Montgomery Town Council
Sept. 4, 2025, 7 pm
100 Community Dr, Skillman, New Jersey
Hi, my name is Irfan Khawaja. I live in Princeton, but spend a fair bit of time here in Montgomery. I’m here to speak in favor of Montgomery’s passing a municipal-level resolution in favor of the Immigrant Trust Act, just as we’ve recently done in Princeton, and has been done in more than a dozen municipalities across the state. Continue reading
Notes on Migrant Justice
In two posts here, I’ve taken issue with the idea that Princeton’s recent passage of (or even mere discussion of) the ITA Resolution has induced ICE to raid the town and detain people. The basic premise behind this claim is that ICE operations target municipalities that express opposition to ICE. The further implication is that if you want to avoid ICE operations where you live, you have to tone down your public opposition to ICE, and adopt a “quiet” form of dissent. It can’t be stressed enough how dangerously out of touch with reality this claim is. If put into practice, it would mean the end of public opposition to ICE at a time when public opposition is clearly working, and is all we have. Continue reading
Thoughts on Rapid Response
In the last 24 hours or so, there have been three major ICE raids in my vicinity in central New Jersey, meaning in the vicinity of where I live or work: one in Hightstown (yesterday, at Franklin & Westerlea), one in Edison (yesterday, 45 Patrick Ave), and one in Trenton (today, 36 Bayard St). The Hightstown raid led to the detention of one person; the Edison one, now being described as one of the biggest since Trump took office, led to the detention of 29. My initial impression is that the Trenton raid was thwarted, and didn’t lead to any detentions; ICE lacked a judicial warrant in that case, and was refused entry into the premises.* Continue reading
A Response to John Heilner
Toward the end of the August 11 Princeton Council meeting at which Princeton’s ITA Resolution was adopted, John Heilner, a Princeton resident, offered a comment that has now been transcribed in the August 13 issue of TapInto Princeton and in the August 13 issue of Town Topics (updated on August 18). Though Mr Heilner’s comment has not to my knowledge elicited very much public comment, I think it demands comment. To put the matter bluntly, I regard his comment as both incoherent and irresponsible, and am amazed that a Council that has spent the better part of the last six months lecturing us about matters of facticity and tone has received it with such apparent equanimity. Continue reading
More Botched Reporting from Town Topics
In an earlier post here, I took issue with Town Topics’s defective reporting on the ITA municipal resolution campaign in Princeton. In quoting exclusively from members of the Princeton Council in its reporting on the July 28 Council meeting, I argued, the paper functioned essentially as a PR mouthpiece for the Council rather than as an expression of bona fide journalism. I sent a shorter version of that post as a letter to the editor of Town Topics, but it wasn’t printed. The paper’s most recent reporting on the August 11 meeting makes an attempt of sorts to remedy the problem, but still falls woefully short. Continue reading
Statement Urging Passage of a Municipal Resolution in Favor of the Immigrant Trust Act
Princeton Town Council
Princeton Municipal Building
400 Witherspoon St
Princeton, New Jersey
July 28, 2025
My name is Irfan Khawaja, I’m a resident of Princeton, and I support a municipal resolution in favor of the Immigrant Trust Act. I’ll be forwarding written statements to the Council from Flemington Borough Council member Trent Levitt, Bloomfield mayor Jenny Mundell, and former New Jersey state representative Sadaf Jaffer, all urging passage of such a resolution. I’ve asked several other mayors and local officials to weigh in, and my hope is that they will.
Continue reading
A friend of mine was unceremoniously fired from Felician University in 2023–one of sixteen people fired on a single day–after 23 unrelenting years as an English comp instructor to students with an average SAT verbal score well below 500. I described her in a letter of recommendation, without exaggeration, as “the most dedicated college instructor I had ever encountered” in two+ decades in the profession. Her office was across the hall from mine, and every now and then I’d eavesdrop on her efforts. I couldn’t imagine putting even half the effort into teaching that she did. Continue reading
As someone who unapologetically wears brownface every day, I find the hysterical front-page revelation of Justin Trudeau’s 2001 experiment with brownface pretty underwhelming. I also find the reaction to it on the part of various brown-faced Canadian politicians to be a transparent instance (so to speak) of grandstanding. If ever there was a case where policy ought to trump a supposed matter of character in politics, this is it–not so much because policy always trumps character in political matters, but because the supposed matter of character involved here is so morally inconsequential that just about anything trumps it. Continue reading
I did the last of my immigration-enforcement events yesterday at Felician–this one really a mini-event, intended for my seminar-sized criminal justice class. The guest speaker this time was my former Felician student Maria Lopez-Delgado.
Quick intro: Maria graduated as a philosophy major from Felician in 2013 (thesis topic: “The Marxian Critique of Capitalism”; advisor: Khawaja), went on to law school at UNC School of Law, did a stint at the New Jersey Office of the Public Defender, and for the past year or so has been back in North Carolina with North Carolina Legal Aid’s Battered Immigrant Project, where she works with victims of domestic violence, sexual assault, and human trafficking.* Since she was in North Carolina and we were in Jersey, we spoke by Google Video Chat. Continue reading
Joyce Phipps, Esq. is the founder and director of Casa de Esperanza–a non-profit legal aid and social service organization in Bound Brook, New Jersey, created to serve immigrants and refugees. I met her last February at the vigil for immigrant detainees I described in an earlier post.
We met more or less by chance: lost in thought, I wandered away from the vigil to prowl around the perimeter of the facility, and poke at its edges; Joyce, who was doing the same thing, noticed me, and struck up a conversation. It took just a few minutes of conversation to convince me to invite her to Felician to talk about her work defending the rights of immigrants and refugees. It took less time for her to accept. Continue reading
Policy of Truth 