Assemblywoman Bagolie,
Assemblywoman Collazos-Gill,
Senator McKeon,

I’m writing as your constituent to express my extreme concern with the trajectory of our free speech rights in New Jersey. Only a few weeks ago, Rümeysa Öztürk, a Ph.D. candidate at Tufts University, was released from an ICE jail, after 2 months in custody, during which she was never charged or even accused of any crime. If she was being held for any act, other than being smart, Muslim, and female, it appears to be the same act I am undertaking today, publicly calling for her community leaders to support the uniform enforcement of international law and espousing the basic humanity of all people.

But her release doesn’t erase the fact that she was snatched off the street by unidentified, armed, masked men. It doesn’t erase that she was denied asthma treatment and not allowed to wear her hijab while in custody. It doesn’t mean she won’t be taken again, and disappeared more quickly this time. I hope you’ve read the Op-ed, but if you haven’t please take a few minutes to do so now.

There’s nothing remotely illegal, dangerous, or controversial about the words in that Op-ed. If you disagree, let's replace all the mentions of Israel with Russia and the references to Palestine and Gaza with Ukraine. Does that change anything for you? Or maybe we replace the mentions of Israel with the United States and the references to Palestine and Gaza with Indigenous Population. Does that change how much traction her words are able to achieve? And regardless of your individual, or our collective, reaction our laws and Constitution purport that we cannot be detained or punished for our political speech. Yet that’s exactly what’s been happening, nationally, and in New Jersey.

Even before Newark Mayor Ras Baraka was arrested outside GEO Group’s private prison, Mahmoud Khalil was detained, albeit briefly, in New Jersey, enroute to Louisiana. Our state has long been a participant in ICE’s shell game. A likely illegal attempt to try to keep detainees from having clear legal avenues prior to their illegal and rushed deportation. But now, under Trump, instead of deportation they face rendition to concentration camps in countries they’ve never known. The laws against private ICE detention in New Jersey have been circumvented or challenged, including by the Biden Administration you have all supported and actively campaigned for. This is not a new fight for immigrants, including in our state, and that’s why it’s critical we pass the Immigrant Trust Act, before a future Attorney General can weaken or overturn the current guidance on law enforcement agencies supporting ICE.

It’s also not a new experience for our state’s Black residents to have unidentified, heavily armed, masked individuals jump out and run at them on the street. Ask any Black resident of Paterson, Newark, Trenton, or Camden about “Jump Out Boys” and they’ll tell you countless stories. Some, like Carl Dorsey in Newark, fatal. Others, like Jajuan Henderson in Trenton, inflicting life changing physical and mental costs. I’m willing to bet you’ve never had to stare down the barrel of guns in the hands of unidentified people screaming contradictory commands at you, because that kind of policing doesn’t occur in your neighborhoods, nor in mine. But state violence, and the chilling effect on those under the threat of it, is not new. But its use against those who have only committed speech or thought crimes is something we believed we’d left behind in earlier dark eras of our history.

Which is why statements by many of you against the rights of student protestors at Rutgers and all of you being co-sponsors of the IHRA Bill are such a startling affront to so many of your constituents. There was an obvious and predictable path from the Biden crackdowns on campus protest and free speech rights, justified by propaganda and disinformation, to the Trump expansion of the illegality and those attacks escaping the walls of our institutions of higher education, and his doubling down of attacks against universities nationally and in New Jersey. The voices of Jewish students, which many of your statements about campus protests claimed to be defending, are being disregarded because their view of who is entitled to humanity can see beyond religion. Make no mistake, the vocal support for punishing student protestors and activists that many of you expressed, helped convince the Trump Administration that they could illegally revoke Rutgers students’ visas, along with hundreds of other students across the country, and set the stage for mass abduction of our next generation of scholars, writers, and professors. Abducted for thought crimes against the regime and for support of international law.

