Montgomery Town Council
Sept. 4, 2025, 7 pm
100 Community Dr, Skillman, New Jersey

Hi, my name is Irfan Khawaja. I live in Princeton, but spend a fair bit of time here in Montgomery. I’m here to speak in favor of Montgomery’s passing a municipal-level resolution in favor of the Immigrant Trust Act, just as we’ve recently done in Princeton, and has been done in more than a dozen municipalities across the state.

The Immigrant Trust Act, as I’m sure you know, is an attempt to codify and give further enforcement powers to the Immigrant Trust Directive first crafted by Attorney General Gurbir Grewal back in 2018. The Act forcefully asserts the state’s commitment to Tenth Amendment federalism, insisting that states and localities be freed of the unwanted and unnecessary burden of enforcing federal immigration law. Given recent trends in federal law enforcement, passage of the Act is a necessity.

Resistencia en Acción activist Asma Elhuni being arrested at an abortive ICE raid in Trenton, NJ

I understand, of course, that municipal councils have no direct role to play in the passage of state-level legislation. But they can affect such legislation by indicating the degree of support for the Act. New Jersey’s plastic bag ban was passed largely through the pressure exerted by municipal resolutions. Indeed, the US Constitution was itself passed after ratification by small state conventions. The underlying principle in all of these cases is that sovereignty rests with the people, and can legitimately be expressed at the level closest to them.

For several months now, I’ve heard the objection that passage of municipal resolutions “draws attention” to the town passing it, making the town a target of a sort it otherwise wasn’t. This objection really makes no sense. ICE operations are driven fundamentally by numerical quotas, not by hunt-and-peck responses to municipal resolutions. To the extent that there are people to detain in Montgomery, they’re already targets, and have been for a while. You’re not going to win a game of hide-and-seek with ICE by hiding behind inaction. By not passing a resolution, all you’d be doing is free riding on the efforts of those municipalities that have—and betraying the people you claim to be protecting. You wouldn’t be protecting them. You’d be turning them into shields so that you could feel better about doing nothing.

There’s something you can do. It’s right in front of you. Take the opportunity, and join the fight.

Feel free to contact me if you have any questions.