While political prisoner and Palestine activist Mahmoud Khalil remains in ICE detention in Louisiana, his lawyers are fighting for his freedom in New Jersey. On Friday, March 28 they were in Newark to argue for Khalil’s upcoming immigration hearing to take place in New Jersey, rather than Louisiana where a judge is more likely to go along with the Trump administration’s political persecution of Khalil.

While Khalil’s legal team advocated for him in the district courthouse, hundreds of supporters rallied outside chanting, “We want justice, you say how? Release Mahmoud right now!” and “Up up with liberation, down down with occupation!” While Newark has seen plenty of pro-Palestine protests since the liberation struggle drew national attention in the aftermath of October 7, they have rarely drawn the numbers that the rally to free Mahmoud Khalil did.

The turnout was, in part, bolstered by the presence of immigrant rights organizations which have for years been leading a dynamic movement against ICE detention in New Jersey. Throughout the crowd, people held signs provided by the New Jersey Alliance for Immigrant Justice (NJAIJ), the state’s largest immigration coalition. Several speakers representing immigrant rights organizations — including NJAIJ Executive Director, Amy Torres — spoke about how attacks on the Palestine movement and attacks on immigrants are connected.

“Yes this is about Palestine, and also this is not about Palestine,” Torres said in a speech to the crowd. “This is about this administration taking the issue that they believe is the least sympathetic and making an example out of the people that they arrest so that they can dehumanize the issue, they can dehumanize the actors, they can dehumanize the people standing up as a means of going after every single one of us.”

Speaking with Mondoweiss, Torres elaborated on how ICE routinely targets activists.

“Every arrest that ICE has made is a political one. Mahmoud Khalil’s case has grabbed national attention for very valid reasons, and it’s time for us to have this conversation with a larger audience,” Torres said. “ICE is a rogue agency that was created in a post-9/11 nationalist fervor.”

ICE was established in March 2003, the same time the United States was preparing to invade Iraq. As ICE explains on its website, “Congress granted ICE a unique combination of civil and criminal authorities to better protect national security and public safety in answer to the tragic events on 9/11. Leveraging those authorities, ICE’s primary mission is to promote homeland security and public safety through the criminal and civil enforcement of federal laws governing border control, customs, trade and immigration.”

Research by Brown University’s Costs of War Project shows how many of the policies passed in the early 2000s as part of the so-called “War on Terror” led to an erosion of civil liberties in the United States and abroad. A key finding of the report states that, “The post-9/11 wars have involved major human rights and civil liberties violations, including detention without trial, torture, expanded U.S. government surveillance and racial profiling.”

Another speaker at the rally was Li Adorno, a community organizer with the immigrant rights group Cosecha. He explained how the Palestine movement resonates with the experience of many different immigrant communities.

“I think it’s very important to stay connected to our roots,” Adorno told Mondoweiss. “A lot of people in Cosecha are immigrants coming from different countries, and a lot of the time we see this trend where like a colonizing entity comes in and starts taking off land little by little, starts implementing laws to oppress a certain type of people, and it’s like looking at the mirror when we’re looking at Palestine.”

Immigrant rights organizers and Palestine organizers who spoke with Mondoweiss maintained that those involved in both movements have long understood their struggles as connected, but the Trump administration’s efforts to deport Palestine activists are making it easier to highlight these connections to community members who have been less active.

Whitney Strub, a Newark resident and historian at Rutgers University, has spent years organizing for Palestine and immigrant rights with Northern NJ Democratic Socialists of America and the Rutgers faculty union AAUP-AFT. He said that he is seeing a surge in support for both movements in light of ICE’s attacks on Palestine activists.

“There’s greater collaboration and greater solidarity as of the last few years which have just really intensified I think both these movements,” Strub told Mondoweiss.

Connected oppression

As immigrant rights organizer and writer Silky Shah argued recently, Khalil’s case shows how migrant justice and Palestine solidarity are tied together. While there are extreme details that make the persecution of Khalil particularly concerning, Shah points out that much of how he’s been treated, such as being denied due process and communication with his loved ones, is actually the norm for people detained by ICE.

Maya, an immigration attorney in New York City who requested to only use her first name and is also an organizer with the Palestine solidarity group, PAL-Awda NY/NJ, spoke about this with Mondoweiss based on her experience providing legal services for immigrants.

“The kidnappings of all the Palestine activists in the last few weeks are shocking and pretty unprecedented in how they’re using these really little known provisions of immigration law,” she told Mondoweiss. “But the experience of ICE watching people, waiting outside their homes, monitoring and surveilling a person… that is something that our immigrant communities have been having to deal with for a very long time.”

