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. Continue reading
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. Continue reading
I wake up. First thing I do: I look at my phone, and click on Radio Jornalera, the online workers’ radio station of Resistencia en Accion. Que pasa? What’s going on? ICE is once again in Trenton, masked and armed, as they’ve been every other day recently. But Resistencia’s Rapid Response team is there, too, demanding that ICE identify themselves, filming them, and taking down their license plates and badge numbers.
Continue readingNotes on Migrant Defense Work in New Jersey
When Resistencia en Acción started its campaign for a municipal resolution in favor of the ITA back in June, we were hoping not only to pass a pro-ITA resolution in Princeton, but to re-ignite what had begun as a statewide movement in favor of such resolutions. At least a dozen municipalities had passed pro-ITA resolutions before Princeton did, and I’m happy to say that a statewide pro-ITA movement has in fact taken off in New Jersey since late summer. Continue reading
“Divestment and the Boundaries of Conscience”
As regular readers of this blog know, I’ve been involved since 2024 in the campaign to induce Princeton University to divest its holdings, not just from Israel, but from arms manufacture and military affairs as such.
It was about a year ago that I got it into my head to get Robert K. Massie IV involved in our efforts. Massie is one of the architects and chroniclers of the decades-long campaign to divest from apartheid South Africa; I’d first encountered his book Loosing the Bonds twenty years ago, and been impressed by the rigor of his argument, as well as by the wealth of detail and moral passion he brought to the subject. Continue reading
I’ve recently given a handful of talks critical of the Kalven Committee Report’s (KCR) conception of institutional neutrality–three or four, depending on how you count, with one or two more to come, depending on what the referees say. My argument is pretty straightforward: it’s an adequacy-condition on any account of academic norms that the account deal with the problem of institutional complicity in wrongdoing. The KCR defense of institutional neutrality doesn’t just fail to deal with this issue; it offers complicit institutions a blueprint for evading accusations of complicity even when those accusations are recognized as true, well-documented, and incriminating. Continue reading
Apropos of my last post, Montgomery Township has just issued an official proclamation in favor of the Immigrant Trust Act. A proclamation has a somewhat lower official status than a resolution; unlike a resolution, it’s issued collectively by the mayor and Council, and doesn’t require individualized votes by Council members. So it’s not exactly what we wanted, but it’s still a win.
Whether coincidentally or not, two Council members who were present last time were absent today, notably Dennis Ahn and Vincent Barragan.
Continue readingJust a quick update on the progress of the mini-campaign here in New Jersey for municipal resolutions in favor of the Immigrant Trust Act. About a dozen or so resolutions passed between December 2024 and March 2025. After about two months of Council appearances, Resistencia en Acción and allies won a resolution here in Princeton on August 11th. My impression is that the Princeton win has generated the press coverage that’s breathed new life into the campaign. Continue reading
Institutional neutrality is the doctrine that institutions like universities should refrain from issuing public comment on matters of public controversy. As I’ve argued here at PoT (and elsewhere), one canonical exception to neutrality is institutional self-defense: a university is obliged to speak up when the university itself comes under attack. Predictably, we now have yet another exception to add to the list: the Charlie Kirk Exception. This exception asserts that when a famous right-wing loudmouth is shot on a university campus, all institutions hitherto bound by solemn pledges of institutional neutrality are obliged to carve out a special dispensation to condemn the act. Continue reading
You’ve likely encountered Fox News host Brian Kilmeade’s suggestion that we deal with the problem of homelessness by killing mentally ill homeless people. The remark has widely been treated as an isolated, one-off, a kind of non-sequitur that Kilmeade dreamed up out of the blue, and for which he has now apologized. So, case closed.
In fact, Kilmeade’s comment is no one-off non-sequitur at all. If you read through the relevant part of transcript of the show, and work through a few minor interpretive puzzles, you come to realize that what Kilmeade did was to draw a logically valid inference from an argument that Lawrence Jones, his co-host, had set up. Far from being a one-off, Kilmeade’s claim only makes sense as an inference from Jones’s argument, implicating both of them in the same set of claims. And far from being a non-sequitur, what the two of them offered up to the public was a well-structured argument. In a very real sense, they’ve done us the service of laying out the logical structure of genocide. Continue reading
Policy of Truth 