New Jersey is asking a federal judge to throw out the Trump administration's legal challenge to a new state law banning immigration agents from wearing masks, a request it made in a new legal filing that is backed with more than a dozen sworn declarations describing masked federal agents chasing elementary school kids at a bus stop, storming a 75-year-old woman's home, and pulling a man out of a car while telling his wife "you will never see him again."
The first-person accounts from residents, school officials, and a pastor describing the havoc wreaked by masked and unidentified federal agents New Jersey since immigration enforcement has ramped up across the state after President Donald Trump retook the White House last year. The new law at the center of the legal fight between the Sherrill and Trump administration bars law enforcement from wearing masks with some exception, part of a push to force U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers to uncover their faces during immigration operations.
State officials in the new, 195-page filing said these accounts show the law addresses concerns that "are not theoretical."
Kristin O'Neil, superintendent of the Lindenwold School District in Camden County, described a Feb. 12, 2026, episode where four ICE vehicles blew past a stopped school bus that had its lights flashing and stop sign extended, and then headed to an apartment complex where a group of elementary school children were waiting for a separate bus. The children ran, O'Neil said.
"The students reported that they recognized the agents were ICE. The agents were all wearing masks, hoods up, and wearing vests," she wrote.
Charles Neiss, a 67-year-old Watchung resident, described two encounters around Plainfield involving masked men in military-style vests with pistols and no visible badges. During one of the interactions shortly after a January snowstorm, Neiss said, an agent photographed bystanders and announced they "were now all in a database."
"We shouldn't live in fear because a rogue agency holds themselves above the law," Neiss wrote.
Gov. Mikie Sherrill signed the mask ban into law in March, over the objections of Republicans who said it was an unconstitutional encroachment on federal powers. Sherrill said then that she'd be "happy" to go to court over the statute. The Trump administration sued in April, arguing that the law improperly regulates federal officers, including ICE agents.
Monday's filing from attorneys for the state of New Jersey asks Judge Renée Marie Bumb to dismiss the case, arguing that the federal government can't identify an instance where a federal agent's conduct would violate New Jersey's law due to how broad its exceptions are, and that the law imposes only a modest burden on officers while not interfering with their federal duties.
"The Federal Government's suit runs roughshod over New Jersey's sovereign authority to ensure the safety of officers and residents alike," the brief says.
A declaration accompanying the filing from 75-year-old Inez Jannotti describes six masked individuals dressed in black banged on her Hamilton Township door at 6 a.m. on Feb. 13, 2025. One told her through a cracked window that "they were cops and needed to speak to me immediately." When she opened the door, a masked man pushed her back into her house with a body shield.
The agents were apparently looking for a neighbor at a similarly numbered address on a different street, the filing says.
"The man apologized and asked for directions to the neighbor's house," Jannotti wrote, adding, "I still have nightmares about that day."
Her son, Joshua Jannotti, chief investigator for the New Jersey Office of the Public Defender's mental health division, filed his own declaration corroborating his mother's account, saying the man told her, "Sorry," once he realized the mistake. He said his mom's trauma comes from not knowing who was in her home that day.
"She simply cannot shake the psychological dread that it can happen again at any time. Even with my contacts in New Jersey law enforcement, I cannot convincingly ensure her that she is wrong," he wrote.
Deborah Gomez described watching her husband, Edgar, be pulled from a car outside the courthouse in Bridgeton in Cumberland County on March 26 after agents blocked the car in, broke a window with a baton, and refused to show a warrant despite repeated requests, she said in her declaration.
When Gomez attempted to visit her husband at Newark migrant jail Delaney Hall on May 25, she said she was denied entry because visitation was suspended amid protests over conditions at the facility — and that ICE agents pepper-sprayed her and shot her with a rubber bullet as they dispersed the crowd outside. She also said she watched agents throw a nurse to the ground hard enough to injure her face, despite the nurse identifying herself.
On June 11, Gomez said, an agent she recognized from her husband's arrest approached her in a parking lot and said, "B****, are you happy? We took your husband. You will never see him again. He will be deported."
She said she was turned away from Delaney Hall again on July 4 and told it was because she'd spoken to the media about her treatment. And on July 12, while standing across the street from the facility, Gomez alleged an ICE agent pepper-sprayed her, her children, and another person.
Ellen Massey Whitt, who coordinates a Middlesex County immigration hotline, described arriving at a Savino del Bene warehouse in Avenel on Oct. 29, 2025, to find dozens of masked, heavily armed agents blocking the road during a raid that made headlines at the time, according to her declaration. The Rev. Seth Kaper-Dale, co-pastor of the Reformed Church of Highland Park, described a similar scene in South River in May 2025, when six to eight masked agents stood outside a house for hours, ignoring questions from him and other community members.
Adele Faust, a 37-year-old volunteer responder to ICE raids, said she approached a black Nissan Pathfinder with no plates in Bridgeton on April 17, 2026, and asked the masked driver who he was and why he was wearing a black N95 mask.
When she got within 10 feet of his car, he pulled away while maintaining eye contact and gave a "sarcastic 'Miss America' wave," Faust wrote. She said that interaction left her "personally angry," and said that because the man didn't identify himself, she still doesn't know whether that was an ICE agent or an armed criminal threat to the community.
"I was angry for the vulnerable community members I am to protect. What chance do they have to understand how to protect themselves in interactions with anonymous, physically intimidating men prowling their neighborhood?" she wrote. "If these men refuse to identify themselves, how can I or anyone distinguish between them and a rogue mass shooter?"
States like California, Washington, and New York passed their own laws banning federal agents from wearing masks. Earlier this month a federal judge blocked New York's law, saying she expects the Trump administration to succeed at trial with its arguments that the law directly regulates federal officers in violation of the supremacy clause of the Constitution.
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