Dear friends,
As we fight for immigrant justice and empowerment during a brutal mass deportation campaign, there is something new we may need to fight against: the ‘normalization’ of all that’s happening. Outrage can turn to weary avoidance of the news. Collective action can start to weaken. Motivation can diminish. With profound respect for the continued struggle on many fronts, we also want to name the threat of normalization that can creep into our lives, especially for US citizens not directly endangered by anti-immigrant state violence.
This newsletter highlights the relentless commitment of Win Rozario’s family and community advocates in the face of the NYPD quietly retiring and immunizing one of the cops charged with excessive force in Win’s murder. We stand with the thousands in the streets on October 9, the day after ICE shot Oscar Belgal in the Bronx, calling for Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch to be fired. And we offer a review of the just-published memoir of Mahmoud Khalil, who spent over 100 days in an ICE cage in Louisiana and now continues to fight for justice as the Trump regime still threatens to deport him.
Newsletter highlights:
- Justice for Win Rozario? The Injustice Continues
- Mahmoud Khalil’s memoir of ICE detention
Notan Eva Costa, Win Rozario’s mother (Diversity Plaza, 4/1/26)
1. Years Later, Win Rozario Shooting Still Roils NYC
“We are 10 months into a new administration that purported to be different from the administration that came before…I want to hear answers of why this person was allowed to retire and no one knew, and when the hell the trial will begin for the officer who’s still here.” —Public Advocate Jumaane Williams, (October 8, 2026)
Almost three years after 19-year-old Bangladeshi immigrant Win Rozario was gunned down by cops in his Queens kitchen, his death continues to reverberate within city politics. As we previously reported, NYC’s Civilian Complaint Review Board (CCRB) ruled in September 2025 that NYPD Officers Matthew Cianfrocco and Salvatore Alongi used excessive force and abused their authority during the deadly shooting. Despite extended delays, the Rozario family and their supporters, including local immigrant justice group Desis Rising Up and Moving (DRUM), have continued to demand accountability from the two cops and city officials.
Now it’s been revealed that the NYPD—violating its own policies—allowed Alongi to take a disability retirement this May, receiving a lucrative pension and evading the disciplinary trial previously ordered by Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch. The Department also delayed notifying state agencies that Alongi was retiring under a threat of disciplinary action, notification required by law. This left the door open for the disgraced cop to potentially seek employment with a different police department.
At a City Hall press conference on October 8, the Rozario family, supporters and community activists responded with fury to the news. They accused Tisch and Mayor Mamdani of “betrayal.” Win’s mother, Notan Eva Costa asked:
“How is it possible that an officer charged with killing a teenager could file for retirement and actually leave the NYPD with his pension without even being flagged? How is that even legal? Is Jessica Tisch not a mother too? Does she not understand what it means to lose a child?” —Queens Daily Eagle, October 8, 2026
Win’s father, Francis Rozario, charged that the mistake “is not negligence. I feel it’s a deliberate cover-up and corruption at the highest levels of the NYPD.” Utsho Rozario, Win’s brother, added: “Our family’s tax dollars are paying for a pension for a man who killed my brother. Do you understand what that feels like?”
About an hour after the October 8 press conference, Tisch publicly apologized for the violation of NYPD policy. Ignoring the department’s long history and documented pattern of disciplinary impunity, she characterized it as “human error.”
Mayor Mamdani’s election campaign prominently featured pledges to end the practice of police responding to mental health crises, a change which has not yet occurred. Instead, four days after the Rozarios’ press conference, City Hall announced a series of measures intended to increase police accountability. Among these is a comprehensive review of police use-of-force practices, an additional $2.6 million to fund the NYPD’s Office of the Inspector General, and a pledge of greater transparency when cops kill or seriously injure a resident. The accompanying statement from the mayor’s office declared, “When the government uses force against a New Yorker, the standard for accountability must be at its highest. Every New Yorker deserves to know that force will be used lawfully, carefully and only when necessary.”
The administration’s announcement occurred at a time of widespread anger at the NYPD for its violence against protesters following the recent ICE shooting of Oscar Belgal in Marble Hill. But reports by CBS and other news outlets make it clear that the new policies had already been in the works, and were drafted mainly in response to the Win Rozario scandal.
City Hall’s reform measures have provoked a range of reactions. Patrick Hendry, president of the police officers’ union, claimed that “The mayor’s radical base wants a wholesale dismantling of the NYPD, and it’s clear this announcement is an attempt to appease them.” On the other hand, the Justice Committee, while endorsing the mayor’s new policies, argued that he didn’t go far enough. “Previously, administrations tried to require the NYPD to review and adjust its own policies, and it has never worked.”
WHAT CAN WE DO?
- Make a donation to the Justice Committee or to DRUM to help them support the Rozario family.
2. The Cruelty Is Not Incidental: Mahmoud Khalil’s Story
Mahmoud Khalil’s recently published memoir No Land to Stand On: Notes from Detention, is a disturbingly professional recounting of the 104 days he spent in ICE detention in the spring of 2025. As a permanent resident, married to a US citizen, a recent graduate of Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs, he never expected the US government would treat him just like the Assad regime had when he grew up Palestinian in Syria, with forced disappearance and arbitrary detention. When he was a teenager, the Mukhabarat (secret police) disappeared his aunt for three months. When he was an expectant father living in New York, standing next to his pregnant wife, ICE took him. His transgression: being a Palestinian spokesperson for the student mobilization calling for Columbia’s divestment from the US-Israeli war machine.
