Cranbury Township Committee
23 N. Main St.
Cranbury, New Jersey
October 13, 2025

Hi. My name is Irfan Khawaja. I live in Princeton, and I’d like to urge the Cranbury Township Committee to pass a resolution in favor of the Immigrant Trust Act like the one we have in Princeton.

It’s no secret that Cranbury has lots of warehouses and thousands of square feet of warehouse space. I myself used to do data entry work at the old Lenox China facility nearby.

It’s no secret, either, that Cranbury actively seeks out these warehouses for their value as ratables. It’s right there in your Master Plan, as it is in the Master Plans of other nearby towns.

It’s also no secret that the floor jobs at these warehouses are often done by migrant labor: loading, receiving, unloading, picking, packing, sorting, QC, janitorial work, maintenance. I was a hospital janitor myself, so I know the drill. Take these jobs out of the equation, and you’ve got no economy–no warehouses, no ratables, no tax revenue. 

In short, these migrants don’t just pay taxes and work hard in some generic sense. They make your quality of life possible. They make it possible for Cranbury to be the quaint place that it is. 

But it’s also no secret that these very workers are on the receiving end of a systematic assault by an alphabet soup of federal agencies–DHS, HSI, CBP, ICE. These entities aren’t law enforcement agencies in any normal sense of the word. They’re the front end of a military occupation whose explicit targets are the people of this country. I’ve spent time under two military dictatorships, in Pakistan and the West Bank. I’ve been falsely accused of crimes, detained, strip searched, interrogated, and shot at with live ammunition. I know what a military occupation looks like. That’s where we’re headed. 

The hour is late. Election Day is a couple of weeks away. Both of our gubernatorial candidates are evading this issue as hard as they can. One of them is against the Immigrant Trust Directive, and neither of them is in favor of the Immigrant Trust Act. If municipalities don’t dissent, the game is over.

This is not a drill. It’s not an exaggeration. Our freedom is on the line, and is partly in your hands. You need to respond in a way that will make yourselves proud to have done your part to defend it. The time is now. 

Thanks to Dawn Cohen, Catherine Hunt, Sadaf Jafar, Jenny Psaki and of course Resistencia en Acción and the rest of the Montgomery crew for inspiration and solidarity. See you in New Brunswick.