Nov 12 2025, FBI Complex Black Alliance for Peace Joins the Call to Protect NJ from NSPM7 Harms: “Empty platitudes about threats to democracy will not do”
JT of Black Alliance for Peace sets the tone – “we are not looking for empty platitudes, we are demanding concrete protections from repressive harms.” Read and view his testimony:
My name is JT.
I am a member of the Black Alliance for Peace. I am also a member of an organization called Community Movement Builders, the Newark chapter. And uh the Black Alliance for Peace seeks to recapture and redevelop the anti-war, anti-imperialist, and pro peace positions of the radical black movement.
Community Movement Builders is a member-based collective of black people creating sustainable self-determining communities through cooperative economic advancement and collective community organizing. I am here today in solidarity with the No Complicity New Jersey Committee’s call for the state and local governments to take concrete steps to combat federal repression.
Empty platitudes about threats to democracy will not do. Vague and empty statements about the threat will not do. Vague and empty promises about the threats facing dissensing voices will not do. It is actually vagueness that brings us here today. Vague and open terms like anti-Americanism, anti- capitalism and anti-Christianity. Vague and open categories like those who support quote unquote extremism on migration, race, and gender. or those who support quote unquote hostility towards uh traditional American views on family, religion, and morality. On top of that, this national security uh presidential memorandum offers a one-sided narrative of a vague amorphous term like political violence.
It leaves out the overt self-proclaimed white supremacist mass murderers of Charleston churchgoers and Buffalo supermarket shoppers. It leaves out the cold-blooded murder of two Minnesota state lawmakers. And it is this vagueness that the Trump administration and the previous one has and will continue to exploit to advance its agenda. An agenda that has not been nor will be contained to the United States through vague undefined terms like criminal, terrorist, or gangster.
This administration has continued to take the lead in now in the now decades long violent militarized meddling and intervention into Haitian affairs through vague undefined terms like criminal terrorist and gangster. The current administration has led a murderous bombing campaign that has killed dozens of people throughout the Caribbean.
Right. It is these vague open categories that now leave dissenting and people-entered voices and organizations open to prosecution, persecution and assault without due process or even a shred of evidence.
Right? This presidential memorandum states memorandum states quote the United States requires a national strategy to investigate and disrupt networks, entities and organizations that vomit political violence so that the law so that law enforcement can intervene in criminal conspiracies before they result in violent political acts. Before they result in violent political acts.
This means that those who stand up and say, “We believe that our community should have control over what happens in our community, not real estate developers or boards of directors, may be may very well be branded as quote unquote anti- capitalist and investigated and targeted and disrupted.
This means that churches This means that churches who love on and celebrate their undocumented parishioners and trans youth whom they know whom they have known for years may very well be branded as extremists on migration and gender.
And investigated and targeted and disrupted. This means that young men like me who live with a healthy evidence backed suspicion of law enforcement and stand up and say unapologetically that Tamir Rice, Sandra Bland, Michael Brown, Bana Taylor, Alton Sterling, Philando Castile, Carl Dorsy, Drew Washington, and Deborah Terrell should be alive today may very well be branded as opposing quote unquote foundational American principles such such as support for law enforcement and investigated and targeted and and disrupted.
This means that those of us who stand against the training of the public coffers to finance and profit from imperial wars in Palestine, Ukraine, and and now our own hemisphere will continue to be branded as quote unquote anti-American and investigated and targeted and disrupted.
Here’s the thing. As vague as these terms and categories are, the Trump administration has made crystal clear how it plans to leverage them to continue to destroy those who stand up to a ruling class imperialist agenda. And let’s keep this real. As as my sister and comrade Lisa Davis just said, those who are black and African and stand up for poor and working-class black communities and the oppressed will continue to be at the top of that list.
What is unclear is what the state of New Jersey and the city of Newark plan to do about these threats.
Will you move past vague empty platitudes and sound bites about how Trump is destroying democracy? Will you step up to protect those who oppose this ruling class agenda? Or will you leave us to the hungry wolves?
The people inside Delaney Hall and their families want to know.
Right. The family of Deborah Terrell, who is calling for accountability, justice, and transformation, want to know.
The students and faculty who are risking much to speak up for Palestine, Haiti, Venezuela, Colombia, Sudan, and the Congo want to know.
Whatever their answer may be, the Black Alliance for Peace is clear. We call on the people to stand up and to organize here and abroad. People center human rights aren’t the ones that are given to us.
They are the ones that we struggle for and win as a people. The Black Alliance for Peace calls on people, the people, to stand up and to organize to make our Americas a zone of peace. This memorandum is a declaration of war on those who are struggling for people’s centered human rights, especially black and African people. We have seen the outcomes of this war in the past few weeks as nearly 80 terrorists quote unquote have now been murdered. This is why we must fight and this is why we must fight not only for uh not only for peace but people centered human rights so that our Americas can be a zone of peace. Thank you.
Full testimony of all speakers from “November 12 Pubkic Hearing in the Streets Calling for NJ Protecition from Repressive Harms of National Security Presidattial Memorandum 7 (NSPM7)”:
