Family Services of New Jersey

06/09/2026

Understanding Executive Order 14406: What It Means for Undocumented Immigrants, Homeowners, Workers, and Business Owners

By Lazaro Cardenas, Esq.

As an attorney, I have received many questions about President Trump’s Executive Order 14406, “Restoring Integrity to America’s Financial System,” and what it could mean for undocumented immigrants, homeowners, workers, and business owners.

The first thing to understand is the difference between what the Executive Order actually says and what is being claimed on social media.

Full text of Executive Order here: https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2026/05/restoring-integrity-to-americas-financial-system/

Right now, the Executive Order does not require banks to close existing accounts, freeze money, demand immediate payment of mortgages, or refuse banking services simply because someone is undocumented. Instead, the Order mainly tells federal agencies and banking regulators to create new guidance and propose regulations in the coming months.

For undocumented individuals who already have bank accounts, mortgages, car loans, or credit cards, there is currently no requirement that those accounts be closed. The Executive Order also does not require banks to check the immigration status of every customer at this time. Instead, it calls for a risk-based review process that regulators still need to define.

However, there are valid reasons to pay attention. The Executive Order directs regulators to consider immigration status and work authorization when evaluating lending risk and a person’s “ability to repay” a loan. If future regulations are adopted, they could make it harder for undocumented individuals to get new mortgages, refinance loans, open new accounts, or qualify for certain types of credit.

Business owners should also watch these developments closely. The Order focuses heavily on payroll compliance, worker classification, tax withholding, off-the-books payments, and the use of labor brokers. Businesses that employ undocumented workers or operate in industries that rely heavily on immigrant labor could face greater scrutiny from banks and federal regulators.

My practical advice is:

• If you already have a bank account, do not panic or withdraw your money because of online rumors.
• Keep making mortgage, rent, vehicle, and credit payments on time.
• Keep copies of your account records and loan documents.
• Business owners should review payroll and employment practices with qualified legal counsel.
• Stay informed, because many important details will depend on regulations that have not yet been written.

The Executive Order signals a major policy change, but its actual legal and practical effects will take time to become clear. For now, it is important to focus on verified facts rather than fear.

This post is for educational purposes only and is not legal advice. Every situation is different, and individuals should consult an attorney about their specific circumstances.

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Comprendiendo la Orden Ejecutiva 14406: Lo que significa para los inmigrantes indocumentados, propietarios de viviendas, trabajadores y dueños de negocios

Por Lázaro Cardenas, Esq.

Como abogado, he recibido muchas preguntas sobre la Orden Ejecutiva 14406 del presidente Trump, “Restaurando la Integridad del Sistema Financiero de Estados Unidos”, y lo que podría significar para los inmigrantes indocumentados, propietarios de viviendas, trabajadores y dueños de negocios.

Lo primero que hay que entender es la diferencia entre lo que realmente dice la Orden Ejecutiva y lo que se afirma en las redes sociales.

Texto de la Orden Ejecutiva en este enlace: https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2026/05/restoring-integrity-to-americas-financial-system/

En este momento, la Orden Ejecutiva no exige que los bancos cierren cuentas existentes, congelen fondos, exijan el pago inmediato de hipotecas ni nieguen servicios bancarios simplemente porque una persona sea indocumentada. En cambio, la Orden principalmente instruye a las agencias federales y a los reguladores bancarios a crear nuevas directrices y proponer regulaciones en los próximos meses.

Para las personas indocumentadas que ya tienen cuentas bancarias, hipotecas, préstamos para automóviles o tarjetas de crédito, actualmente no existe ningún requisito de que esas cuentas sean cerradas. La Orden Ejecutiva tampoco exige que los bancos verifiquen el estatus migratorio de todos los clientes en este momento. En cambio, solicita un proceso de revisión basado en el riesgo que los reguladores aún deben definir.

Sin embargo, existen razones válidas para prestar atención. La Orden Ejecutiva instruye a los reguladores a considerar el estatus migratorio y la autorización de trabajo al evaluar el riesgo crediticio y la “capacidad de pago” de una persona para un préstamo. Si se adoptan futuras regulaciones, podrían dificultar que las personas indocumentadas obtengan nuevas hipotecas, refinancien préstamos, abran nuevas cuentas o califiquen para ciertos tipos de crédito.

Los dueños de negocios también deben seguir de cerca estos acontecimientos. La Orden se enfoca en gran medida en el cumplimiento de las normas de nómina, la clasificación de trabajadores, la retención de impuestos, los pagos no registrados oficialmente y el uso de intermediarios laborales. Las empresas que emplean trabajadores indocumentados o que operan en industrias que dependen en gran medida de la mano de obra inmigrante podrían enfrentar un mayor escrutinio por parte de los bancos y los reguladores federales.

