Last night, a corrections officer drove a pickup truck into a row of protestors at the entrance to an ICE detention center in Rhode Island; when those present surrounded the truck and their injured friends, the crowd was sprayed with pepper-spray. If this sort of violence is wielded against unarmed, conscientious objectors gathered peacefully outside, it frightens us to imagine the treatment faced by those detained within the center’s walls.
Our Torah teaches: “When strangers reside with you in your land, you shall not wrong them. The strangers who reside with you shall be to you as your citizens: You shall love the stranger as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt (Lev 19:33-34).” As rabbis, we believe that we must aspire to apply this ethos to immigration policy in this country. We also believe that the right to peacefully protest in this country must be vigilantly guarded.
We came to the Donald W. Wyatt Detention Facility in Central Falls to demonstrate our opposition to the detention and mistreatment of immigrants, refugees, and asylum seekers. We refuse to be silent — and therefore complicit — in the face of human rights abuses or grave threats to civil rights in this country.
This violence was perpetrated just a few days after Tisha B’Av — a sacred day of mourning and fasting in commemoration of Jewish exile, oppression, and forced migration through the ages — on which T’ruah: The Rabbinic Call for Human Rights organized more than 50 similar protests at ICE facilities around the country.
We denounce and call for an investigation into the actions of the employees of this for-profit facility. We will remain steady in our commitment to nonviolent action, even in the face of such callous disregard for the lives and safety of our friends, congregants, students, and neighbors. As those of us present sang many times that evening, “Olam chesed yibaneh: We will build this world from love.”
