Originally written on August 6, 2025.

Introduction

Build Up Resistance Now (NJ B.U.R.N.) is a youth-led anti-imperialist political organization consisting of locals throughout the state of New Jersey. We are committed to building sustained political struggle, developing a revolutionary theoretical understanding of the New Jersey region, and serving as practical training grounds for activists in our state. We accomplish this through weekly neighborhood outings where we speak to everyday people in our towns and cities (at public parks, street corners, porchfronts, homeless encampments, transit hubs, apartment complexes, and more), learn about the concrete issues people face, and find ways to fight back together in collective struggle.

Background

Situated on the Eastern coast of the United States between the major metropolitan areas of New York City and Philadelphia, New Jersey has long been overlooked by the left-wing activist milieu as a site of revolutionary organizing. Often perceived as a stagnant suburban reservoir, political struggle in New Jersey is overshadowed by its neighboring cities, with local activists regularly traveling to New York or Philly — sometimes relocating permanently — to participate in high-profile political demonstrations, lifestyleism, or leftist social scenes.

Yet, a glance at the history of New Jersey reveals a radical tradition that demands continuation. This history includes the 1920s communist-led labor strikes in Paterson, the rebellions in Newark and Plainfield during the 1960s, the anarchist-inspired Free Schools, the battles of the Black Liberation Army, and the breakout of the George Floyd uprising in the state capital of Trenton and Atlantic City. Whether it’s the deindustrialization and violent “urban renewal” of New Jersey’s major cities, the relentless gentrification of NJ-to-NYC commuter enclaves and high-profile shore towns, the growing numbers of families and workers who find themselves displaced and homeless, the contradictions erupting between state and local police departments, or the designation of our port cities as the primary commercial corridor of U.S. weapons exports to Israel, the objective situation necessitates our attention and dedication. We are obliged to take up this task, and we fully intend to win.

Initial formation

We trace our roots back to the Spring 2024 Gaza Solidarity Encampments at Rutgers-New Brunswick and Rutgers-Newark. In the aftermath of these encampments, our founders saw the pressing need to consolidate a radical bloc within the local Palestine solidarity movement.

Without any ambitions of starting a formal organization, we started to gather individuals into an informal affinity group for the purpose of attending protests together, hosting debrief discussions, and brainstorming ways to heighten and consolidate the New Jersey Palestine solidarity movement. Through this pre-organizational formation, we were able to facilitate important political development among the local youth and propagate a principled, combative, and strategic protest culture, aiming beyond the regular spectacle of reformist advocacy and NGO-staged demonstrations.

Perhaps most pragmatically beneficial, this pre-organizational formation allowed the to-be founders of NJ B.U.R.N. to identify each other as potential co-leaders and organically establish a deep ideological unity based on shared real-world experiences in local settings (in contrast to the all-too-common phenomenon of uniting based on theoretical adherence to a specific socialist tendency). Much debate, discussion, disagreement, and consensus-building took place in this pre-organizational formation, laying the foundation for genuine unity within NJ B.U.R.N.

This pre-organizational model can be easily replicated in regions with sufficient population density and existing political life.

Organizational methodology

When the founders of NJ B.U.R.N. began to discuss formal organization, our sights were set on the New Brunswick HELIX Hub, a health sciences building being constructed directly across the street from the New Brunswick Train Station. The HELIX Hub is slated to host a number of academic and private sector research institutions including Tel Aviv University, alongside 220 luxury apartments and other upscale developments. As it currently exists, the HELIX Hub is the economic jewel of the New Jersey Democrat-led political establishment, boasting a $750 million price tag and advertisements that span all the way to New York City.

Although New Brunswick is largely known as the college town of Rutgers University, the city of New Brunswick extends far beyond the university, with large working-class and immigrant neighborhoods sprawling for miles beyond campus boundaries. Seeing that the HELIX Hub was to be built in the city-proper (outside of the Rutgers-New Brunswick campus), we recognized the necessity of going beyond the realm of student organizing and conducting mass work broadly on the neighborhood level.