Mi consejo práctico es:

• Si ya tiene una cuenta bancaria, no entre en pánico ni retire su dinero debido a rumores en línea.
• Continúe realizando puntualmente los pagos de su hipoteca, alquiler, vehículo y crédito.
• Mantenga copias de los registros de sus cuentas y documentos de préstamo.
• Los dueños de negocios deben revisar sus prácticas de nómina y empleo con asesoría legal calificada.
• Manténgase informado, porque muchos detalles importantes dependerán de regulaciones que aún no han sido redactadas.

La Orden Ejecutiva señala un cambio importante de política, pero sus efectos legales y prácticos reales tardarán tiempo en aclararse. Por ahora, es importante centrarse en hechos verificados en lugar de actuar por miedo.

Esta publicación tiene únicamente fines educativos y no constituye asesoría legal. Cada situación es diferente, y las personas deben consultar a un abogado sobre sus circunstancias específicas.

05/17/2026

The systematic dismantling of the Civil Rights Act should be treated as an existential crisis for Blacks and minorities as a whole.

From Nooses to Pens: The Modern Dismantling of Black Power

How the dismantling of civil rights protections is redrawing Black Americans out of power

For much of American history, the noose was more than a weapon of terror. It was a political instrument. Lynchings were not simply acts of racial hatred carried out by isolated mobs; they were deliberate tools of social control designed to maintain a racial hierarchy after slavery ended.

The purpose was clear: intimidate Black Americans into political silence, economic dependence, and social submission. The rope, the burning cross, and the mob worked together to send a message that Black advancement would be punished.

Today, America no longer gathers crowds around courthouse trees to celebrate racial violence. The brutality is less visible, less public, and often wrapped in legal language and political rhetoric. But for many Americans watching the steady dismantling of civil rights protections, the underlying purpose feels disturbingly familiar.

The noose has been replaced by the pen.

Modern America does not openly proclaim that Black communities should be excluded from power. Instead, it redraws voting districts in ways that dilute minority influence. It weakens protections once guaranteed under the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act. It attacks diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives as though they are forms of discrimination rather than attempts to correct generations of exclusion. It removes books from classrooms that discuss racism honestly while simultaneously insisting that systemic inequality no longer exists.

The methods have evolved. The objective, preserving existing power structures, often has not.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 represented one of the greatest moral achievements in American history. It was not a gift bestowed upon Black Americans out of generosity. It was a reluctant recognition of rights that should never have been denied in the first place. Those rights were secured through marches, arrests, beatings, assassinations, and unimaginable courage by ordinary citizens who demanded that America live up to its own Constitution.

To weaken those protections today under the guise of neutrality or “colorblindness” ignores the reality that inequality did not disappear simply because laws changed. Generations of discrimination created disparities in wealth, education, housing, healthcare, and political access that do not vanish on their own. Equality under the law means little when the starting lines were never equal to begin with.

That is where the equity argument becomes unavoidable.

Critics often attack the concept of equity by claiming it gives special treatment to certain groups. But equity is not about giving anyone an unfair advantage. Equity is about recognizing that fairness sometimes requires acknowledging historical and structural disadvantages. Treating unequal situations exactly the same does not create justice; it often deepens injustice.

If two runners begin a race, but one runner has spent centuries chained behind the starting line while the other was allowed to build wealth, influence, educational systems, and generational opportunity, pretending they are now equally positioned is not fairness. It is denial.

The opponents of equity often frame their arguments around meritocracy. They argue that society should be entirely colorblind and that opportunity should depend solely on individual effort. On paper, that sounds noble. In practice, it ignores how systems shape opportunity long before individual effort enters the picture.

A child born into an underfunded school district, in a neighborhood shaped by decades of redlining and disinvestment, does not begin life with the same opportunities as a child raised in wealth and stability. A family denied the ability to purchase homes in prosperous communities for generations loses the opportunity to build intergenerational wealth through homeownership. A voter standing in line for hours because polling locations were reduced in their community does not experience democracy the same way as someone who can vote in minutes.

Equity attempts to address those realities. It is not an attack on fairness. It is fairness.

And yet, across America, equity itself has become a target. Diversity and inclusion programs are being dismantled. Universities are retreating from policies designed to broaden access. Corporations are abandoning commitments to representation under political pressure. Legislatures are passing laws aimed at restricting how race and history can even be discussed publicly.

This is where the comparison to America’s darker past becomes uncomfortable but necessary.

The old systems of racial control relied on open violence because society tolerated it. Today’s systems rely on legal mechanisms because overt racism is publicly condemned. But both systems can produce the same result: the preservation of racial disparities in power, wealth, and influence.

