A Response to John Heilner

Toward the end of the August 11 Princeton Council meeting at which Princeton’s ITA Resolution was adopted, John Heilner, a Princeton resident, offered a comment that has now been transcribed in the August 13 issue of TapInto Princeton and in the August 13 issue of Town Topics (updated on August 18). Though Mr Heilner’s comment has not to my knowledge elicited very much public comment, I think it demands comment. To put the matter bluntly, I regard his comment as both incoherent and irresponsible, and am amazed that a Council that has spent the better part of the last six months lecturing us about matters of facticity and tone has received it with such apparent equanimity.

Incoherence 1: It is totally unclear whether Mr Heilner intends to be speaking for himself, or in some official capacity. He begins by listing his affiliations with a number of migrant support groups in the area. He then says “I’m here to speak for myself, not for any organization.” Within a few sentences, however, he gives a first-person plural description of a supposed decision made by “trusted” organizations to oppose the Immigrant Trust Act (ITA): 

I can tell you that before July 14 and ever since, all the many local trusted immigrant advocates and organizations consciously decided NOT to publicly push for the ITA because we thought it best for Princeton not to become a target (emphasis mine).

The two claims flatly contradict each other. If you say “I’m here to speak for myself,” you’re speaking only for yourself. But if you invoke a set of organizations, describe a collective decision they supposedly made, and then say “we thought it best…,” you’re speaking on behalf of the “we” that made the decision. You can’t have it both ways. 

I should add that there is no public record of the decision to which Mr Heilner alludes. If he has evidence of it, I would ask that he produce it for public inspection. For whatever it’s worth, I directly asked LALDEF on July 31 what position it took on the matter of the ITA, and have so far (almost three weeks later) gotten no answer. There is an obvious difference between a publicly avowed position and a privately held one. Mr Heilner’s comment makes a confusing attempt to split the difference between those two things. He does this while urging us all to “better communication.” Well, muddying the waters is not good communication. 

Incoherence 2: Mr Heilner begins and ends his comment by expressing support for the ITA. Yet the whole point of his comment is that the “trusted” organizations that he’s praising opposed the ITA, fearing retaliation by ICE. And of course, it’s not just that he’s praising those organizations in the abstract; he agrees with them on this very issue. Indeed, it’s not even that he merely agrees with them, but that by his own testimony, he played a significant role in their supposed decision to oppose the Act. To confuse matters further, he gives us the advice to tell our state representatives to support the ITA, then urges us to vote for Mikie Sherrill, who opposes it. The result seems less like useful advice than a confusing attempt to have things all ways at once.

Which brings me to the irresponsible part of Mr Heilner’s comment. Mr Heilner chides the advocates of the municipal resolution, principally Resistencia en Acción, for the supposedly problematic character of their campaign for the resolution, urging them to adopt a “quieter and better way to communicate.” According to Mr Heilner, the July 24 ICE raid in town was precipitated by Resistencia’s having advocated so loudly for the municipal resolution ten days earlier. The implication would seem to be that those in favor of the resolution were partially responsible for having provoked the raid, and thus partially responsible for having gotten fifteen persons detained by ICE. 

A resident speaks in favor of the ITA Resolution

Mr Heilner adduces no evidence whatsoever for this extraordinary insinuation. Indeed, he candidly admits to having none. Yet his insinuation is the explicit basis for his suggestion that we quiet down and emulate his supposedly enlightened approach to political discourse. It’s hard to imagine a more obvious example of blaming the victim, and a more sanctimonious form of paternalism. 

It’s also hard to imagine a better way of playing into ICE’s hands. It is extremely implausible to think that ICE conceived its July 24 raid in the “ten days” (Mr Heilner’s phrase) prior to the raid. The surveillance, logistics, and legalities involved simply cannot be put together in ten days, and it is frankly absurd to suggest that a quota-driven agency like ICE initiates major operations in response to what happens in a municipal council meeting. 

That said, it is certainly in ICE’s interest to get people to believe that every raid it undertakes is retaliation for someone’s speaking out. That belief would minimize people’s speaking out and maximize their docility, which is exactly what ICE wants. 

After six months of  lectures from the Mayor and Council about the importance of facticity, the dangers of false rumors, and the burdens of responsible discourse, here we have a case in which a person associated with “trusted” organizations confabulates a dangerous, defamatory rumor out of whole cloth, admits it, and then offers it in Council for the credence of the public. The same officials so eager to lecture us about how to talk and what to say–otherwise so full of butthurt vanity and angry recriminations– suddenly fall silent, averting their eyes and ears in the apparent hope that no one heard or processed Mr Heilner’s comment. People wonder why there is distrust between establishment and activists. Well, now you know.

One member of the Council spoke of “healing.” Maybe we should remember the words of Jeremiah in this connection:

They have healed the wound of my people lightly, saying ‘Peace! Peace!’ when there is no peace (Jeremiah 6:14).

You can’t heal wounds by creating new ones, or pretend your way to a non-existent peace. The “trusted” establishment of this town can pretend, if it likes, that the passage of a single municipal resolution marks the end of its engagement with this issue. But the end will only come once the threat itself is gone. Until then, we have no choice but to resist–loudly, forthrightly, and unapologetically. Others can join in, or they can step aside. What no one can legitimately do is blame the victims for their victimization while claiming the mantle of virtue. Once you do that, you become an adversary, and once you are, you have to be treated like one. The avatars of prudence need to ask themselves if that’s what they want. Because if they do, they should expect resistance–and expect no sympathy when they encounter it.