Welcome to How We Won, a new newsletter about organizing victories and the people that made them happen.

I’m Lindsay, a Chicago-based writer and editor, and the creator of the Beyond November resource guide. In the overwhelm of living through what some days feels like a neverending tidal wave of crises and cries of “we’re cooked,” once a month, this newsletter will highlight a big community win — be it related to housing justice, climate, education or any number of other issues — and interview the organizers behind it about what worked, what didn’t and what lessons you can apply to the fight in your own communities.

When I first told Nedia Morsy from Make the Road New Jersey that I was calling from Chicago, she first asked how I was doing. 

Like most immigrant justice organizers across the country, she was acutely aware of the overwhelming task Chicagoans face right now of defending our communities against ICE terror. As I am writing this, footage is flooding social media of them kidnapping a teacher from a Spanish immersion preschool. 

As harrowing as it is, I told her, I have been heartened by the swift, strategic and growing response from everyday Chicagoans, organizing school watches and patrols, armed with whistles and mounted on bikes, supporting impacted businesses, and being a steadfast presence outside the detention facility in Broadview despite repeated violent escalations from the feds. 

“If we can’t organize in this moment, we are not who we’ve been waiting for,” Morsy says. “It’s terrible. It’s violent. I think we have a lot of hope; we have a lot of interest in trying new things and being innovative, and that is what is keeping us moving.”

As ICE and CBP expand their destructive campaign to cities like Charlotte and New Orleans, it felt all the more urgent to share a story of how a community succeeded in fighting back.

Broad Street is the main drag in Elizabeth, New Jersey, where you’ll find the Community Center that houses Make the Road New Jersey, and right behind it, one of the oldest cemeteries in the state. And right behind that is the Union County Jail. 

The looming concrete skyscraper, which has sat vacant since 2017, is a stone’s throw from the DMV, the main branch of the city’s public library, three high schools and a McDonald’s where students like to gather after school. 

In February of 2025, Make the Road New Jersey, an organization which organizes, advocates, and offers support for and with immigrant, working class and Latinx communities, began hearing rumors from community members that the county was considering selling the jail, and would sell to ICE or a private entity that would contract with ICE.

As more of these rumors began circulating, Nedia Morsy of Make the Road New Jersey and her team began asking questions. They began calling elected officials and submitting FOIA requests. “We were getting ‘ers’ and ‘ums’ and realizing that something was afoot,” she says. 

Make the Road met with county officials, who said they had a fiduciary responsibility to sell the building, and maybe ICE would bid on the 1200-bed facility. With the information and alarm bells ringing, they got to work.

Organizers began reaching out to their networks and ultimately turned 350 people out to rally outside the Union County Jail the night the county voted to put it up for auction. This included attending every single commissioners meetings, publishing op-eds, collaborating with unions and state and local elected officials and a robust public education and outreach plan.

A month after Make the Road began investigating the proposed sale of Union County Jail, ICE opened a detention facility at Delaney Hall in Newark, just a short drive away. 

“Because we were able to bring so much attention to what happened at Delaney and underline that any interaction with ICE and the billionaires they contract with is riddled with manipulation and lies and obfuscating the truth, we brought the narrative back home to what could happen,” Morsy says. “This is terrible and happening 20 minutes away. This ceiling could fall on 1200 people.”

In May, elected officials including Newark Mayor Ras Baraka and Congresswoman LaMonica McIver were arrested while demanding answers about and oversight of the Delaney Hall facility, and McIver still faces bogus federal charges. Make the Road attended oral arguments in her trial in October to show support for her.

“I think so often about May 9th and the days before Mayor Baraka was arrested,” Morsy says. “He was going up to the gates of Delaney Hall and submitting citations and was doing it all by himself, a Black man going up to ICE agents with large guns and masks on a street you don’t really go on to, in an incredibly industrial area, and we as movement people must think about flanking our people, not just community members but elected officials.”

