Well readers, we did it. The Union County Board of County Commissioners voted 9-0 tonight to adopt Resolution 2025-796:

Supporting the Wind of the Spirit Immigrant Resource Center’s efforts, and encouraging the New Jersey Legislature to pass Senate Bill 3672 and Assembly Bill A4987, which establishes protections for immigrants interacting with government agencies, and designates the “New Jersey Immigrant Trust Act.”

The resolution was co-sponsored by Commissioner Sergio Granados and Chairwoman Lourdes M. Leon, and supported by the entire Board. The Board passed the resolution, offered words of support for migrant rights generally, praised our efforts, and promised to transmit the text of the resolution to the other twenty county governments in New Jersey–two of whom, Essex and Hudson, have already adopted resolutions. Union County makes three, with eighteen more to go.

Much of the groundwork for the resolution was laid by Wind of the Spirit Immigrant Resource Center in Madison and Plainfield, but in a wider lens, tonight’s win was a joint effort by many migrant defense groups, carried out over several months, including Make the Road New Jersey and Resistencia en Accion.

The effort began early this year in the hotly-contested battle over the future disposition of the Union County Jail. A small coalition of migrant defense groups from all over the state fielded hundreds of activists and dozens of speakers over five solid months–from March to July–to make clear to the Board where we stood on migrant rights, on ICE, and on the idea of turning the Union County Jail into a migrant detention facility. We won the battle over the jail, eventually won the battle for a pro-ITA resolution, but most of all, won the battle for the moral high ground. To their credit, the Board listened to us and responded.

“This is what democracy looks like,” as they say. Nothing grand. Just moderately sane.

When it comes to migrant defense, the mass media likes to cover physical confrontations in the streets–Los Angeles, Portland, Chicago, DC, Chinatown, and most recently, Alameda. Or causes celebres: Mahmoud Khalil, Kilmar Abrego, LaMonica McIver. I’m the last one to knock any of that. I only wish their coverage asked more of the right questions and gave more direct answers to them. What gets less covered is a quieter, apparently more sedate, but no less powerful story: the drama of democratic exchange over migrant rights, the place where ordinary people rise up to engage with–or confront–the state’s monopoly on the use of force through discourse alone.

It’s fashionable, particularly among centrists or conservatives, to defer to Tocqueville or the Federalist Papers on matters like this, and leave things there. There’s a tendency on the Left to drown it all in the power analytics of Gramsci and Foucault. But none of that really captures the experience. Democracy demands a different Muse.

In lieu of that, here are some pictures of what democracy looks like. If you seek its monuments, look around.