Along an industrial stretch of roadway in New Jersey’s biggest city, Newark Mayor Ras Baraka appeared with immigrants rights activists last week to protest the Trump administration’s deal with a private company to open the first new immigration detention center of the president’s second term. Voters, he said, “don’t believe that people should be rounded up simply because they try to become citizens of the United States.” In pushing back against construction of the 1,000-bed detention facility, Baraka, one of six Democrats running for governor in New Jersey this year, has staked out an aggressive approach on an issue that his party has struggled with recently. Other candidates have either moved closer to President Donald Trump, partly embracing his get-tough approach to immigration, or spent most of their time talking about the economy and the high cost of living. That range makes this year’s June primary for New Jersey governor something of a testing ground for Democrats as they struggle to find their footing on an issue that has long bedeviled them. If the get-tough policy wins in liberal-leaning New Jersey, Democrats running elsewhere may have to rethink how best to appeal to their most loyal supporters. The fight over the detention center represents the second time since Trump’s inauguration this year that Newark has surfaced in immigration headlines — the first came after ICE arrests in January— with the mayor capturing the spotlight and working to chart his own path forward. Baraka rejects the notion that most voters support cracking down on immigrants without documentation. He calls openly for defending constitutional rights against searches and seizures without due process and a viable pathway to citizenship. “If you ask people, are they opposed to criminals? They’re going to say yes,” he told reporters after the demonstration. “If you’re opposed to the murderers and rapists and all this other stuff? Yes. The reality is people want to be secure in their person and papers.” In his mind, that doesn’t lead to mass detention and deportation of people looking for a better life. Whether his calculus resonates with Democratic primary voters in the June election and into the general is a question a lot of Democrats want answered. ‘Boldness counts’ The Democratic field of six candidates features two sitting members of Congress, the mayors of the state’s two largest cities, the head of the state’s biggest teachers union and a former top legislator who touts his background as a blue collar ironworker. Not all of them are talking much about immigration, and what works with voters in a blue state’s primary won’t automatically translate as a blueprint for Democrats elsewhere. But immigration was top-of-mind for voters in 2024 and is a centerpiece of the president’s agenda, according to Micah Rasmussen, the director of the Rebovich Institute for New Jersey Politics at Rider University, which means Democrats willing to take a stand may benefit politically. “There is a penalty for seeming lost and not knowing what to say about something because the Democrats haven’t found their way yet,” he said. “Voters are not rewarding hesitation. They want boldness.” The field in New Jersey Not every Democrat in the contest to succeed term-limited Democrat Phil Murphy as governor is jockeying to the left of the president. Former state Senate President Steve Sweeney has called on the party to disavow sanctuary state policies […]