Statement Urging Passage of a Municipal Resolution in Favor of the Immigrant Trust Act
Princeton Town Council
Princeton Municipal Building
400 Witherspoon St
Princeton, New Jersey
July 28, 2025

My name is Irfan Khawaja, I’m a resident of Princeton, and I support a municipal resolution in favor of the Immigrant Trust Act. I’ll be forwarding written statements to the Council from Flemington Borough Council member Trent Levitt, Bloomfield mayor Jenny Mundell, and former New Jersey state representative Sadaf Jaffer, all urging passage of such a resolution. I’ve asked several other mayors and local officials to weigh in, and my hope is that they will. 

I wanted to weigh in myself on one objection I’ve heard to the idea of a resolution. An item in the July 15 issue of Town Topics ascribes to the Council the view that passing the resolution “might bring unwanted attention to the town, making it more of a target for ICE.”

I don’t see the merit in this objection.  Roughly a dozen municipalities have passed resolutions of the relevant kind. I haven’t done a fully scientific study of every town, but I’ve done a more informal survey, and I’m not aware of evidence that says that passage of a resolution makes a town more of a target for ICE. If the Council thinks otherwise, I would invite it to explain itself. 

Obviously, ICE doesn’t need passage of a resolution to know that Princeton is an inviting target. We’ve already seen that ICE will arrest and detain people here in the absence of a resolution. 

If the idea is that passage of a resolution will invite retaliation, I would say this: 

First, this prediction has not been borne out in the smaller towns that have passed resolutions–e.g., Bloomfield, Madison, Flemington, or Morristown. These are the towns with demographic profiles most similar to Princeton. 

It has been borne out by the larger cities that have passed resolutions, like Paterson and Newark. But there’s an obvious alternate hypothesis there: big cities contain lots of targets.

The best predictor of ICE’s behavior is number of viable targets for detention and removal. ICE operates under quotas. It’s driven by numbers, not by the presence or absence of municipal resolutions. 

The premise of the Council’s objection is that a resolution signals defiance, and defiance invites unwanted attention. But it’s equally plausible to say that failure to pass a resolution signals timidity, and timidity invites aggression. 

The question then becomes: which signal would you rather send–defiance or timidity? Unfortunately those are the only two signals you can send. You have to choose which.