Statement to the Union County Board of Commissioners
Administration Building
Elizabethtown Plaza
Elizabeth, New Jersey
June 12, 2025

(Temporarily pushed down; will bring it back to the top when I can.)

My name is Irfan Khawaja. I live in Princeton, and work in Iselin. 

The Board has voted to auction the Union County Jail to the highest bidder. We all know that the highest bidder is likely to be ICE. So let’s get real: you’ve auctioned it off to ICE.

ICE is an agency out of control. The documentation of this fact is incontrovertible; it goes back more than a decade, and runs to hundreds of pages. The Trump Administration’s use of ICE is part of an explicit, documented campaign forcibly to deport millions of people from their homes, destroying their lives, destroying their families, and shipping some off to concentration camps. One likely aim of this campaign is to exploit the crisis it creates to usher in a dictatorship. Given a choice to do otherwise, you’ve decided to play a willing role in the scheme. 

You might respond that the deportees are illegals and criminals. Well, the Gestapo made the same claim. You might say you have a fiduciary responsibility to save the county money. Well, IBM made a lot of money selling punch cards to the Third Reich. You might take refuge in silence. But silence is evasion.

CECOT, El Salvador (Wikipedia, public domain)

Am I exaggerating? We all know that the topic is too complicated to be discussed in three minutes. So you tell me. I’m willing to engage in a moderated debate with any member of this Board at Union County College right down the street. If you think you can justify the auction, if you think I’m exaggerating, have the courage of your convictions and say so in the biggest auditorium they’ve got, in front of as many people as it’ll hold.

You need to stop running away from this. Either you talk to the people willing to talk, or you’ll have to deal with the ones done talking. We’ve all seen where the second option leads. Here’s your chance to do better. Take it.