By reading Khalil’s narrative, people can start to understand the inhumanity of existing inside a private ICE detention camp. His writing helps you imagine yourself in his situation. You are taken into custody and, because you have not done anything illegal and you have so much faith in the legal system, you believe this will not last long. When they ask you to remove your shoelaces, you decide to remove your shoes entirely, thinking you will put them back on when you go home soon. But soon you are walking in cheap blue canvas shoes from New York to New Jersey, and while shackled on a flight to Louisiana. You wear them in a late-night drive to a parking lot from which you are transferred and taken to a remote detention center outside a town you do not know. Far away from anyone who knows you, cares for you, or can help you.
You learn the shoes are blue because they color-code the uniforms of detainees. You feel fortunate to hear that blue uniforms represent low risk. You learn that you are allowed to mix with the orange low-medium risk uniforms. You will not interact with the high-medium yellow or high-risk red uniforms. They are separated from you by a fence in the yard. Someone in blue gives you a handbook that explains the rules and the rights of detainees. He warns you that none of the rules are implemented. “The handbook described a facility that did not exist. It was a document written for auditors and lawyers, not for the men who were actually held there. These were rights on paper, absent in practice” (p. 59).
You slowly get to know the social norms in a massive dorm where the lights are never turned off. Those who have been there the longest have claimed the corner beds, which allow them to hang two sheets across the bunk to create some privacy. The guards can remove the sheets whenever they choose. You meet Ricardo, who worked in construction and became a foreman after 24 years. He raised two daughters; one works for the federal government. He has a nephew in the US Air Force. He owns a farm with horses. A month later, you learn Ricardo was deported: a judge ruled that he had “No connection to the community” (p. 147).
In addition to constant light, you feel the constant cold of air conditioning stronger than the thin blankets and color-coded clothes. The food lacks color. People roll bread into balls, color them with toothpaste and create prayer beads. The currency for goods exchange is packets of dried noodles. You cannot eat. Friends are made when they can eat your, at best bland, rations. The constant rerunning of ads for fast food chains on the always-on TV screens becomes torturous.
Although you are famous outside, and occasionally seen on the news screens inside, you learn you are just a line on a ledger to make money for the GEO Group detention corporation. Your tiny bed space, rigid clothes, awful food, phones and tablets that are past their prime make communication almost impossible. These are cheap by design to save costs in the ledger. The people are being moved through the system and so will not be around to register complaints that the rules in the handbook are not being followed.
While you have 25 lawyers, and are thankful for hundreds of strangers writing to you in support of your unintended bravery, the one benefit that brings is a congressional visit to see you. For this visit, you can meet people for the first time without a glass visitation wall separator. No need for them to shout into plastic telephones, their mouths constantly touching the plastic that so many other mouths have touched. For this visit, the yards were painted, and the moldy sagging ceiling repaired. Pavements were pressure washed. Grimy windows replaced. Rusty gym equipment was given a coat of paint. Despite your fame and team of lawyers, your request to see your newborn son for the first time as a contact visit is denied: you see him through the glass visitation wall. You cannot hold him.
You find out that Kishor, who is married to a US citizen, is possibly going to make bond. You ask him if he will contact the media outlets and speak out against the conditions inside. Out of fear of retaliation and the possibility of being sent back inside, he says he would not. “Fear was contagious. Everyone was afraid, inside and outside” (p. 115).
“The cruelty was not incidental. It was structural. Every obstacle, every distance, every risk was designed to wear you down, to make you feel so alone that eventually you would sign the papers and leave” (p. 162). When asked by Lopez if he should ask for his undocumented mother to visit him—what would you say? And, if things are this bad for the blue and orange uniforms, what is it like for those people in yellow and red?
Khalil notes that his life in detention was not as bad as it was for Victor Frankl, or Solomon Northup. Even the guards he thinks of as being simply indifferent. They are doing their time inside the one place in town that offers them a low-paid job (they are, after all, just part of the GEO Group’s ledger too). After Matsuye Endo successfully challenged the incarceration of Japanese Americans during WWII, what we were left with is not a legal triumph but the constant reminder that over 120,000 people, two-thirds of them citizens, had been locked away until finally the government was forced to release them (p. 130).
There is, of course, more yet to unfold of Khalil’s personal story: just this week, on October 19, his legal team made a formal request to the Supreme Court to overturn a ruling that could return him to ICE custody, facing the threat of deportation again. There are so many hundreds of thousands of stories that will never be known of the blue, and yellow, and orange, and red uniformed people taken by ICE to benefit the earnings of private prison corporations.
WHAT CAN WE DO?
- Buy Khalil’s book from a local bookstore like McNally Jackson, or Book Culture, or Astoria Bookstore. Or order online through the Jackson Heights-based World’s Borough Bookstore.
- Sign up for the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) weekly newsletter, including up-to-date news on Khalil’s ongoing legal battle.
In solidarity and with collective care,
Jackson Heights Immigrant Solidarity Network (JHISN)
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