Hundreds of Jewish activists and allies took to the streets in Chicago and surrounded a local ICE office on Monday to demand the closure of President Donald Trump’s detention camps, where immigrants have been forced to endure inhumane conditions and abuse from Border Patrol guards.
“‘Never again’ means close the camps!” demonstrators chanted as they marched down the streets of Chicago.
Rallying outside the Chicago ICE building, protestors hoisted signs that read “There is blood on your hands” and began singing and praying:
https://twitter.com/RabbiBrant/status/1148354416040448000
Demonstrators also shut down the entrances of the Chicago Federal Building, condemning Illinois Democratic Sens. Dick Durbin and Tammy Duckworth for voting for legislation that handed the Trump administration $4.6 billion in border funding without any safeguards for immigrant children.
“We have a simple demand: no more money for roundups, close the camps, shut down ICE,” tweeted the grassroots Jewish advocacy group Never Again Action, which organized the demonstrations.
45 Jews are spread around Chicago's Federal building and blocking the doors to demand that @SenatorDurbin and @SenDuckworth take a stand against racist and violent immigration polices #NeverAgainIsNow #ShutDownICE pic.twitter.com/lL6TsX0Fr5
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Never Again Action
LIVE: Police are moving in as #JewsAgainstICE
and allies have blocked all entrances to the Chicago Federal Building.We’re here to tell @SenDuckworth
and @SenatorDurbin that we will not allow them to keep funding concentration camps! #ShutDownICEWATCH: https://t.co/z3H2NdhJwR pic.twitter.com/5HExNer3ew
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Shutting down the streets of Chicago with prayer, chants, and song #NeverAgainMeansCloseTheCamps
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The action on Monday was part of a growing nationwide campaign by progressive Jewish activists to condemn the Trump administration’s anti-immigrant policies and detention centers, which have been described as concentration camps by lawmakers and scholars.
As Common Dreams reported last week, more than 30 Jewish activists were arrested for blocking the road to a migrant detention center in Elizabeth, New Jersey.
“We have a responsibility as a people whose history included these kinds of atrocities to identify the signs and prevent them from happening,” Alyssa Rubin, a 25-year-old Jewish activist from Boston and one of the lead organizers of Never Again Action, told HuffPost. “If you’ve ever said, ‘Never again,’ or if you’ve ever wondered what you would have done if you were alive during the Holocaust, this is the time.”
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We’ve borne witness to a chaotic first few months in Trump’s presidency.
Over the last months, each executive order has delivered shock and bewilderment — a core part of a strategy to make the right-wing turn feel inevitable and overwhelming. But, as organizer Sandra Avalos implored us to remember in Truthout last November, “Together, we are more powerful than Trump.”
Indeed, the Trump administration is pushing through executive orders, but — as we’ve reported at Truthout — many are in legal limbo and face court challenges from unions and civil rights groups. Efforts to quash anti-racist teaching and DEI programs are stalled by education faculty, staff, and students refusing to comply. And communities across the country are coming together to raise the alarm on ICE raids, inform neighbors of their civil rights, and protect each other in moving shows of solidarity.
It will be a long fight ahead. And as nonprofit movement media, Truthout plans to be there documenting and uplifting resistance.
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