Towards these ends, we organize neighborhood outings nearly every day in various regions of New Jersey, including those New Brunswick neighborhoods directly impacted by the construction of the HELIX Hub. During these outings, we go and speak to people in public spaces, striking up conversations about police brutality, housing, education, gentrification, displacement, and other local issues — with an anti-imperialist edge. We conduct rigorous social investigation on local conditions while also situating these local issues within a global context. We don’t lecture people as “educated socialists” or distribute dull, out-of-touch newspapers — instead, we ask people about their life experiences and political ideas while also demonstrating our own revolutionary political line. We frequently talk about Palestine, US national politics, and liberation movements of the past, aiming to weave together the totality of political life and establish true political unity on the basis of anti-imperialism in our towns, cities, and neighborhoods.

After our outings, we apply our political education and synthesize our findings into analyses and takeaways. Only after an extended period of social investigation and relationship-building do we begin to launch campaigns, actions, and mobilizations, the particulars of which vary from city to city.

Common misconceptions about neighborhood outings

When we first proposed the idea of conducting neighborhood outings, some activists brought up points like “social anxiety,” introvertedness, or concern over not being from the community or sharing a common class or ethnic background. Furthermore, we’ve observed a direct correlation between those who are apprehensive of interacting with the masses and their insistence that we perform “mutual aid” charity work as our primary basis for interaction.

At best, the insistence on mutual aid is rooted in genuine despair and pessimism. We notice many activists who explicitly or implicitly believe that revolutionary change is impossible, and thus the best course of action is to simply help as many struggling people as possible through means of charity. At worst, their apprehensions are rooted in the failure to recognize oppressed people as full political subjects, not just charity cases or helpless victims of capitalism. Similar to the narrow economism of many first-world socialists in their labor strategies, the insistence on “mutual aid” charity work reflects the naive and paternalistic belief that people will only mobilize for their immediate and personal needs, as if people cannot comprehend the totality of politics and must be strung along with free food and reformist “wins.” With our mission to build true political power alongside people rather than above or separate from them, we reject these organizational logics. This does not mean that we avoid charity dogmatically, but rather that it must be implemented carefully after a period of social investigation and relationship-building. When we hosted our blanket drive in the fall of 2024, homeless community members stood at the table besides us, and they didn’t introduce us to their friends as the “free blanket people,” but rather “these are the kids who want to help us fight the police.”

Some comrades have challenged our insistence on placing anti-imperialism at the forefront of our work, claiming that “homeless people” or “poor people” “won’t give a fuck about Palestine since they’re too busy trying to survive.” However, we’ve found the exact opposite to be true. Far from alienating the masses, our decision to boldly and unapologetically place anti-imperialism at the front of our interactions has led to a political character that could not be replicated if we were to only focus on people’s immediate needs. Oftentimes, people are actually more enthusiastic about supporting Palestine than local, immediate struggles. In one situation, a homeless woman who had never heard about Tel Aviv University sat down with us at Popeyes after asking for money, and when we explained the HELIX Hub situation, she left the conversation declaring, “We need to get these terrorists out of the city.”

To believe that people are incapable or unwilling to engage with the full political content of the world, that they can only respond to charity or appeals to identity, precludes any sort of meaningful unity and joint struggle. Regardless of common class or ethnic background, the vast majority of people are enthusiastic to talk to us when we clearly articulate our ideas and demonstrate our commitment to what we stand for (e.g. “I want to fight back even if it means getting arrested” “I will do anything to stop this”). People often comment positively about our group’s diversity and youth character. We often explain that we are not a nonprofit, that we do not make any money from our organization, and that we are not working for any politicians. Most of all, it is the political content that we are able to project and demonstrate — in our conversations, our pamphlets, and our speeches — politics that we can only gain by going to the people and speaking with them day after day, week after week, which ultimately builds trust, unity, and community support.

