People are organizing for immigrant rights across the United States. Already, New Jersey has several initiatives in the works. This isn’t surprising: One in four residents in the state are immigrants, a rate 14.3 percent higher than the national average. Just a few years ago, the state saw a combative movement which nearly succeeded in banning Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention. While the Biden administration overruled the hard-won state detention ban, many activists remember the fight we put up.
The New Jersey community was further galvanized by a high profile ICE raid in Newark which received national attention. The demand for immigrant rights in the state is so strong that even the Democrats here are having to present themselves as fighters against President Trump’s attacks at a time when the Democratic Party nationally is moving increasingly to the right on immigration.
Various organizations have called meetings and marches to discuss how to fight back. Several university worker unions (mostly affiliated with Rutgers, the largest state school in NJ) called a town hall in Newark to discuss how they plan to oppose attacks by ICE. Make The Road NJ (an NGO that is close with the Democratic Party) called a march which mobilized hundreds of people in the streets of Passaic on an icy cold Saturday (this is large for an NJ action). The Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL) called a rally in Elizabeth, one of the most immigrant-heavy cities in the state and the site of New Jersey’s last remaining ICE detention center.
While it’s good that there are plenty of actions for people in New Jersey to attend if they want to fight for immigrant rights, fractured organizing risks weakening the movement in the long run — it will take a united front to build a mass movement capable of defeating the Far Right’s attacks on immigrants. The unions organizing for immigrant rights, NGOs like Make The Road, and more explicitly anti-capitalist groups like PSL and Cosecha could draw out larger crowds if they called actions together. These different groups may still disagree on what demands to put forward and how to organize, but that should not get in the way of the larger task of bringing as many people into the streets in a fight against ICE. It will be important for the rank and file of the movement to demand this unity in action act. It is also essential that we organize independently from the Democratic Party which will try to channel the movement out of the streets and into arenas it controls, like the upcoming NJ gubernatorial election.
In fact, for the movement to be as strong as possible, we will need to organize spaces where the rank and file can debate the best strategies for defending our communities against ICE and bringing more people into the struggle. These spaces should be democratically run by all who want to participate in the fight against ICE, whether or not they are formally organized in a group.
There is already a powerful example of what such a democratic space could look like. In Detroit, activists have been organizing through a “People’s Assembly” where hundreds of workers, community members, and leftists of different types join together to debate strategy for the movement. These hundreds of activists then vote on initiatives to carry forward. There is no reason such an approach couldn’t happen in New Jersey as well. For such a space to exist, the rank and file of the immigrant rights movement will have to call for it with the logic of a united front bringing together all groups, unions, and individuals who want to fight.
As an organizer of the Detroit People’s Assembly put it:
It will be important to avoid the pitfalls of past efforts. In times like this when there’s a great sense of urgency and a need to act, there’s a lot of pressure to skip discussions and set up administrative or behind-the-scenes structures in hopes of maximizing “efficiency.” But what this misses is that the power of mass assemblies and worker committees comes from the trust and buy-in built through the democratic process. It can be slower and messy, but it is the source of strength and is what enables the most people to take ownership over the movement and to have agency in carrying out the decisions made by the assembly. To that end, activists and organizers should resist the instinct to “systematize.” That doesn’t mean we get rid of structure or procedures, but when we use these methods as “short cuts” to skip democratic processes, we actually end up hamstringing the potential of the committee or assembly. We should also avoid the instinct to treat people that show up as simply a set of people to be plugged-in to an ongoing campaign. Rather, we should treat the group as a body unto itself that activists are participating in.
It will also be important to unite the struggle for immigrant rights with other struggles. This is something that every rank-and-file activist can fight for even when certain leaderships don’t. For example, several activists in New Jersey who have been organizing in solidarity with Palestine for more than a year attended the Make The Road march with keffiyehs and signs highlighting how Trump’s war on immigrants also aims to attack students in solidarity with Palestine. This is a powerful example of how anyone can bring perspectives on how to strengthen the movement by uniting it with other sectors.
Now imagine if there was a space for those activists to go and propose ideas for how to unite the movements against ICE and the movement for Palestine, exchange with other activists, and vote on initiatives for the whole movement to carry out. Maybe people will propose organizing their unions to go on strike in defense of immigrants at their workplace. Maybe there will be discussions of how community members can mobilize to put their bodies on the line if teachers or healthcare workers refuse to allow ICE into their workplaces. Maybe an intense debate will emerge over what city is the best one to hold a march, and through that debate everyone will have an opportunity to directly decide if/where/when to march. These are all important discussions that the assembly could decide to take up.
Every rank-and-file activist can and should fight for such a perspective of organizing democratically so that we can use the full creativity of all workers, oppressed people, and activists who are ready to defend our immigrant neighbors.