The IHRA bills, including the one you all co-sponsor in New Jersey, would take those same unconstitutional restrictions on speech, and give them the power of law in New Jersey, allowing the weaponization of the state and the physical violence of our law enforcement apparatus to be used to suppress legitimate, and needed, criticism of a rogue nation state. One that is not just committing genocide, but openly bragging about it. The language of the IHRA is internally inconsistent, indicating that Israel should not be subject to any double-standards, but declaring that criticism of Israel cannot be treated the same as critique of any other country. One of the IHRA’s primary authors has publicly stated that codifying it into law violates the very intentions that drove its creation. It also reinforces the dangerous anti-Semitic framing that all Jewish people are responsible for the actions of the State of Israel by tying together anti-Semitism and critique of that government. And while that dangerous framing may have contributed to the senseless murders of two Israeli Embassy employees in Washington DC, the solution is not to apply that same broken logic to protestors who support the humanity of Palestinians. We have already seen the negative effects of the flawed IHRA language in your District, in West Orange, where Jewish advocates simply asking for the mentions of Israel be removed from our Township IHRA Resolution were painted as anti-Semitic, self-hating Jews, Hamas supporters, and attacking the Jewish community they are active participants in. If the IHRA Bill is passed, it will join our existing anti-BDS law as blatantly unconstitutional laws that seek to suppress rational, well informed speech, debate, and, when necessary, protest.

It only gets worse when considering the implications of the IHRA Bill alongside the pop up parties Bill you all voted to pass. It’s not hard to see the very real threat to the right to protest, or publically speak up in support of Palestine, or any other cause that the party in power in Trenton has deemed undesirable. Despite very clear warnings from civil liberties groups and lawyers, you all voted to support a Bill that very clearly would be abused to criminalize protest, and thereby speech. Thankfully, the Governor vetoed many of the worst potential abuses, but the fact that it passed that way in the first place highlights that you, and all of our Legislators, don’t seem to be taking the threats to our speech and other freedoms seriously. Those threats may only grow following the election in November.

What happens in Palestine, will happen here. What happened to Rümeysa Öztürk, happened to Ras Baraka, will happen to you despite being elected officials, will happen to me, if we don’t stand up for the fundamental rights our country was founded upon. It took us far too long to extend those rights to all citizens, and yet you’re proactively working, in Democratic trifecta New Jersey, to roll those rights back, which in addition to being fundamentally wrong, won’t win you any votes in November. Anti-Semitism and anti-Arab hate and Islamophobia are all on the rise, not because of college protestors, or critique of the IHRA Bill, but because of the incredible power of othering, pushed by far-right wing extremism and white nationalism.

At a protest in your District, in West Orange, in November, a Muslim man was assaulted while exercising his free speech and protest rights to call out the crimes against humanity being committed by Israel. Would he be investigated or charged if the IHRA Bill was law? Would the outcome of such an investigation matter, or is the threat of it enough to chill speech? Now a fundraising campaign for the assailant not only attempts to intimidate the victim and the witnesses, including myself, but also cites the IHRA Resolution West Orange passed as justification for the assault. We warned our Mayor and Town Council this would happen, but they refused to listen. You have a chance to do better. The IHRA Bill leans into the blaming of others, and history has taught us, time and time again, that unity not divisiveness will protect the most vulnerable in our societies. We must stand together for the equal and just enforcement of international and local law or we will accelerate the illegal arrests, the human trafficking of political prisoners, and the empowerment of the worst elements of our country and society.

These are the ideals of the Immigrant Trust Act, and in lifting up our residents and unifying around the humanity of everyone in New Jersey, it only further highlights the fundamental and irreparable flaws of the IHRA Bill. So I ask you, for your constituents, for your state, and for our shared humanity, pass the Immigrant Trust Act and remove your support for the IHRA Bill. If you don’t, it’s only a matter of time before our own students are being disappeared, and you’ll have to live with your contributions to that effort. I hope you carefully consider this request and take the time to engage in a meaningful response and not canned talking points that continue to degrade the humanity of our neighbors.

Thank you,

Matt Dragon