Scope

Part of our pre-organizational discussions included intense debate and decision-making about the proper scope for NJ B.U.R.N. to adopt. Though we had our sights set on the HELIX Hub, we decided that limiting ourselves to a single-issue advocacy group would be a dead-end for our goals, given that we wanted to engage in the totality of politics, rather than be beholden to a single-issue base. Furthermore, while we sought to conduct social investigation and understand the concrete situation in New Brunswick, we also wanted to prevent descending into hyper-localism. We ultimately decided that a New Jersey-wide scope would allow us to gain a sufficiently big-picture and understand how regional particularities affect different sites of organization, while not artificially extending beyond the places that we are familiar with (it is possible to drive anywhere in the state in under 3 hours, and we are able to physically travel wherever we may need to). In our first year, we conducted outings in New Brunswick, Franklin Township (at The Arbors apartment complex), Perth Amboy, Bordentown, Hamilton, Trenton, Florence (outside the Amazon warehouse during the Fall 2024 strike), Atlantic City, Elizabeth, Paterson, Asbury Park, and upper Hudson County (West New York, Union City, Guttenberg, North Bergen). Out of these locations, we’ve pursued full organizational efforts in New Brunswick, Atlantic City, Hudson County, and Trenton (under the leadership of our sister organization, Trenton M.A.K.E.S).

Summation

8/6 campus action at Rutgers New Student Orientation

In our first organizational endeavor, we supported a handful of individuals in a 4-minute disruption of the Rutgers-New Brunswick New Student Orientation, where incoming freshmen were being forced to sit through a mandatory anti-protest training as a repressive reaction to the Spring 2024 Gaza Solidarity Encampments. In response to the disruption, Rutgers University launched a police investigation and claimed through a school-wide email blast that the protestors engaged in “abhorrent” “anti-Semitic chanting,” despite the only chants being “Power to the people!” “Power to the students!” “If we don’t get no justice, they don’t get no peace!”

Notably, the anti-protest training was canceled the very next day after the disruption, and we uphold this as an example of a low-risk action that nevertheless succeeded because it was combative and directly confrontational.

By distributing 200 flyers during the 4-minute disruption and promoting the action on social media, 8/6 doubled as a recruitment event, and we immediately received interest from individuals aligned with our mission and culture.

Initial outings in New Brunswick: New Jersey Transit Police and the Northeast Corridor Thesis

When we began conducting neighborhood outings in New Brunswick, we focused heavily on the New Brunswick Train Station, which is across the street from the HELIX Hub Tel Aviv Satellite Campus construction site. The train station is one of the only spots in the city where homeless individuals are “allowed” to sleep (albeit outside the station). People caught sleeping in the downtown commercial areas are ordered by private security to move to the train station or a church, or else be subject to arrest. The train station is also a popular gathering spot for New Brunswick locals and longtime residents.

Our work at the train station proved the necessity of conducting social investigation as the first step, rather than imposing a pre-determined political campaign. When we asked people about police brutality, most people had little to say about the local New Brunswick Police, instead calling out the New Jersey Transit Police for their reputation of unpredictable violence and frequent harassment. Some of the stories we’ve heard or witnessed include:

• Kneeling on a homeless woman’s neck during an arrest, resulting in her hospitalization. She was given a list of 21 charges, including the felony charge of “inciting a riot.”

• Tackling a man to the ground and knocking his teeth out while he was trying to help an unconscious person on the sidewalk.

• A homeless man was charged with “soliciting” and subsequently imprisoned because he was opening the doors for people walking in and out of the station.

• A man was jailed for weeks for defending his daughter against a sexual predator at the train station (while the Transit cops stood by and did nothing).

• When the Transit Police arrive (unannounced) to conduct sweeps, people have their clothes, medical supplies, birth certificates, credit cards, and personal documents thrown away. When NJ B.U.R.N. members challenged them about throwing homeless people’s clothes away, a Transit officer replied that “they were dirty,” and that if they were clean, he would have turned them into Lost & Found.

• People have received fines for falling asleep inside the station, even if they are waiting for a train, just because they “look” homeless.

