Religious Leaders Step Up to Resist ICE Violence

SCOTT HARRIS: This is Counterpoint. My name is Scott Harris. We right now welcome to our program, Rabbi Jill Jacobs, CEO of T’ruah: The Rabbinic Call for Human Rights. And the group that Rabbi leads has called for an end to the violence of ICE in Minnesota and everywhere else in our country. And I’m very grateful, Rabbi, that you could make time to speak with myself and our audience tonight. Thanks for being here.

RABBI JILL JACOBS: Thank you so much for having me.

SCOTT HARRIS: First of all, tell our listeners about your group, T’ruah: The Rabbinic Call for Human Rights and the kind of work you do there.

RABBI JILL JACOBS: T’ruah is an organization of more than 2,300 rabbis and cantors across the U.S. Our rabbi and cantor members are in 47 states in the U.S. as well as six provinces in Canada. And we work on human rights both here at home as well as in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories. And as you noted, so much of our work recently and really over the past year has been our rabbis working to defend their neighbors from being kidnapped off the street by ICE.

SCOTT HARRIS: Right. And you had mentioned to me before we went on the air earlier today that your group has activated some of your members in Minnesota in Minneapolis. And there are activist rabbis that are going, plan to go to Minnesota to help in the resistance to what ICE is doing every day in the streets of Minneapolis and the rest of the state. Why don’t you tell us a little bit about your group’s response to the killing of Renee Good, the 37-year-old mother of 3, who was shot down by an ICE agent on Jan. 7?

RABBI JILL JACOBS: Yeah. Well, this incident was obviously very shocking that a woman who was in her car, who was just there to see what was happening to protect her neighbors was just—I think many of us have seen the horrible videos—was shot and killed. And she’s not the only one. There are more than 30 people who have been killed in ICE detention or by ICE officers, as well as people who have been victims of other violence over the last year. So it is very scary and violent. And we’ve seen that ICE is just taking our neighbors off the street without not only people who have any criminal record, often without checking anything about a person, except maybe they hear them speaking another language or maybe they just aren’t white. And so we are in a very scary situation right now. And this is something that rabbis and the Jewish community feel very strongly about.

Many of us remember that our own families are only alive today because we were able to come into the United States during a time when immigration was more possible. And we are also in the Jewish community, we just recently started reading the Book of Exodus in the yearly cycle. And the beginning of the Book of Exodus tells the story of how our ancestors were welcomed into the land of Egypt, were comfortable there, had a comfortable life and all of a sudden there was a change of heart. There was a new leader who decided that this foreign element was scary and decided that instead of welcoming our ancestors, that this Pharaoh was going to oppress them. And so that story is very live for the Jewish community. And so we’re really proud that our rabbis in Minneapolis have been out on the street. They’ve been doing ICE watch, they’ve been donating, they’ve been collecting materials and money to support their neighbors and have been mobilizing their own communities.

There was a very strong letter that came out from the Minnesota Board of Rabbis against the detentions that are happening. And this week, there is a day of action happening on Friday afternoon. There was a call for faith leaders from across the country to come to Minneapolis to join with local Minneapolis clergy. And so we have several dozen rabbis from around the country who are planning to fly to Minneapolis to join their rabbinic and cantorial colleagues in Minneapolis for this day of action. And I also want to mention that besides what’s happening in Minneapolis, we have rabbis in Los Angeles, in Portland, in New York, really all over the country who are out on the streets protesting against ICE, trying to protect their neighbors, who are protesting against companies like Target that are allowing ICE to operate on their premises. And so we really have rabbis who, along with their communities, are active in states all across the country, as well as of course, local Jewish communities and many other communities as well.

RABBI JILL JACOBS: It is a really scary time. We saw that Trump ran his campaign both in this election and also in the past two elections—one that he won, one that he didn’t—on fear of immigrants and on telling people that any problem that anybody might have, economic, social, etc., etc., is all the fault of immigrants. That is a classic fear technique. It’s a classic fear technique that is used by aspiring autocrats and that’s what Trump is doing. He is actively destroying democracy in this country. And unfortunately, we have many examples from across the world of countries that have lost their democracies that have been ruled by dictators, by autocrats. And one of the steps that those leaders often take is to deploy the military against their own citizens. And this is a new step that he’s taking. It’s a very terrifying step and it’s the responsibility of all Americans to notice that this is a new move and to say really clearly that we’re not going to stand for it.

And of course, that’s the responsibility of Congress and for all of us to keep our congressional representatives accountable to push back against all of these moves against democracy.

RABBI JILL JACOBS: Yeah. Something that we’ve learned from countries where there’ve been effective protests against autocracy is that it takes a lot of people. It takes a mass movement. It takes a lot of tactics and that certainly includes general strikes. It includes boycotts of select companies. It includes protests and it means that this isn’t something that we can just protest for a day and everything changes. This is going to take possibly years for us to push back at these anti-democratic moves. And so what we’re seeing in Minnesota is an example of what could happen across the country. And it’s very much the responsibility of citizens to stand up and to say that we are willing and able to take actions that perhaps we haven’t taken before in our lives because this is so important right now. And it’s so important to make sure that Trump doesn’t further destroy our democracy.

