Statement to the Middlesex County Board of Commissioners
75 Bayard St.
New Brunswick, New Jersey
October 16, 2025

Hi. My name is Irfan Khawaja. I live in Princeton, but work in Iselin, and spend most of my waking hours in Middlesex County. I’m here to urge you to join Essex and Hudson counties, plus a couple dozen municipalities, in passing a resolution in favor of the Immigrant Trust Act.

To that end, let me remind you of an unfortunate event that took place in this county last year. On New Year’s Day 2024, the Edison Police Department, at the behest of Edison mayor Sam Joshi, detained a busload of migrants at Edison Rail Station, traveling from El Paso, Texas to New York–a forty hour trip. The migrants were confined to the bus, refused the right to exit even to go to the bathroom, interrogated, then literally driven out of town, and told not to come back. It sounds like something out of a bad movie, but it’s fact, not fiction, documented in a reputable journalistic outlet.  

Catherine at the podium, Middlesex County Administrative Bldg

No legal basis was or has ever been cited for any part of this operation. The closest any officer came was to assert that the people on the bus “looked Hispanic,” comparing them to an invading army, and making some stupid, unfunny jokes at their expense. According to Edison’s finest, a couple dozen unarmed, exhausted refugees on a bus were the military equivalent of the Red Army.  It all seems too dumb to be true, but I didn’t come up with it. They did. 

Tiffany lets them have it

Had the Immigrant Trust Act been in force, none of this would have happened. Every part of this operation, starting with Joshi’s directive, would clearly have been illegal, and have given the Attorney General a legal basis for pre-emption and response. What we got instead was a scene straight out of the Jim Crow South, with the Edison rail station standing in for the Greyhound bus station at Jackson, Mississippi and Sam Joshi standing in for Ross Barnett.* And it could easily happen again.

Charlie Kratovil, whose New Brunswick Today piece I relied on in my statement 

An ITA resolution gives us a double opportunity: to right a past wrong and to prevent another one from happening. Opportunities like this don’t come that often, and don’t take an encore when they do. My suggestion? Take it. Better to act while you can than regret that you didn’t.

I didn’t catch the speaker’s name, but she called ICE “fascists,” which was all right by me. The two women seated in the middle ground were Rutgers undergraduates doing a research assignment for a class.

*An allusion to the confrontation between civil rights activists associated with the Congress of Racial Equality and local law enforcement in Jackson, Mississippi during the Freedom Rides of May 1961.