While facing constant abuse from the New Jersey Transit Police, locals explain how they themselves actually contribute to the functioning of the train station. “We’re the ones who sit on the steps and hold open the doors for people, we give people directions when they’re lost, we tell people how to get to the right platform, we sweep the floors, and when people are in trouble, we’re the ones who step in to help.”

We have also been told that the New Brunswick Police has openly fought with the Transit Police in the past as they disagree over policing methods. While the New Brunswick Police and particularly their community affairs division maintains a veneer of friendliness towards the community, the Transit Police are more outwardly antagonistic. During one of our protests in New Brunswick, the Transit Police requested that they be able to leave Transit property and follow us throughout downtown New Brunswick, and the New Brunswick Police publicly disagreed and prevented them from doing so.

When someone is arrested by the NJ Transit police, they are brought to the holding facility in Newark Penn Station, where people report worse conditions than local and county jails. In some instances, people are transported to a psychiatric facility in Trenton.

Why are the Transit Police so particularly brutal, and what stake do they have in the New Brunswick Train Station? Does this happen in other places in New Jersey? In explaining our findings, we must recognize the Northeast Corridor region as the most popular commuter rail line in all of New Jersey. For the most part, the Northeast Corridor serves New Jersey residents who hold professional jobs in New York City. Many of these jobs are in high-paying industries, like tech, business, and finance, which bring alongside them bigger paychecks than you would receive locally in New Jersey. Landlords, local governments (who are financially dependent on tax revenue), property developers, business owners, and New Jersey Transit itself must secure the Northeast Corridor region and bolster its property value in order to extract revenue from these affluent working professionals, made evident by the new luxury condominiums and upscale developments (eateries, shopping, etc.) being developed in the vicinity around every Northeast Corridor station. The affluent commuters are situated antagonistically to the locals, who either use the train station as shelter (if they’re homeless) or simply as one of the last few public gathering spaces in the city. In fact, we were told explicitly by the Transit Police that we were forbidden from giving out free blankets at the train station “because of the commuters.”

Rather than genuinely serving the public, public transit instead functions as a for-profit service carving out new, multi-sectoral avenues of capital accumulation, generating revenue from those with paychecks to spend on luxury high-rises, fifteen dollar sandwiches, and thirty dollar round-trip train tickets to New York City.

Cop Watch and Defense against the NJ Transit Police: Lessons on reformism and community-demand “economism”

In our work at the New Brunswick Train Station, we saw some success with using our presence to deter police violence. By the fall of 2024, locals would proactively call us over to the train station to help defend against the Transit Police. In the words of one local, “they know they can’t touch a Rutgers student.” In that fall, we held two community speak-outs against the Transit Police at the train station while consistently showing up to challenge sweeps and arrests. After one of our speak-outs, the Transit Police stopped all activity at the New Brunswick Train Station for several weeks (no arrests, no tickets, and no harassment).

Ultimately, in the long run, we “failed” in the sense that over the winter, NJ Transit hired new security personnel and began cracking down to the point where everyone migrated to different spots in New Brunswick, disintegrating the former community at the train station. However, we learned an important lesson in regards to building political power in our communities.

Activists often believe that in order to get people to support your cause, to trust your organization, and to uphold your political leadership, you need to “do” something for them. You must deliver some sort of miniscule reforms or concrete gains from above, and this will convince people to “follow” you. While securing wins is surely an important step in movement building, in our experience, what won over people’s trust and support wasn’t that we were able to stop the Transit Police (in the end, they ultimately overpowered us) — it was that we fought alongside people and involved ourselves in the struggle taking place on-the-ground. In the words of one homeless community member, “other groups come out here and give us free food and leave, but you guys are the only ones who want to fight with us.”