The old America used the noose to terrorize Black citizens away from the ballot box. The modern version may use voter suppression laws, gerrymandering, or the weakening of federal oversight. The old America used segregation to exclude Black families from opportunity. The modern version may rely on economic structures and policy decisions that perpetuate unequal outcomes while denying responsibility for them.

One was violent in the streets. The other is bureaucratic in the halls of government.

Both can strip communities of power.

The danger of the modern moment lies partly in its subtlety. Lynchings shocked the conscience because they were impossible to hide. Today, inequality can be disguised beneath court opinions, legislative language, and appeals to “neutrality.”

Policies that disproportionately harm minority communities are defended as procedural reforms. Efforts to correct disparities are condemned as divisive. The very acknowledgment of racism is increasingly portrayed as more offensive than racism itself.

History teaches that rights are rarely lost all at once. They are eroded gradually, often under the promise of restoring order, fairness, or tradition. What begins as limiting oversight becomes limiting access. What begins as attacking “special treatment” becomes attacking equal opportunity itself.

America must decide whether it truly believes in equality beyond slogans and symbolism. Because equality is not merely the absence of chains or segregation signs. Equality requires meaningful access to opportunity, representation, education, economic mobility, and political power.

The noose may no longer hang from the tree. But when laws and policies systematically pull communities away from opportunity, silence their political influence, and erase the tools designed to remedy historic injustice, we should not pretend that history is no longer speaking.

It is.

The question is whether we are willing to hear it before the damage becomes irreversible.

05/08/2026

Cutting the Bridge to the Middle Class: Governor Sherrill’s Budget Betrays New Jersey’s Latinas

By Lazaro Cardenas, Esq.

In her first budget address, Governor Mikie Sherrill told New Jerseyans a story about opportunity — about what government can do when it runs well, about building bridges to the middle class. It was a compelling story. But for the tens of thousands of Latinas who depend on New Jersey’s Hispanic Women’s Resource Centers, her budget tells a very different story.

Under Governor Sherrill’s proposed Fiscal Year 2027 spending plan, state funding for Hispanic Women’s Resource Centers would be slashed from $2,500,000 to $535,000, an 80% cut that would effectively dismantle a network of community institutions that have been serving New Jersey’s Latina population since 1991. Three centers would be forced to close entirely. Programming in Passaic County and South Jersey would disappear. The program’s annual reach would collapse from more than 9,000 women to fewer than 2,000.

This is not a line-item adjustment. This is demolition.

The Hispanic Women’s Resource Centers are not duplicative bureaucracies or administrative redundancies ripe for consolidation. They are, quite literally, the bridge that Governor Sherrill says she wants to build. These centers provide financial literacy workshops, job training, English language services, small business development support, domestic violence intervention, and mental health services, all tailored to Latinas navigating a state where they face the second-largest wage gap in the entire nation. They teach women how to start a business, navigate the legislative process, advocate for themselves, and build independence. Closing them does not make New Jersey more affordable. It makes opportunity less accessible to the people who need it most.

The timing of this cut is particularly troubling. We are living through a moment of intensified federal immigration enforcement that has generated unprecedented fear in New Jersey’s Latino communities. Families are missing appointments. Clients are calling resource centers not to schedule job training sessions, but to report that ICE just took their husband or their neighbor. In this climate, the Hispanic Women’s Resource Centers are not just workforce development programs. They are anchors of stability for communities under siege. Governor Sherrill is proposing to pull those anchors at the very moment the storm is at its worst.

We understand that the Governor inherited a genuine fiscal challenge. A $3 billion budget gap demands serious choices. No one who governs responsibly can pretend otherwise. But a $60.7 billion budget, the largest in New Jersey history, retains billions in spending across dozens of line items. The choice to absorb an 80% cut to Latina-serving community infrastructure while preserving so much else is not a mathematical inevitability. It is a policy decision. And it is the wrong one.

Governor Sherrill has told lawmakers that if they want to restore cuts, they should identify other programs to cut in their place. That posture may be fiscally defensible as a negotiating principle. But it should not become a mechanism for abandoning the most vulnerable members of our communities while waiting for someone else to make the first move. Leadership means making the case that some investments are too vital to trade away, and the Hispanic Women’s Resource Centers are exactly that kind of investment.

New Jersey’s Latino community has shown up, at the ballot box and in civic life, as a growing and engaged constituency. We have organized, advocated, voted, and invested in this state. We deserve a government that invests back. The Hispanic Women’s Resource Centers are not charity. They are infrastructure. They generate economic mobility, reduce dependence on public assistance, and strengthen the families and communities that make New Jersey’s cities and towns function.

Governor Sherrill, we urge you to restore full funding for the Hispanic Women’s Resource Centers. The Legislature should reject this cut and make clear that dismantling bridges to the middle class is not fiscal responsibility. It is fiscal abandonment of the communities that need government to work most.