The intertwined nature of ICE’s oppression of immigrant communities in the United States and Israel’s oppression of Palestinians goes even deeper.

Research by Deadly Exchange, a campaign to document US-Israel police partnerships, shows how Israel collaborates with the U.S. immigration system. For example, ICE and CBP have engaged in exchange programs with Israeli military and police forces. On a trip to Israel organized by the Jewish United Fund in Chicago, American police were taken to border checkpoints and shown “a major live police exercise with helicopters, horse mounted police, snipers, the K-9 unit and other resources involved in the monitoring, interdiction and detaining of cross-border infiltrators”.

Additionally, Israel’s largest weapons manufacturer, Elbit Systems, plays a significant role in exporting surveillance technology to the U.S.-Mexico border. Documents published by CBP indicate that Elbit Systems is expected to install 307 new surveillance towers along the U.S.-Mexico border over the next decade. Since 2014, Elbit has been awarded several contracts by the Department of Homeland Security worth hundreds of millions of dollars to build surveillance technology along the border which was first tested on Palestinians.

While this surveillance technology is often depicted as more benign than the razor wire and deployed soldiers which have increasingly defined much of the Right’s militarization of the border, surveillance systems like Elbit towers increase migrant deaths by leading people to travel through more inhospitable regions in search of asylum. In occupied Palestine, Elbid’s technology is a pillar of the apartheid system that Israel uses to track and regulate nearly every aspect of Palestinians’ lives.

NJAIJ highlighted many of these connections in a statement published on October 24, 2023, just a few weeks into Israel’s war on the people of Gaza. More than 100 immigrant rights organizations across the country also signed onto a statement demanding a ceasefire, highlighting the connections between oppressions, and expressing solidarity with Palestinians. Many of these groups stood by the statement even after their funding was threatened due to their support for Palestine.

“I’ve been in the immigrant rights world since 2017, and in the last few weeks I’ve seen so many of my colleagues and coworkers, or people I went to law school with, working to protect students and protesters for Palestine in a way that is very inspiring,” Maya said.

Connected movements

Like in most of the country, Palestine activists in New Jersey have been largely maligned by news outlets and Zionist organizations. This has not stopped them from organizing, but it has meant that the movement has faced an uphill battle in growing its public support.

The immigrant rights groups in the state have a strong base of support from decades of organizing. These groups had already been using their base and access to local media to highlight the violence that ICE carries out, even before Khalil’s detention brought more attention to the issue.

Between being kidnapped in New York by federal agents in T-shirts and being sent to a Louisiana ICE facility that activists call “Detention Alley,” Khalil was briefly transferred to Elizabeth Detention Center (EDC) in New Jersey. Since the facility first started holding immigrants in 1994 it has been infamous for its cruel conditions including a lack of access to fresh air or sunlight, vermin infestations, medical neglect, and abusive treatment from guards. In 2020, an immigrant detained in EDC, Héctor García Mendoza, sued ICE over their lack of Covid-19 safety measures. He was swiftly deported to Mexico in retaliation. No one in the movement has been able to locate or contact him since.

In 2021, activists from New Jersey and New York City successfully closed all but one of New Jersey’s ICE detention facilities. They have been fighting to close the last remaining facility, EDC. In the face of legal setbacks during the Biden administration, ICE has begun looking to New Jersey as a potential site for expansion.

Two days before Khalil’s arrest, NJAIJ and other immigrant rights groups announced a protest in Newark to oppose the reopening of Delaney Hall, an ICE detention center that has been closed since 2017. The protest took place on March 11, just as Khalil’s arrest was drawing national scrutiny. In the crowd of hundreds that attended the protest, it was impossible to miss the presence of pro-Palestine activists waving Palestinian flags and wearing keffiyehs. Endorsing organizations included local chapters of the Council on American-Islamic Relations and Jewish Voice for Peace, groups that have played a leading role in the movement for Palestine.

“When you look at organizations whose bases are Muslim and Arabic-speaking… they’ve really been at the fore of the immigration fight here,” Torres told Mondoweiss. “These communities understand more than anyone how federal agencies are used to target and surveil and profile people.”

Speaking about the turnout for the Delaney Hall protest, Strub said that there is space for both movements to bring in even more people.

“I certainly think these student arrests and, you know, Gestapo ICE kidnappings that are going on now are wake up calls and opportunities,” Strub told Mondoweiss. “I think you’re seeing people go out against Mahmoud Khalil’s ICE detention who had been silent on Palestine… That can be a consciousness raising moment.”

---