Simply pushing small reforms as a method for building political power is flawed in a similar way as the charity methods we describe in previous sections. People aren’t sheep to be fed and strung along with “small wins.” What’s truly irreplaceable is struggling alongside people and building genuine camaraderie as we fight for dignity and justice together. We discussed this topic extensively in July of 2025 during our public screening of the Troublemakers (1965) documentary, which followed the Newark Community Union Project (NCUP) as they fought for neighborhood demands in Newark. Although NCUP “failed” to achieve their stated reforms, the years they had spent developing relationships and engaging in struggle alongside locals put them in a position to provide political leadership years later during the Newark Rebellion of 1967, where they held decision-making meetings and drafted the list of protest demands.

Tel Aviv Out Of New Brunswick: 12/7 Protest

Set for completion in late 2025, the HELIX Hub is being constructed directly across the street from the New Brunswick Train Station. It will function professionally as a health and life sciences research building with the participation of Rutgers University, Nokia Bell Labs, and major regional hospitals, like Robert Wood Johnson and Hackensack Meridian Health. Additionally, Tel Aviv University will have a presence in the H1 portion of the HELIX Hub. The H3 portion will contain “upscale” dining and shopping along with 220 luxury apartments, contributing to the ongoing gentrification, displacement, and police crackdowns in downtown New Brunswick.

After four months of conducting weekly outings in New Brunswick, two speak-out events, and two winter item supply drives, we organized a protest at the construction site of the HELIX Hub. Based on our social investigation, we drafted six demands for our “Tel Aviv Out of New Brunswick” campaign:

1. Tel Aviv Out Of New Brunswick

2. Abolish the NJ-Israel Commission

3. Fire all abusive NJ Transit Police Officers

4. Homes For All

5. Stop the Sweeps at the New Brunswick Train Station

6. Provide a youth center and programs for kids in New Brunswick

A primary motivating factor for our decision to host the protest was to demonstrate to the broader community that we were willing to take action. After our fall speak-outs, the main feedback we received was that people wanted to see us continue to protest, to see that we were truly willing to be dedicated, combative, and confrontational for our cause. In subsequent neighborhood outings, we have found success in bringing up the 12/7 protest to demonstrate our group’s activity and character, and some community members continue to recognize us from the protest months later.

We also aimed to project our protest culture to other activists and organizers, taking the streets of downtown New Brunswick with the power of 80-100 people. We were able to test the response of law enforcement, observing that the local New Brunswick Police and the New Jersey Transit Police openly disagreed about which agency would be responsible for monitoring our demonstration. Police activity was mostly limited to sitting in their cars and blocking traffic. When one New Brunswick Police car sped around the corner in an attempt to chase down our protest, they crashed their own vehicle.

Atlantic City findings: “It’s a Holocaust for homeless people”

As we received interest from activists and organizers across New Jersey, we have traveled to different locations to conduct preliminary outings and initial surveys, with some of those locations turning into fully-established branches. In Atlantic City, we’ve continued to pursue full organizational efforts.

Compared to New Brunswick, Atlantic City faces greater levels of institutional neglect and abandonment. As both a casino and a beach town, there is less of a traditional “urban renewal” effort, as the city’s revenue stream is largely dependent on attracting masses of tourists (especially during the summer) rather than being a home for high-earning NYC-commuting professionals. Instead of luxury condominiums and professional-class dining options, Atlantic City pours its efforts into large concerts, conventions, and other forms of entertainment. The New Jersey state government receives hundreds of millions of dollars in tax revenue from the casinos of Atlantic City alone.

Many people we’ve spoken to in Atlantic City are former casino, entertainment, or service industry workers who suffered from the job losses and economic impact of Hurricane Sandy, as well as the rise of competing casino towns in Pennsylvania. Many people are also tradespeople (masonry, construction, etc.), who built the million-dollar homes in the neighboring wealthy, white-predominant shore towns, only to find themselves out of work and on the streets in the present day. There are also many people who lost their money at the casinos, and are now stuck in Atlantic City.

