Progressive Win in New Jersey Hinged on Anti-ICE Organizing
Progressive Democrat and organizer Analilia Mejia officially won a special Democratic primary for New Jersey’s 11th Congressional District Tuesday, in a narrow race that took days to determine. Less than 900 votes separate Mejia and her opponent, former Rep. Tom Malinowski, though that number has grown with virtually every update. By the time Malinowski conceded on Tuesday, the margin between the two was just 1.4 points, with Mejia taking 29.1 percent of the votes and Malinowski taking 27.7 percent.
Mejia is expected to defeat Republican nominee and former mayor of Randolph Township Joe Hathaway in the special general election for the blue district on April 16. The seat was vacated when Mikie Sherrill won the New Jersey gubernatorial election last November.
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Speaking with the Prospect on the phone Sunday afternoon, when she was up by just 868 votes with 93 percent of the precincts reporting, Mejia discussed how she connected with voters in her district and why her belief that abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is a winning stance.
“You can’t turn away from this madness and you can’t unsee this injustice and they want leaders who say you’re not crazy, what you’re seeing is real,” Mejia said. “People get it, voters are not dumb.”
Mejia was one of the last candidates to enter the race, with some of the lowest name recognition compared to a former congressman (Malinowski), a commissioner in Essex County (Brendan Gill), and the state’s former lieutenant governor (Tahesha Way). But she attributed her victory to her commitment to offering constituents help and knowledge to fight the fascism they are seeing.
She combined campaigning with training, including holding town halls that began and ended with educational sessions about anti-authoritarianism, civil disobedience, and ways to prepare for encounters with immigration agents, who are terrorizing New Jersey and every other state. (Department of Homeland Security officials have also expanded ICE overseas, including at the Winter Olympics in Italy.)
“We need to turn off the funding spigot, we need to claw back the $75 billion that was stolen from the American people … and given to a murderous, out-of-control agency,” Mejia said, referring to the extra funding funneled to ICE in the Republican mega-bill last summer.
Mejia also discussed the need to end ICE’s mass surveillance, an aspect of Trump’s mass deportation drive that she said needs more attention. “This is less discussed but a very critical point,” she said. “If you are stopped by an ICE agent … they are capturing the information and we have no idea how it’s being used, how it’s being targeted.”
She noted that the two immigration officials who executed Veterans Affairs nurse and legal observer Alex Pretti had been recording his image before they shot him to death. The executioners have since been identified as Border Patrol agent Jesus Ochoa and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officer Raymundo Gutierrez. The Prospect’s running total of the number of people immigration agents have killed in the field or otherwise caused to die is now up to 25 people.
“We cannot lose sight that data collection and surveillance is also a threat,” Mejia said.
GRASSROOTS ACTIVISTS AROUND THE COUNTRY agree, and are voicing their anger toward politicians who are using taxpayer dollars to enable the surveillance state. They’re taking particular aim at Palantir Technologies, the multibillion-dollar company founded by Christian nationalist Peter Thiel, whose tools CEO Alex Karp has said are for killing people.
As part of the expansive deployment of surveillance technology, ICE uses Palantir tools to hunt immigrants, including the artificial intelligence platform ImmigrationOS, which ICE uses to “track immigrants’ movements,” and another program called ELITE to find people to deport. Palantir has received $81 million in ICE contracts since last January, part of a $22 billion spending spree by ICE and CBP. Stephen Miller is one of their investors. Vice President JD Vance is Thiel’s protégé.
Palantir is “the tech backbone for ICE, providing the key technology so ICE can track and abduct and disappear community members,” Make the Road States Deputy Director Sara Cullinane told the Prospect. “With all of the outrage we’re seeing across the country over ICE’s behavior and their brutality, it’s important also to understand the corporations that are colluding with ICE and building out the infrastructure ICE needs to carry out its pretty terrifying mission.”
Late last month, officials in Mejia’s home state heard testimony from dozens of New Jerseyeans demanding that the state investment council end its portfolio allocation to Palantir. Other activists around the country have likewise demanded their municipalities and states end investments in and contracts with Palantir.
The organization Purge Palantir last week released a new database, The Palantir Payroll, listing which politicians are taking Palantir’s money via its corporate PAC, Employees of Palantir Technologies Inc. It collates Federal Election Commission data on principal campaign committees, leadership PACs, and single-candidate super PACs and ranks which candidates got the most money. On the Republican side, the biggest winners are Sens. John Cornyn of Texas and Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, who respectively got $286,801 and $148,500 from Palantir last year. Both are at risk from Republican primary challenges and are spending big to survive them.
Top Democrats on the Palantir Payroll are Rep. Pat Ryan (D-NY), who said he would donate the money to Hudson Valley nonprofits serving immigrants after a different advocacy group, For the Many, criticized him for accepting money from ICE profiteers. Ryan also said he would reject future contributions from executives at companies working with ICE.
Colorado Democrats Sen. John Hickenlooper and Rep. Jason Crow, whose state is home to Palantir’s corporate headquarters, are on the Palantir Payroll, and after pressure from their constituents, both said they would also donate Palantir donations to immigrant rights organizations, just as Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-IL) did last year with all contributions from Palantir’s chief technology officer. Krishnamoorthi is running for U.S. Senate this year.
The number two Democrat on the Palantir Payroll is Rep. Adam Smith (D-WA), ranking member on the House Committee on Armed Services, who told the Prospect that the $106,051 he received from the company has no bearing on how he votes. Asked if he would give the money back, Smith said, “If you give the money back … you’re saying, ‘Oh my God, I don’t trust myself’… I personally and strongly feel it undermines representative democracy.”
He doesn’t agree with the phrase “abolish ICE” because he said there are too many interpretations for it, but he would support returning immigration enforcement to the Justice Department. He also said, “I don’t love how Palantir’s technology is being used,” but is more focused on Donald Trump, along with “border czar” Tom Homan, Miller, and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem. “They need to be stopped,” he said.
Keeping Palantir’s money but disagreeing with the use of their technology is “incoherent at best and at worst disingenuous,” Cullinane said.
More Democrats agree, as Tuesday’s House Committee on Homeland Security hearing on ICE and CBP oversight showed. Throughout the hearing, Democratic congressmembers said they wanted to abolish ICE. Rep. Delia Ramirez (D-IL) went so far as to say that the entire Department of Homeland Security, which was established in 2002, must be “dismantled.”
A strong stance against fascism is what Americans are looking for, Mejia said, and why she won her race in New Jersey. She believes that Democrats who say ICE should merely be “reformed” are wrong.
“It becomes clear that we need bold leadership in order to pull ourselves out of it,” Mejia said. “I think the murders in Minnesota feel very similar to that moment in our nation’s history, when in the middle of evening news, the American people couldn’t turn away from what was happening in the South, they couldn’t turn away from firehoses turned on children.”
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