The Biden administration is siding with a private prison corporation’s legal effort to keep an immigration detention center in Elizabeth from shuttering, claiming its impending closure would be “catastrophic” to federal immigration efforts. The U.S. Department of Justice in a legal filing calls New Jersey’s 2021 law banning all immigration detention contracts — the agency refers to the law as AB 5207 — unconstitutional and says closing the Elizabeth facility would harm the federal government amid an influx of migrants and closures of other detention centers around the nation.
As sales for the state’s recreational cannabis industry take off, New Jersey’s decade-old medical marijuana program is shrinking every month. Medical marijuana sales are nearly half of what they were six months ago, and more than 20,000 patients dropped out of the medical program since its peak in May 2022, according to state data.