Crackdowns on the homeless have been concentrated at the boardwalk. The nearby casinos keep a list of “undesirables,” and swiftly move to kick out any “undesirable” who gets too close to the casino floors. A vast network of security cameras embedded with facial recognition software immediately flags the “undesirables,” prompting a police response. People have received $100 tickets for “loitering” on the boardwalk, increasing to $600 and above if you don’t pay on time, with a jail sentence shortly down the line. One homeless man told us he had collected eighty different $60 tickets for sleeping in public. As the summer of 2025 approached, we learned of a local bounty promising payment in exchange for burning homeless people’s personal belongings. During this time, one of our local contacts told us that everyone he used to know had disappeared into jail cells and prisons, and that all the faces he used to see daily were no longer there. He told us, “right now, it’s a Holocaust for homeless people.”

At the local homeless shelter, the AC Rescue Mission, people find little help. During our outings, we learned that only 1/6th of the beds are occupied due to unlivable conditions. Over the winter of 2024, during a night of sub-zero weather, one man was kicked out of the AC Rescue Mission because his diabetic hypoglycemia was mistaken for drug use. He froze to death while sitting in his wheelchair at a nearby bus stop.

The Jewish Family Services (JFS), which is one of the only social services agencies for homeless people in Atlantic City, is a collaboration between the Atlantic City Police and Stockton University. Their Board of Directors includes President Matthew Simpson, a manager at “Carfax for Police,” a service that offers cars to police to help them “solve crimes.” In 2020, the same year that locals in Atlantic City went on the offensive against the Tangier Outlets, a massive shopping center promoting upscale brands catering to affluent out-of-town tourists, JFS received a $740,576 federal grant from the Department of Justice (DOJ) for Police and Social Worker interaction.

A government agency, called the Casino Reinvestment Development Agency (CRDA), claims to reinvest casino profits into the well-being of the local community, but in reality, they play a major role in carrying out the day-to-day harassment of the homeless population. When NJ B.U.R.N. members confronted the CRDA about what they actually do, they vaguely mentioned “landscaping” and “concert” events. Through our social investigation, we learned that their day-to-day operations consist of conducting sweeps and throwing away people’s belongings in commercial areas of Atlantic City. When trying to remove a panhandler from a high-traffic location, they took the nearby garbage can and chained it to the ground upside-down, forcing the panhandler to move to a less visible part of the city. Many of the “progressive” nonprofits and community groups in Atlantic City are funded by the CRDA.

Given the conditions we see in Atlantic City, revolutionary consciousness is hardly scarce. Some have said “there’s a revolutionary on every block.” Unlike New Brunswick, where many people still hold their allegiance for the United States and especially the Democratic Party, the people in Atlantic City fully understand that neither political party, and no ruling class power is coming to save them. Many people we spoke to in the fall of 2024 refused to back either Trump or Kamala, bringing up how Kamala hypocritically locked up thousands of Black men for marijuana, and how the Democrats pay lip service to morality, “yet they bomb innocent Palestinians.” Furthermore, we’ve observed less racial segregation in the homeless encampments of Atlantic City than New Brunswick. We’ve explored this dynamic further in our 2024 presidential election analysis, concluding that much of the continuing allegiance to the status quo that we see in New Jersey has to do with people’s proximity to the State, particularly the Democratic Party of New Jersey.

Exposing neoliberalism, NGOs, and the Democratic Party

As we’ve explored the web of state and police-aligned nonprofits and abusive social services in Atlantic City, we began to conduct research into the NGOs and other political players in New Brunswick. In particular, we researched the origins and activity of the New Brunswick Development Corporation (DEVCO), which is the tax-exempt, nonprofit real estate development agency behind the HELIX Hub in New Brunswick. They are also leading the university-centric urban development efforts in Atlantic City and Paterson.

In 1967, around the same time as the infamous “long hot summer” rebellions in Newark and Detroit, the Black youth of New Brunswick staged their own uprising. High school students, fed up with the racism they faced from businesses and shopkeepers downtown, organized a march where they looted stores that were particularly notorious for their racial discrimination. Their grievances also included rising unemployment, discrimination in education, and the shutdown of “The Happening,” a Black youth social club.

