Public Comment: Local Resolutions on ICE Are Not Enough
End Israel's Apartheid Occupation of Palestine protest, London, England, October 2023. Photo: Alisdare Hickson c/o Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)
The following public comment was submitted for the Amherst Town Council meeting of February 23, 2026.
My name is Ahmad Esfahani and I live in Greenfield. I am a former employee of the Town of Amherst.
My educational background includes a Master’s Degree in Criminal Justice from Georgia State University. My supervising professor, Robert Friedmann, was for many years the director of the Georgia International Law Enforcement Exchange. This program, which is still in existence, exchanges high-ranking law enforcement officers from the state of Georgia with their counterparts in Israel. Quite simply, this program, and others like it, trains American law enforcement officers in how to police within a system of Apartheid. Coincidentally, the tactics they have brought back mirror those this council previously condemned in its 2024 resolution concerning Palestine.
In 2023 we marched 25 Miles for Palestine, and nothing changed. For three years, various local and educational groups have urged for peace, yet now it looks like Netanyahu and Trump are on the brink of having exactly what they wanted: open real estate with no restrictions and no resistance. Now, ironically, the protesting, activism, and “resistance” which this community so values is facing a real test; and given my experience in working both in and for this town, I have no confidence that there will be anything other than empty words which ultimately lead to closed mouths.
Though the resolution before the council is well-intentioned, the fact is that, through statutes like the Homeland Security Act and emergency frameworks such as the Stafford Act, the President has the power to unify and coordinate all levels of law enforcement. Simply put, no town can legally declare itself off-limits to ICE: federal law overrides local resistance.
There exists another option, but it would require serious courage and dedicated follow-through. This option would be the creation of a People’s Council which is outside the umbrella of the town, the commonwealth, and the federal government. If the people have options, they will consider them, and right now there is no option except to accept whatever the US government decides to do. If this is truly “stolen land”, and if we are all just inheritors of racists and imperialists, then why not actually do something about it? In a word, I am calling for Revolution. Revolution. Revolution.
Ahmad Esfahani is a resident of Greenfield