Howarth mailers hit opponents on immigration, Trump

Assemblyman Joe Howarth is turning to negative mailers with a week left before polls open on primary day.

The incumbent, mounting an off-the-line re-election bid after being dropped from the county line, has sent out a series of mailers attacking his former running mate, Assemblyman Ryan Peters, and former Burlington County Sheriff Jean Stanfield.

His attacks at his former running mate follow a familiar line: They attack Peters over President Donald Trump.

County leaders pulled support for Howarth after State Sen. Dawn Addiego defected to the Democratic party earlier this year over a belief that the assemblyman attempted to join her on that side of the aisle.

Howarth denies attempting to switch parties, but sources on both sides of the aisle have told the New Jersey Globe that Howarth was seeking to become a Democrat only to have that plan foiled by local Democrats in the eighth district that said they would not back him in the year’s primaries.

Since then, Howarth has turned to running a Trump Republican.

His mailers attack Peters — and, to a lesser degree, Stanfield — for refusing to sign a Trump loyalty pledge.

They also hit Peters over a video the assemblyman posted in January in which he compared the actions of Trump and Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI).

Tlaib called the president a “motherfucker.”

“I can’t say I blame the congresswoman,” Peters said in the 58-second Facebook video. “She’s merely following the path of President Trump, who’s a master of the name game who constantly puts an insulting adjective before everybody’s first name.”

Peters called the statements a sign of “the utterly disrespectful behavior” voters have come to expect from the nation’s capital and followed those statements with a call for a return to civility in politics.

Howarth’s mailers hit Stanfield on a different front.

He alleges that during her tenure as sheriff — she retired at the start of May — Stanfield did not comply with a request from Immigration and Customs Enforcement to hold an immigrant in the country illegally.

Such requests, called detainers, require local and county law enforcement agencies hold suspects for an additional 48 hours past when they are due to be released to ICE can take custody and begin deportation proceedings.

Detainers are not legally binding, but as a local law enforcement official had little control over the issue.

In this case, a detainer was issued Brazilian national in the country illegally in July of 2016. He was released and arrested seven months later, in February 2017.

At the time, ICE was releasing a weekly report naming jurisdictions that did not comply with their detainer requests.

Those reports were later suspended due to concerns about inaccuracy.

Still, immigration typically plays well as an issue in Republican primaries, even if the eighth district has shifted towards the center in recent years.

Peters and Stanfield have been wary of that shift, while Howarth has ignored it in an effort to win a chance at re-election.

Primary day is June 4. The winners will face Democratic Candidate Gina LaPlaca and Mark Natale in the general.