A headline like that spreads fast precisely because it sounds outrageous enough to be memorable, and vague enough to be hard to pin down. It’s also not an accurate description of what New Jersey has actually done. The state hasn’t set up any program handing free lawyers to the 6,600 people caught up in this voter registration mess. What’s actually happening is considerably more mundane, and honestly, more instructive about how a real government mistake gets corrected once someone finally admits it happened.

The root cause is a genuine technical failure, not a policy choice. A third-party software vendor’s system mistakenly routed people into the voter registration workflow after they had explicitly told the MVC they weren’t U.S. citizens. Once the error surfaced, the state didn’t sit on it. The Division of Elections has already removed more than 4,500 confirmed noncitizens from the rolls outright, while the remaining names went to county election officials specifically to check whether any of those individuals have since legitimately naturalized and become citizens in the meantime, since automatically purging someone who’s since earned citizenship would be its own genuine injustice.

It’s worth being fair about how this claim actually took shape, because it isn’t invented from nothing. Critics pointed to a real detail. New Jersey’s public guidance page for people affected by the registration error reportedly includes a link to information about the state’s Detention and Deportation Defense Initiative, a separate program that provides subsidized immigration attorneys to people facing deportation proceedings. Sherrill’s administration did recently increase that program’s budget to $20 million. Those are both real, verifiable facts, and opinion writers and Assembly Republicans have used them to argue the administration is prioritizing legal defense for noncitizens over other funding needs, including cuts affecting more than 160 school districts elsewhere in the budget.

Here’s the distinction that actually matters, though. A general resource page mentioning an existing, separately funded immigration legal aid program is not the same thing as the state creating or offering a program of taxpayer-funded lawyers specifically for the 6,600 people caught up in the voter registration error. Those are two different pots of money serving two different purposes, and collapsing them into one headline turns a fair critique of the DDDI funding increase into a much more sensational, and considerably less accurate, claim about the voter registration cleanup itself.

I’ll say plainly where I land on this. The DDDI funding increase is a legitimate policy choice people can reasonably support or oppose, and critics raising it alongside school funding cuts are making a real budgetary argument worth having honestly. But stretching that into a headline claiming Sherrill is handing free lawyers to 6,600 noncitizen voters takes a defensible critique and turns it into something the underlying facts don’t actually support. Both things can be true at once, the state is genuinely working to correct its own MVC error responsibly, and there’s a legitimate, separate conversation to be had about how New Jersey funds immigration legal aid versus public schools. Conflating the two doesn’t serve either conversation well.