ICE is on the front pages again after the agency’s killings of Keith Porter Jr, Renee Nicole Good, Silverio Villegas González, and Alex Pretti. This follows the deaths of over 30 people in ICE custody in the last year alone, including Geraldo Lunas Campos — whose murder was initially hidden by DHS until it was ruled he was choked just days ago. We are devastated by the number of records vanishing around those abducted, leaving no trace of where they are or even if they are alive. In one Florida detention center alone, up to 1,200 people have no tracking record at all, what human rights groups now call “enforced disappearances."
Also on the front pages are our formidable neighborhood-powered movements, with Minneapolis being the latest to show us the way. People of every background surrounding the schools, hospitals, workplaces, and homes of those ICE preys on. People who are changing local school board policies and workplace practices to protect kids and colleagues. People who are grocery shopping and picking up school children for the families ICE targets. People who are blowing whistles like shofars to sound the alarm of danger, and canvasing their neighborhoods to ensure everyone knows their legal rights.
As our communities refuse to comply with the authoritarian horror we face, we must continue to show up for each other in our neighborhoods and in the halls of power.
Democrats in Congress must act as boldly as the constituents they say they represent by halting funding for ICE until the violence, abuses, and deaths in American communities and immigration detention centers cease. Democrats in Congress must hold the line to secure meaningful restrictions on ICE’s ability to engage in racial profiling, warrantless arrests and raids on sensitive locations like houses of worship and schools. And there must be a full investigation into the recent deaths at the hands of ICE.
“As pardoned insurrectionists, Proud Boys, and neo-Nazis seamlessly transition to wearing ICE uniforms, receiving paychecks stolen from our kitchen tables so they can declare war on our children, our elders, and our neighbors who are simply trying to go to work, Minnesotans are showing us the way. Minnesotans are showing us — every day, in big and small ways — that hope, which is another word for faith, is fueled by action.” (full remarks)
These words are from Bend The Arc: Jewish Action’s CEO, Jamie Beran, who recently travelled to Minnesota as part of a delegation of rabbis and Jewish leaders. Yesterday, Beran spoke at a national interfaith gathering joined online by more than 8,000 people, where she addressed the Trump regime’s plan to make us freeze with overwhelm, with a reminder of why we are powerful. (full remarks)
“Jewish tradition shares a lot with the American racial and immigrant justice movements we belong to today. Our national movements are from our nation’s people – and our nation’s people -- those who were forced here, those whose lineages were erased from here, those who had to flee oppression overseas, and those whose identities have deemed them outsiders since birth, have one particular thing in common. We are the people who they could not make go away.”