Make the Road has had a working relationship with Mayor Baraka since 2017, when they worked together to pass a paid sick leave ordinance and a sanctuary city policy for Newark. She also noted how Congresswoman McIver, as a freshman representative, has put her safety on the line to advocate for immigrant constituents. Building a mutually supportive relationship with elected officials is not just important for getting things done, she says, but for backing up those representatives risking their positions and safety to take on authoritarian power. 

“There is an attack on Black and Brown people, community, electeds—we cannot miss that thread that even in polished roles, Black and Brown people are dangerous or the enemy or antigovernment and that’s simply not true,” Morsy says. “If anything, these are champions making every effort to hold on to our democracy.”

Morsy says there is an inside-outside dynamic that is effective, that there should always be outside pressure and accountability for elected officials and working within to help leaders understand the issues on the ground. “We shouldn’t have the expectation that everyone is woke from the jump,” she says. “We need to work with everyone to understand where we’re coming from. There needs to be demonstrated efforts at inside collaboration.”

On the outside, Morsy hails canvassing as a “tried and true” strategy, and in the case of this campaign, popular education became a key component of the campaign. Make the Road held town halls twice a week in Elizabeth to share information about what was happening with the jail.

“The thing that we struggle with today is how do we keep the story of chaos that you’re organizing around relevant and high note amidst tons of stories of chaos,” Morsy says.

Social media and communications were critical in that regard too, and Make the Road frequently creates and posts content about their campaigns and community announcements. At a time when so much information is out there all the time, Morsy says, it’s critical for organizers to be proactive in combating it. 

“I think it’s interesting that—not to insult comms people—we all must become comms people,” she says. “We should develop relationships with reporters and talk to them. If we’re trying to carry out a message, how are we creating a space where we are a credible source of information?”

Clarity on the immediate goals — shutting down a detention center, for example — is important, but so is inviting the community to envision what happens beyond that. “If our work and our organizing is just an effort to fight back, which is the name of the game these days, we actually remain cogs in the authoritarian regime’s wheel because we’re just responding to what they’re putting down,” she says.

The most important question, Morsy poses, is “what are we creating?” “Are we creating mutual aid groups?” she asks. “Are we creating campaigns that the funding be redirected to a gymnasium? Have we forgotten about what we dreamed out? We have to be building and creating, otherwise we actually haven’t stood for something for us and for our liberation.”

In late July, immigration organizers in New Jersey experienced two setbacks— the 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals overturned a provision organizers had helped pass prohibiting state and local governments from contracting with private prisons, and the Trump administration announced the use of the Fort Dix military camp for migrant detention.

That same week, amidst these blows, Make the Road won. 

Union County representatives told a rallying crowd of 250 community members the good news — the county would not allow the jail site to be used for immigrant detention. The excitement, the relief, the emotions were palpable, with many attendees bursting into tears.

“The commissioners and the county staff were excited to come out themselves and share the news that they had come to this decision,” Morsy says.

The work has not stopped for Morsy and Make the Road, however. At the end of September, the team launched a new campaign calling on the state of New Jersey to divest pensions from data software giant Palantir. “We think about immigration, detention centers, the raids, but we have forgotten about data infrastructure as part of the deportation mechanism and technology,” she says. “We are building a multiracial coalition because data surveillance impacts all of us, to racially target Black and Brown people.”

In addition, they are advocating for the New Jersey Immigrant Trust Act, which would codify an existing directive limiting collaboration and information sharing between local law enforcement and ICE. And as they take on these challenges, their numbers grow stronger.

“We actually grew the base of people who will come out and publicly oppose detention, that’s a win that will take us into tomorrow,” Morsy says. “We got the news about Fort Dix and we got the news about the Third Circuit taking parts of the state ban away, and it was a good reminder that organizing does work. Where we did put pressure, we were successful. It’s whack a mole, there are all these horrible things, but where there was constant pressure, meetings, mass people, constant conversations, that had actually made the difference. The administration had moved these two huge things, but they would be unsuccessful building in our backyard.”

Join us every second Friday for more stories of How We Won. Thank you for reading and sharing. Keep going!