On the second day of the protest, the New Brunswick Police put the city under lockdown and prevented all movement in and out of the downtown vicinity. As the police taunted the crowd with rifles and shotguns, the adults of New Brunswick came out to support the youth, leading to a tense standoff. The New Brunswick Police were only forced to retreat when one resident threatened armed resistance, saying, “If you don’t get the cops out of here, we are all going to get our guns… If you move those cops out of here, we will leave.” The Democratic mayor of New Brunswick at the time, Patricia Sheehan, opened a dialogue with the protestors, inviting them to speak on the local radio and promising to address their grievances. No subsequent protests ensued.

Following the uprisings of 1967, Democratic President Lyndon B. Johnson created the Kerner Commission to investigate the “long hot summer” protests and establish a blueprint for how to prevent them. In the nationwide report, Patricia Sheehan and her “successful” “peaceful” “de-escalation” of the New Brunswick situation was upheld as a model example of why uprisings happen and how to stop them. Today, we see the same methods of repression still in use by the Democratic Party as they absorb revolutionary energy and redirect it back into the machinery of the state. Despite the peaceful ending to the 1967 New Brunswick protests, racial discrimination continues to plague housing and education in the city, there is still no youth center, and the police in downtown New Brunswick become more violent and repressive each day.

Around the time of these protests in New Brunswick, deindustrialization and white flight took hold of the city. As New Brunswick experienced rapid property devaluation, Johnson & Johnson, whose headquarters are located in New Brunswick, considered relocation. In order to protect their assets as a landowner (and for the city to inflate its property value and therefore secure its tax revenue), DEVCO was created to “revitalize” the city. In fact, DEVCO was founded by a former Johnson & Johnson executive, Richard B. Sellars, whose first major project was the Hyatt Regency Hotel. During the construction of the Hyatt, an entire Puerto-Rican and Dominican neighborhood was razed to the ground, destroying extended families, disrupting immigrant aid networks, and forcing people to move to isolated suburbs outside of New Brunswick. A similar government-led effort demolished the Memorial Homes housing project, with many of the displaced families being promised relocation, but never receiving it. Many of those original residents have been pushed to the surrounding suburbs of East Brunswick or Somerset/Franklin Township, or ended up homeless. During the demolition of the Memorial Homes housing project, white Rutgers students cheered from the rooftops in celebration of a “safer” city.

Today, DEVCO serves a number of economic interests beyond Johnson & Johnson (whose role in DEVCO has minimized since the 1990s), as the tax-exempt nonprofit is now funded by a diverse portfolio of government grants, tax credit and bond programs, private investors (such as apartment building companies), and Rutgers University. They have built a number of new luxury apartments, the Hillel House at Rutgers, and the cancer research center in New Brunswick.

At the same time that DEVCO was founded to manage the physical redevelopment of New Brunswick, another agency, New Brunswick Tomorrow, was created to manage the public image of DEVCO’s real estate development projects. New Brunswick Tomorrow sells itself as a “social revitalization” nonprofit that surveys the community to ensure that they have a “voice” in New Brunswick’s urban renewal, yet their core agenda remains tied to the promotion of DEVCO. New Brunswick Tomorrow even spearheaded protests against the 5.5% allowable rent increase in 2023, while their partners in DEVCO are responsible for the rising rents in the first place. Nonprofit workers from the same sphere of influence have in recent years hosted punk shows and progressively-veiled events, attracting radical youth who don’t know any better. CoLAB Arts, a nonprofit group, now organizes the majority of DIY shows and art events, replacing the underground music scene that once thrived in New Brunswick prior to the COVID pandemic of 2020. On their website, they have published interviews with Mayor Patricia Sheehan upholding her repression of the 1967 protests, and Harris-Walz advertisements were a common sight at coLAB Arts “punk” shows in the fall of 2024. Uncovering these structures of repression, co-optation, and social control has led us to heighten the importance of fighting the Democratic establishment in our region, and in the words of one sympathetic DEVCO worker, “going up against DEVCO is equivalent to fighting the Democrats.”