RABBI JILL JACOBS: There’s a lot that we can learn. One thing that I want to mention, particularly as I’m a rabbi and I run a rabbinic organization, is that Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, of course, spoke very much as a religious leader. He spoke out of biblical texts and he spoke from a deep moral and religious place. And right now, it’s the responsibility of religious leaders, of religious people to speak up with a clear moral voice, because that is what can cut through the lies and the fear to speak up for what is right, to speak from our tradition. And we also need our religious communities to sustain us at this moment. This is going to be a very long fight and we can’t afford to burn out. We can’t afford to be torn apart. We really need to have strong religious communities and other communities that can sustain all of us.

So that’s one lesson we can learn. The second lesson is that right now, we often will pull out different quotes by Dr. King … and of course, this is Martin Luther King Day is a national holiday, at least for now. I know President Trump is trying to erode that and we make it seem like everybody agreed with the civil rights movement and everybody agreed with Dr. King when he was alive. But we know, of course, that that wasn’t true, that there was a lot of pushback, that it wasn’t a popular movement, that he wasn’t very popular because there is a real resistance often to change. And something that we can learn from the strength of the people who were part of the civil rights movement, even when it wasn’t very popular, is that we have to keep fighting when we know that we are doing the right thing, even if perhaps we’re getting a lot of criticism or people are telling us that it’s too harsh or people are telling us that we shouldn’t be taking action in the way that we’re taking action, that in fact, there is a responsibility to continue to work for what we know is right.

RABBI JILL JACOBS: People have absolutely stepped up. Across America, people have stepped up. Even before we start talking about religious communities, we see what’s happening in Minnesota. We see ordinary people who maybe have never taken action in their lives who are now devoting so much time to protecting their neighbors. And we see that religious communities are speaking up. I’ve spoken about the Jewish community in the way that rabbis both in Minnesota and beyond are speaking up to defend our neighbors. We’ve seen the Catholic church in America come out with a very strong position. We’ve seen other religious communities and denominations come out with strong positions. And this is for religious people. This is very much rooted in our religious traditions. I can only speak out of the Jewish tradition, but I know that every single religious tradition has a lot of texts and teachings that are about human dignity.

And as a rabbi, I can say that the very first thing that we learn about human beings in the Torah is that human beings are created in the image of God, which means both that we have certain responsibilities, just like God has responsibilities toward us and God takes on responsibilities for humanity, and also that human beings deserve to be treated with the kind of respect and dignity that we would afford to God. And so, and every other law about how to construct a society in Judaism is based on this fundamental principle that human beings are created in the image of God. We also have a lot of very specific law about how to treat a gear or a stranger, a sojourner, an immigrant to our communities that because we understand what it was like to be a stranger in the land of Egypt, first welcomed and then later feared and used to create fear for political reasons and ultimately oppressed.

So we understand that experience. And it’s important for religious leaders to speak out of our own experiences and to say, and speak out of our own traditions, and to say that all of our faiths have something to say about what it means to be a moral person in the world. It’s not just about where we might pray or how we might pray, but it’s also about how we act in the world. And religious leaders, including rabbis, but including all kinds of Christian, Muslim, other religious leaders understand this and are teaching those messages to their communities.

RABBI JILL JACOBS: Absolutely.

RABBI JILL JACOBS: Well, Congress has a real responsibility to push back on the ways in which the Trump administration is violating basic laws and to say that we’re not going to stand for ICE to be snatching people from their homes and off the street or for certainly the indication of the Insurrection Act to put armed military personnel in American streets. So we need a strong opposition that it’s going to push back.

And very specifically, something that Congress can do right now is to ensure that the Department of Homeland Security doesn’t get additional funding unless, first of all, doesn’t get additional funding for ICE and doesn’t get any additional funding unless it comes with very strong protections and checks against what ICE is doing right now. And that is something that’s happening right now because DHS’ funding is actually running out at the end of the month. So the appropriations are being actively negotiated and not only the Democrats, but also any Republicans who care about democracy and care about the future of this country and understand that Trump is acting in a way that is not legal need to ensure that DHS doesn’t get additional funding for ICE and to ensure that there’s restrictions on ICE funding, and that is something that Congress can be doing—can and should be doing right now.

And it’s also something that every single American can and should be calling their elected representatives and saying that we want to make sure that ICE doesn’t get additional funding to be able to continue taking away our neighbors.

RABBI JILL JACOBS: Sure. It’s T’ruah.org. I’ll spell that. It’s T as in Thomas, R-U-A-H.org.

RABBI JILL JACOBS: Thank you so much for having me.