A man fleeing ICE officers crashed into a Tesla on a New Jersey highway, injuring a mayor’s wife.
The incident unfolded Wednesday during a targeted immigration enforcement operation. When officers gave repeated verbal commands, the man, alleged to be in the country illegally, refused to comply and sped away. He entered U.S. 130, ran a red light, and slammed into another vehicle in North Brunswick.
Among those injured in that vehicle was the wife of East Brunswick Mayor Brad Cohen.
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ICE confirmed the sequence of events to Fox News Digital. “After repeated verbal warnings and due to officer safety concerns, ICE officers relied on their training and attempted to safely remove the illegal alien from their car,” a spokesperson said. “The illegal alien then proceeded to flee at a high rate of speed and collided with other vehicles.”
As originally reported, the crash quickly reopened a heated political debate in New Jersey over how much local law enforcement should cooperate with federal immigration authorities.
Republican Assemblyman Paul Kanitra placed blame squarely on the state’s sanctuary policies. In an exclusive interview with Fox News Digital on Friday, Kanitra connected the crash directly to legislation signed by Gov. Mikie Sherrill in March. That law codified New Jersey’s limits on state and local cooperation with federal civil immigration enforcement.
“This is just the latest in a long line of traffic incidents and vehicular incidents that wouldn’t occur if New Jersey didn’t have our sanctuary status that got codified as soon as Gov. Sherrill came into office,” Kanitra said.
Supporters of that policy argue it encourages immigrants to report crimes and work with local police by keeping those officers separate from federal immigration enforcement. Critics argue the restrictions make it harder for ICE to locate people subject to removal.
Kanitra was not sympathetic to that defense. “Democrats seemingly have an inability to take accountability for their own actions here,” he said. “They’re unable to even recognize the chaos that they’re creating, and they’re shouting and screaming at everybody else trying to find somebody to blame.”
He added a blunter assessment. “You kind of reap what you sow.” Kanitra said people in his district have previously been killed in crashes involving individuals in the country illegally.
He also pointed to a separate case involving an immigrant accused of driving into a family outside a kosher supermarket and killing an infant, citing it as further evidence of what he called the real-world consequences of the state’s immigration enforcement limits.