The Delaney Hall Prison Uprising and our fight against ICE

In June of 2025, we were informed of a spontaneous mobilization at Delaney Hall, an ICE detention center in Newark, NJ. Delaney Hall is the largest immigrant prison on the East Coast, and it is operated by the private corporation, GEO Group. Due to the conditions inside, including starvation, the use of tear gas, and unsafe structural conditions, people had begun to riot and even escape from the facility. Both family members of detainees and New Jersey immigrant solidarity activists mobilized to the gates of Delaney Hall in what would turn out to be a standoff against ICE and GEO Group.

Protestors sustained concussions, were left bleeding on the ground from large gashes, and suffered injuries from batons and tasers. Our pamphlet about the Delaney Hall protests is available freely for PDF download. Currently, NJ B.U.R.N. researchers are working to further explore the structure and functioning of ICE and the GEO Group in New Jersey.

Preliminary outings in Paterson, Somerset/Franklin, Bridgeton, Perth Amboy, Elizabeth, Asbury Park, Trenton, and Hudson County

In the weeks after Delaney, we launched an effort to publicize the events at Delaney Hall, particularly at our newly formed branch in Hudson County, New Jersey. Proportionally-speaking, Hudson County has nearly double the immigrant population of New Jersey as a whole, and with ICE activity on the rise, we learned that even children were staying home from school in fear of being kidnapped and detained.

We have also begun to conduct regular outings in Trenton under the leadership of our sister organization, Trenton M.A.K.E.S. As the state capital of New Jersey, much of the city’s resources are directed to government workers, leaving the broader community neglected.

Throughout our first year, we conducted preliminary outings in a number of miscellaneous locations, learning about the Florio family’s monopoly on real estate in Paterson, the unique role of industry in Elizabeth, the displacement of minority groups in Somerset/Franklin Township in order to make way for Rutgers students, institutional neglect and police harassment in Bridgeton, and the gentrification of Asbury Park. We are currently seeking more volunteers to help us pursue full organizational efforts in these locations.

Current objectives

“We are committed to building sustained political struggle, developing a revolutionary theoretical understanding of the New Jersey region, and serving as practical training grounds for activists in our state.”

In the next year, we aim to expand into other key regions of New Jersey, including (but not limited to): Camden County, Jersey Shore, and Morris/Sussex Counties. If you are interested in starting a branch of NJ B.U.R.N. in your region, or forming your own organization in partnership with NJ B.U.R.N, reach out to us at nj.burn@proton.me.

As we’ve gained our footing organizationally, we are looking to engage in further intellectual work that is in line with our goal of developing our theoretical understanding of New Jersey. This upcoming year, we hope to publish more summations, reports, articles, and analyses, both in print and digitally. We’ve been able to gather written submissions from our contacts in New Jersey as they write about police brutality, racial discrimination, housing struggles and more. Our members are working to develop further analyses of the regions we investigate, informed by our weekly neighborhood outings.

As an organization, we aim to build comrades up into effective organizers and give them opportunities for practical experience and growth. We hope that those who join NJ B.U.R.N. take their experience to any site of struggle, whether in New Jersey, within NJ B.U.R.N, or beyond. People often comment that participating in our neighborhood outings is unlike anything they’ve experienced before, and that they would like to bring our methods back to their own organization, or start a branch of NJ B.U.R.N. in their own city.

Most importantly, we hope to continue organizing sustained political struggle in our neighborhoods. We firmly believe that in order to be in a position to lead, organize, and politicize mass movements, we must spend years sinking roots and building connections within the communities we wish to serve — but more than that, we must fight, struggle, and take risks alongside them. This process takes years, and there are multiple benchmarks that we use to measure our progress. Do people know who we are? Do they recognize us and understand what we’re about? How often do we get calls and texts from people that we’ve met on the street? Are we building true unity and political power, and how do we wield it successfully as full political subjects and the makers of history?

To connect with our members, reach out to us at nj.burn@proton.me or on Instagram at @nj.burn.