Rising to the mission means more than balancing a ledger. It means deciding, when choices are hard, who you are willing to fight for.

Latino Action Network Foundation Latino Action Network Community Affairs and Resource Center Morris County Organization for Hispanic Affairs La Casa de Don Pedro NJ Consortium for Immigrant Children New Jersey Alliance for Immigrant Justice Frank Argote-Freyre Beatriz Achecar Oesterheld Maria J. Andrade Javier Robles Casa Freehold Nueva Jersey Asamblea Demócrata

05/06/2026

🎓❤️ They Grew Up Here. They Belong Here.

Imagine working your entire life toward a dream, studying hard, graduating high school, doing everything right, only to have the federal government try to slam the door in your face.

That’s exactly what the Trump administration is attempting to do to our neighbors, our classmates, our children.

Last week, the DOJ filed yet another lawsuit against New Jersey, this time targeting the laws that allow undocumented students who grew up right here in our communities to access in-state college tuition and financial aid. These are young people who sat next to your kids in class. Who played on the same teams. Who marched at graduation. New Jersey is the only home they have ever known.

To qualify for these benefits, they had to attend a New Jersey high school for at least three years, earn their diploma, and commit to pursuing legal status as soon as they’re eligible. They did everything asked of them. And now Washington wants to punish them for it.

For many families in our community, the difference between in-state and out-of-state tuition, over $14,000 a year at Rutgers alone, is the difference between going to college and not going at all.

We refuse to accept a future where our young people are told their dreams don’t matter.

New Jersey is fighting back. Governor Sherrill’s administration has vowed to defend these laws in court. And the Latino Coalition of New Jersey will be standing right there with them, because an attack on our Dreamers is an attack on all of us.

💬 Do you know a Dreamer whose life has been shaped by access to higher education? Share their story in the comments. Let’s remind each other, and the rest of the country, exactly who we’re fighting for.

🔁 Please share this post widely. Our community needs to know what’s at stake.



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🎓❤️ Crecieron Aquí. Pertenecen Aquí.

Imagínate trabajar toda tu vida por un sueño, estudiar con dedicación, graduarte de la escuela secundaria, hacer todo bien, y que el gobierno federal intente cerrarte la puerta en la cara.

Eso es exactamente lo que la administración Trump está intentando hacerle a nuestros vecinos, nuestros compañeros de clase, nuestros hijos.

La semana pasada, el Departamento de Justicia presentó otra demanda contra Nueva Jersey, esta vez apuntando a las leyes que permiten que estudiantes indocumentados que crecieron aquí, en nuestras propias comunidades, accedan a matrícula universitaria a precio estatal y ayuda financiera.

Estos son jóvenes que se sentaron junto a tus hijos en el salón de clases. Que jugaron en los mismos equipos. Que desfilaron juntos en la graduación. Nueva Jersey es el único hogar que muchos de ellos han conocido.

Para calificar para estos beneficios, tuvieron que asistir a una escuela secundaria de Nueva Jersey por al menos tres años, obtener su diploma, y comprometerse a buscar estatus legal tan pronto como fuera posible. Hicieron todo lo que se les pidió. Y ahora Washington quiere castigarlos por ello.

Para muchas familias en nuestra comunidad, la diferencia entre la matrícula estatal y la matrícula fuera del estado, más de $14,000 al año solo en Rutgers, es la diferencia entre ir a la universidad o no ir del todo.
Nos negamos a aceptar un futuro donde se le diga a nuestra juventud que sus sueños no importan.

Nueva Jersey está respondiendo. La administración de la Gobernadora Sherrill ha prometido defender estas leyes en los tribunales. Y la Coalición Latina de Nueva Jersey estará ahí junto a ellos, porque un ataque a nuestros Dreamers es un ataque a todos nosotros.

💬 ¿Conoces a un Dreamer cuya vida ha sido marcada por el acceso a la educación superior? Comparte su historia en los comentarios. Recordémonos mutuamente, y al resto del país, exactamente por quién estamos luchando.

🔁 Por favor comparte esta publicación ampliamente. Nuestra comunidad necesita saber lo que está en juego.

05/06/2026

Prosecutor Raymond S. Santiago announces that a Keansburg man has been charged in connection with a shooting incident that took place on Thursday in Freehold Borough.
Freehold Borough Police Department

https://mcponj.org/2026/05/05/keansburg-man-charged-in-connection-with-freehold-shooting-incident/

05/03/2026

Mother’s Day is days away — here’s one idea for every NJ county

As we approach Mother's Day, heartfelt reflections on family inspire visits to local gems like Grounds for Sculpture, offering a beautiful backdrop for creating new memories together.