I was pleased to see that my statement on the Immigrant Trust Act to the West Orange Town Council got headline treatment in TapInto West Orange. The reporter summarizes my statement, and then quotes Council member Joyce Rudin as favoring passage of a pro-ITA resolution:

[Regarding] the Immigrant Trust Act, I frankly, don’t know why we don’t pass a resolution. It’s been done all over the country. I don’t see how it would hurt us to offer protection, to make a statement as a community, in terms of providing protection to our immigrant community.

I’m gratified to hear that, and hope that Rudin can prevail on others, including incoming Council member Tammy Williams, to pass a resolution.

A reader off-line who agrees with the need to pass a resolution (and agrees with the need to pass the ITA itself) nonetheless said: “I know you’ll disagree, but the second half of your statement is framed as a threat, and I might have softened it.”

I do disagree. The “threat” in question is simply a statement of collective resolve, resolve that goes beyond me. In other words, my statement is not a one-off by one random person on one random evening that can be dismissed as such, but the expression of a widely-held view that demands uptake. If the Council dismisses my statement, they should be on notice that a whole constituency will re-assert what I’ve demanded. And we’ll re-assert it until we get something like an authentic response to it, which we so far have not gotten. Rudin aside, the Council ignored me. Did they ignore me because my argument lacked merit, or because they felt they could get away with it? I don’t think my argument lacked merit, so my view is that they ignored me for the latter reason. If so, they’re wrong. They can’t get away with it. That’s the point of my “threat.”

This is not the first time this Council has had this dismissive reaction to this issue. TapInto West Orange reported back in April that several West Orange residents had brought the issue up before the Council: five are quoted in the article itself. Once again, Rudin had a positive response, but Scarpa and Casalino dismissed these residents’ statements on the very grounds I rebutted in my statement: that the ITA “is not the business of the town.”

Well, yes it is. Like all towns in this state, West Orange is under threat by ICE; the ITA would, like all towns in the state, serve to protect it. A section of the bill explicitly makes reference to the need for migrants to be safe in accessing local services (section 5, particularly 5(3d)), and defines “model policies” that will be enacted principally by local governments. Do Scarpa and Casalino think that the need to access local services is “not the business of the town”? Or that “the appropriate government entities” with responsibility over “health care facilities, public libraries, public schools, domestic violence shelters, family shelters, youth shelters, and any other location deemed sensitive by the Attorney General” excludes the West Orange Town Council or its committees and commissions? Or that section 6 of the bill, governing “municipal law enforcement agencies,” has no bearing on the “business” of the West Orange Police Department? I’d love an explanation that makes that intelligible. How can a bill that’s largely about local government not be the business of local government?

St. Cloud Elementary School, West Orange

If their claim is that the ITA is before the state legislature rather than the Council, they seem to be assuming that the Council is not permitted to influence the legislature even in a matter which directly falls within the Council’s jurisdiction. What’s the argument for this? I’m not familiar with one, and they haven’t produced one. Two dozen municipalities and four counties disagree with them–including the board of their own county, Essex–as do all of the municipalities and counties that passed resolutions in favor of the plastic bag ban prior to its passage by the legislature.  What principle of governance prohibits a town council from making a request of the state legislature in a matter which directly concerns the town itself?

If the Council can lobby the state for grants (as it does), why can’t it pass a resolution to induce the legislature to pass a bill that would protect all of us? If the Council can pass a resolution condemning anti-Semitism as “a pervasive and disturbing problem in contemporary American society“–citing events as far flung as Pittsburgh, San Diego, and Gaza–why can’t it pass a resolution that has a more direct connection to the residents of the town itself?

The state legislature is currently considering legislation that adopts the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism. West Orange has pre-empted the state legislature by passing a municipal resolution that ratifies the IHRA definition and incorporates it into a municipal resolution prior to its passage by the state legislature (see the resolution in the previous link). How is the adoption of a complex, contested definition of anti-Semitism–contested even by its author–local business? Are historiographical and lexicographical debates now the business of the West Orange Town Council? In the case of the ITA, the standard claim is that municipal councils ought not to legislature on matters under consideration by the state legislature. OK. Why the ad hoc exception-making here?

The answers are not that Scarpa or Casalino have some principled commitment to legislative restraint that prevents them from ever seeing beyond West Orange in their capacity as members of Council. They’ve never enunciated or consistently acted on such a principle. It’s that, when it comes to the ITA, for reasons they refuse to disclose, they simply don’t want to pass a resolution. I think residents are entitled to ask why not, and get an answer.

The ITA has been stalled in the state legislature for over a year, and stalled by Democrats. New Jersey has a Democratic governor, an incoming Democratic governor, a Democratic state legislature, Democratic leaders of that legislature, and a slew of all-Democratic town councils and county boards all across this state. In other words, it’s a blue state in total, abject surrender to MAGA. These Democrats can’t invoke the excuse that the big, bad Republicans are preventing them from taking action. They are themselves refusing to act.

West Orange Town Council, November 12, 2025

Democrats are capable of endless expressions of purely verbal “support for migrants.” But ask most of them to do anything, and their only response is a profession of helplessness in the face of a challenge, and an abdication of responsibility where responsibility is called for. The town councils point to the state legislature. The state legislature points to the federal government. The Democrats in Congress want to “pivot to the center.” Meanwhile, people are being arrested, incarcerated, deported, and brutalized every day. What do they expect us to do? Petition Tom Homan and Kristi Noem for relief?

These people seem to have zero grasp of the urgency of the situation, and zero understanding of what it means to resist tyranny. The cozy universe they govern is defined by the imperatives of business as usual: give us more money to spend on ourselves. Someone has to break the news that life isn’t a perpetual shopping spree. There’s more to it than that, and that more has to find expression now. There are good reasons why we can’t wait much longer for action, as a famous guy once put it. We’ve waited more than long enough. Stop stalling. Stop dismissing. Stop putting us off. Act.

I made minor revisions to this post after the initial posting.