Campaign against US detention centres ‘just getting started’

BEN SALES

Do chant in Yiddish. Do sing Hebrew prayers.

“Defiant, angry, urgent, Jewish,” reads the #NeverAgainIsNow action toolkit, a six-page Google document meant for Jews planning to protest at ICE detention centres.

This is the digital handbook for a protest movement called Never Again Action that was born two weeks ago, and is growing fast. The movement’s first action was to protest at an ICE detention centre in New Jersey, where 36 people were arrested. Two days later, 18 people each were arrested in similar actions in Boston and Washington DC.

At least six actions in total have taken place at ICE facilities across the country, co-sponsored with other groups, according to Sophie Ellman-Golan, an organiser of the New Jersey demonstration. Never Again Action is planning another demonstration in DC on Tuesday as a culmination of this round of protests, though movement leaders say it’s only the first stage of a broader campaign.

“What is happening at the border is an abomination, but I also know that there are children in my own city, in my own community, that have gone to bed over the past three weeks without their parents,” said Amy Fischer, 33, one of the Washington protesters who was arrested.

The demonstrations, which are live-streamed on social media, employ Hebrew songs and Jewish chants. The organisation’s materials suggest saying the mourner’s kaddish for migrant children who have died in United States’ custody.

According to organisers, protestors aim to draw attention to the detention of migrant families and children, close the detention centres, reunite separated families, and ensure protection for undocumented immigrants in the country.

When the group uses the phrase “never again”, and describes the detention centres as “concentration camps”, it’s intentionally alluding to the holocaust. The protesters believe that what’s happening at ICE facilities is an atrocity, and that the Jews’ history of persecution, especially at the hands of the Nazis, compels them to act on behalf of other persecuted groups.

In that way, the group is explicitly taking a side in a debate that has raged ever since Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez called the detention centres concentration camps nearly a month ago. Organisers dispute the claims of Ocasio-Cortez’s critics, who say the comparison to Nazi concentration camps both overstates the situation in ICE facilities, and trivialises the Holocaust.

Never Again Action draws on some of the same cohort of youthful activists who have riled legacy Jewish groups, either because they can be harshly critical of Israel or ally with others who are. But while several establishment Jewish groups condemned Ocasio-Cortez’s use of Holocaust terminology, there has been little public Jewish criticism of the Never Again Action protesters and demonstrations. In the past, Jews across a wide political and religious spectrum have supported immigrant and refugee rights.

Mark Hetfield, the chief executive of Jewish refugee aid organisation HIAS (the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society), said he thought the Holocaust analogy was inappropriate, but the protests were worthy.

“This is something we need to be protesting. These are basically atrocities that the US is committing along the southern border.”

Other Jewish organisations also are working on behalf of the migrants, especially as the Trump administration plans a mass roundup of undocumented immigrants on Sunday. T’ruah, the liberal rabbinic human rights group, runs a network of synagogues that provides or assists with sanctuary for undocumented families, has sent delegations to the border, and has members who have participated in the Never Again Action protests. HIAS has deployed lawyers to provide aid on the southern border, and soon will do so in northern Mexico.

Boston’s Jewish Community Relations Council (JCRC), an umbrella local policy group, has provided bond for 90 detained migrants.