Why Are We M.I.A?

You know who’s going to bat for undocumented immigrants in the United States? Catholics are. In Detroit a Catholic group called Strangers No Longer recently organized a march originating at Most Holy Trinity Church in Corktown and ending at ICE headquarters downtown. In Los Angeles, Catholic bishops are speaking out, and loudly, against mass deportation. In Milwaukee, Fr. Javier Bustos of Our Lady Queen of Peace has written over 1000 letters on behalf of his largely Latino congregants. Some Protestant denominations are stepping up too, in Florida, in Philadelphia, in Newark.

And that’s because—HELLO?—rounding hard working, child-raising, tax paying people, many of whom have lived in the United States for decades, separating them from their families, locking them up in shockingly substandard detention facilities, depriving them of access to due process and medical care, and deporting them–often to crowded, hot, unsanitary prisons–is insanely cruel.

Of course, we in America, and despite our lofty ideals (and magnificent Constitution and Bill of Rights) are no strangers to cruelty.

For example, we pretty much slaughtered the people who lived on the North American continent until the arrival of Europeans. Then there was the enslavement of Africans at the forced labor camps that went by the name of plantations. The ongoing impoverishment, via law and custom, for many of the descendants of African slaves. The imprisonment of Japanese Americans during the Second World War. And then all the littler terrible stuff like depriving women of the right to own credit cards and depriving gay people of the right to be gay.

So no, we’re hardly perfect. But collectively we’ve done a whole lot of great stuff, too. But one way or another, you’d think that along the way—and educated for decades on a bounty of books, TV shows, and movies about the Holocaust and other mass horrors—we’d have learned a thing or two about the evils of terrorizing and demeaning specific populations.

But guess what? It turns out that the rounding up, processing, imprisoning, and deporting large groups of (mainly) Latino people is a sure way to make a ton of money. The recent budget bill passed in the United States Congress earmarks some $170 billion for immigration- and border enforcement-related funding provisions, including $45 billion for building new immigration detention centers.  Some 90 percent of ICE lock-up facilities are privately owned and operated. That’s a whole heck of a lot of moola being made off  human misery.

It stinks to high heaven,

Does the United States have the right to control its own borders? Can undocumented immigrants pose societal problems? In both cases, the answer is yes. But I am no policy wonk, let alone an expert on immigration. What I am is an expert on is my own life, which includes a sense of sheer moral outrage instilled by my Jewish parents who taught me Jewish ethical values.

It’s no coincidence that Emma Lazarus, whose famous poem “The New Colossus” (give me your tired, your poor/your huddled masses yearning to breathe free) is inscribed on a plaque at the base of the Statue of Liberty was not only a Jew, but an immigrant.

But now? A mere 80 years since the liberation of Auschwitz, why are we Jews not screaming our heads off?  This is not to say that there haven’t been protests, letters signed, declarations declared, and marches organized. Many, many rabbis and congregations have taken up the cause of immigrant rights. But collectively? As one voice? From the American Jewish Committee to JTS, the Orthodox Union to the Union for Reform Judaism, from Chabad to Hadassah? Not so much.

Perhaps the answer lies in part in the fact that some American Jews, believing that Trump’s policies are good for Israel, voted for him, and are thus silent on the cruelty of the government’s deportation policies. Perhaps because we American Jews have become so assimilated, with a full fifty percent of us marrying non-Jews, that we no longer remember the fear of being “the other.” Perhaps because with material and societal comfort comes a sense of safety and satiety, a belief that we’re fully accepted and therefore no longer the target of others’ hatreds and fears. Or that since October 7 we’ve had bigger worries to worry about. Or that the bad old days of being kicked out of one country after the next, or being forced to flee, or burned at the stake, or gassed in the ovens, or murdered in pogroms are behind us, making us largely invulnerable.

Whatever the reasons, we’re Jews, and we should know better.