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Hundreds of Jewish Activists Surround ICE Office to Protest Detention Centers

“’Never again’ means close the camps!” demonstrators chanted.

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Hundreds of Jewish Philadelphians, undocumented immigrants and their allies gathered in front of an Immigration and Customs Enforcement office on 8th Street in Philadelphia to protest family separation and migrant jails on July 4, 2019.

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.

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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