Hundreds of protestors, led by young Jews associated with Never Again Action and other immigrant advocacy organizations, marched on the Washington, DC headquarters of America’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency on Tuesday.
ICE, first established under the George W. Bush administration but accelerated under the presidencies of Barack Obama and Donald Trump, has been stepping up its aggressive enforcement of restrictive immigration policies against im/migrants and refugees that many have categorized as a form of torture.
The agency has taken criticism for its inhumane practices across the United States, such as the treatment of detainees, unhygienic living spaces, forced separation of children from their parents and a gross violation of basic protections.
A Department of Homeland Security report has itself confirmed the existence of squalid, unsanitary and unsafe conditions for both adults and children in migrant detention centers along the US-Mexico border.
During Tuesday’s protests and subsequent arrests, many activists blocked traffic and chanted “Never again is now!”
IfNotNow activist Yotam Marom, who helped train some of the organizers that started Never Again, posted on Facebook following his arrest at ICE’s DC headquarters.
During yesterday’s action at ICE in DC, the building was shut down for the second half of the day and they sent their folks home early. That’s pretty awesome. It’s not enough, but it’s a start. A few of us were arrested taking over the lobby inside, and that felt important, but I think it’s even more important to note that the biggest impact on the ability of the ICE office to function was made by the thousand people in the street outside, blocking traffic and standing in front of the doors and blocking the entrance to the parking garage. Most of those thousand weren’t professional activists, or experienced direct action people, and none of them were arrested. So next time you’re wondering what you can do, and what your presence might accomplish, remember that a thousand of us standing in a place we’re not allowed to stand is often much more powerful than anything else, that a crowd of a thousand righteous people is often the safest and most empowering place to be, and that we are all able to do that. All we have to do is show up. See you out there. #NeverAgain
Never Again activist Penina Baroff, who participated in shutting down the ICE field office in Atlanta on Monday, told Vision Magazine that “[i]t’s powerful to see the American Jewish community turn up for an oppressed community and put themselves on the line for people who are currently experiencing in America the levels of vitriol and targeting we experienced in Europe.”
“This movement has momentum,” she continued. “And I really hope the momentum moves it beyond minority groups like Jews, POC, and the LGBTQ community who tend to be the majority who show up to justice movements and into mainstream white America, who wouldn’t be risking as much.”
“It’s not abstract and it’s not a choice,” she added. “We must end the concentration camps on the border and the unjust targeting of indigenous Central American migrants who are often fleeing dangerous conditions American foreign policy helped to stoke in the first place.”
Roughly 200 people converged on the sidewalk around Atlanta’s ICE field office on Monday, protesting conditions of migrant detention and calling to close ICE itself.
On June 30, a group of roughly 200 protesters, mostly Jews, blockaded an ICE detention center in Elizabeth, New Jersey. In the week that followed, similar actions sprung up in cities throughout the US, from San Francisco to Philadelphia, decrying the unsanitary conditions in the detention centers along the US–Mexico border.
The protests were partially set off by what some organizers call the “weaponizing of Jewish trauma” after politicians and Jewish establishment organizations condemned Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) for referring to the ICE facilities as “concentration camps.”
Organizers on the Jewish left in America responded with expressions of support for ICE detainees and a series of actions aimed at ICE policies. The actions intentionally utilize language of Holocaust imagery. Protesters have carried signs with messages like “Never again means now.”
The use of Holocaust references has been divisive in the Jewish community, with many feeling that the semantics trivialize what happened to Jews in Europe during the 1930s and 40s. This has caused many Israelis and Diaspora Jewish nationalists to be critical of Never Again.
The hesitation of many Jews to compare the oppression we experienced with the oppressions of other groups is understandable, especially at a time when there are less and less survivors of the Shoah around to tell their stories to future generations. It’s also true that ICE isn’t currently gassing people to death by the tens of thousands on a daily basis. But no one’s actually making that claim. And desensitization to our 75-year-old trauma shouldn’t be our primary concern when people are suffering real injustices today.
The Holocaust carries a particularist Jewish message of “Never Again” but also a similar universal message that calls on us to protect others from the brutality we have faced – even if that brutality doesn’t reach the same depths. Without getting into the “oppression olympics” of whose suffering is worse, the fact of the matter is that we were brutally victimized and barely anyone came to our rescue. Shouldn’t we show up for others as we wished people had shown up for us?
And even beyond our own experiences of oppression, the Jewish people has carried within us through history an inner drive to combat injustice in all its forms. Fighting oppression is actually part of our collective mission.
Never Again Action has held protests in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Houston, Chicago, Atlanta, DC, Philadelphia, New York, Rhode Island and Boston. Hundreds of participants have shown up at many of these rallies, with Boston alone drawing over a thousand. In at least five separate events, dozens of young Jews were arrested for civil disobedience. This isn’t something for Israelis committed to our people’s liberation to criticize, but rather an example of Diaspora Jews deeply expressing their identities in such a way that should make us proud.
