Know Your Rights

The massive increase of ICE activity across New Jersey has driven home the need to equip everyone with the tools to defend themselves. Know your rights trainings are what the name says; they are designed to leave participants with the knowledge and ability to effectively assert their rights to protect themselves and their neighbors. 

The IJWG provides know your rights trainings across the state, free of cost, to any audience that requests it, in order to continue to build out basic knowledge for protection. We strongly encourage all working group members to attend the training, and we also have a train-the-trainer program so that members can learn how to be able to share this knowledge with their community and beyond. 

Community Canvassing & Tabling

In order to further expand the information from know your rights trainings, and prepare our communities to better resist ICE, we organize regular canvasses. We target commercial corridors and public spaces in heavily targeted towns, distributing know your rights information, discussing safety plans with store owners, employees, and community members, and letting folks know that there are people watching and responding to ICE repression. 

We also regularly  show out to community events to distribute resources, watch out for ICE presence, and talk to folks about how to protect themselves. Wherever communities are gathered together, we want to be there to protect and educate.

Rapid Response and ICE Watch

ICE has built up an enormous apparatus to terrify, detain, and deport our neighbors. In response to this, we have taken a lead role in providing community defense through rapid response and ICE watch. We are actively growing networks of responders across New Jersey, and building up new networks where none have previously existed. Rapid responders show up on the scene when ICE is sighted and play a critical role in documenting ICE activity, demonstrating that we stand in solidarity with our neighbors, rallying communities to stand up for their neighbors, and distributing information and providing resources to impacted families and communities.

In addition, ICE watch provides regular patrols of areas known to be regular ICE targets, providing boots on the ground to hamper the ability of ICE to freely harass and kidnap community members. Rapid response and ICE watch are key elements of materially demonstrating our solidarity with our immigrant friends, family, and community members. By standing with them when ICE is around, we show who we are as socialists. 

Detention Center Support

The massive increase in ICE presence in the state has coincided with the opening of a new immigrant detention center in Newark, Delaney Hall. The conditions at Delaney Hall, run by the scandal plagued for-profit prison privateer GEO Group, are deplorable even by the abject standards of a US prison. As part of the Eyes on ICE collective, we regularly show up to support community members when they visit their loved ones on the inside, distributing material assistance and information, as well as basic food and shelter for those waiting outside exposed to the elements in the midst of a toxic wasteland. 

Campaigns to Target ICE Collaborators

In addition to responding to ICE activity and supporting those impacted, we are actively working to make the name of ICE toxic in New Jersey. To that end, we engage in targeted campaigns against local companies that profit from working within the ICE carceral apparatus. Our objective is to so thoroughly tar the name of ICE in NJ that nobody in their right mind would want anything to do with them. It is also an opportunity for us to go on the offensive against offensively bad collaborators.

Palestine Solidarity Working Group

Our solidarity extends to all people impacted by US racism, xenophobia and imperialism, whether they are within or outside the borders of the US. Our Palestine Solidarity working group exists in support of critical efforts fighting the ongoing genocide and fighting complicity in the US wherever it arises. 

Political Education

An important element of all that we do in the IJWG is providing political education about the US carceral state, US imperialism, and the need to develop and implement a socialist, abolitionist approach to immigration and detention. As socialists, we are well equipped to lead this work in a principled manner, to make sure that our values are reflected in the work on the ground. We engage in regular internal and external political education to enlighten both ourselves and our communities about what is happening, what we can do, and to promote a vision for a better world that we can build together.