Protesters blast migrant treatment
Activists gathered at downtown detention site allege ‘Holocaust’ conditions at border
A Houston rabbi on Sunday afternoon outside a detention center for teenage migrants held up his family’s Haggadah, a text celebrating the Israelites’ escape from Egypt. The copy in his hand was written in both Hebrew and German, because it belonged to his grandfather who was born in Berlin in 1924 and narrowly escaped Nazi Germany in 1939.
“We do not live in Nazi Germany, thank God,” Fixler said. “But I grew up looking up wondering what I would have done and what I would have said if I had been a person living in Berlin in 1934 and 1935 and 1938 and 1939. I grew up looking at this book and wondering, what would I have done?”
Many of the roughly 100 people protesting U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement policies have been asking a similar question.
So after recent revelations about overcrowded and unsanitary conditions at detention facilities along the southern border, they felt compelled to act. A newly organized group called Never Again Is Now — a reference to the post-Holocaust promise that human rights would never again be allowed to deteriorate as they had in Nazi Germany — blockaded the entrances to an ICE detention center on June 30 in Elizabeth, N.J.
Activists in Houston took note.
Two separate groups in Houston began trying to start their own Never Again Is Now chapter before merging their efforts.
“There were just so many parallels we could see between the conditions at the different centers at the border and concentration camps,” said Zach Popkin-Hall, a Jewish organizer at the protest. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, DN.Y., also has equated detention centers along the border with Nazi death camps.
Others have pushed back. “We must never allow the memory of those lost in the Holocaust to be cheapened as a cliché to advance some left-wing political narrative,” said Vice President Mike Pence this summer at a Christians for Israel event. In a recent statement, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum said “recent attempts to analogize the situation on the United States southern border to concentration camps in Europe during the 1930s and 1940s (do) not reflect the position of the Museum.”
The Never Again Is Now protest on Sunday took place in front of the detention center on Emancipation Avenue, one of several operated in Houston by the nonprofit Southwest Key, which has a lucrative contract with the federal government to care for thousands of unaccompanied migrant children.
The Emancipation Avenue facility has become a focal point of controversy because news that the former warehouse would be used to house immigrant children surfaced last summer, when children were being separated from their families as part of President Donald Trump’s “zero tolerance” immigration policy. Now, because families are no longer being separated, most, if not all, children at the facility traveled to America on their own and are waiting to be reunited with their families. In response to previous protests, Southwest Key agreed to keep only 16- and 17-year-olds at the Emancipation Avenue facility instead of younger children.
In a statement Sunday evening, Neil Nowlin, Southwest Key’s vice president of communications, said the Emancipation Avenue facility shelters teens “primarily from Guatemala and Honduras who’ve come to the United States to escape dangerous conditions in their homeland. Across our shelters in the Houston area, youth are reunified with loved ones or sponsors within about six weeks.”
“During the short period of time they are with us, we provide classroom education, recreation and opportunities for arts and crafts, music and entertainment and field trips in a dormitory like setting. Children also have access to legal counsel, religious services and group therapy. We are proud of the service and support our teachers, youth care workers, clinicians and case managers provide these young men and women as we work to create a brighter future for them.”
But news stories about conditions in detention facilities along the southern border, people said, have attracted a new crop of Jewish and non-Jewish activists to local protests.
“It’s brought a mix of people who haven’t been out before,” said Bobbie Cohen, state policy advocate for the National Council of Jewish Women, a human rights nonprofit.
“I think it speaks to how deeply this message is felt,” agreed Rabbi David Segal, who organizes the advocacy work for the Reform denomination of Judaism in Texas.
While Never Again Is Now protests in Elizabeth, Atlanta and Washington, D.C., brought arrests, Houston’s protest unfolded without incident. When people sat down cross-legged in the street in front of the entrance to the facility, police quickly erected a barricade around them, protecting the protesters from traffic by blocking off a lane. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Houston, appeared briefly and walked into the facility without addressing the crowd; her office did not say what brought her to the detention center.
Madeline Caufield, a 17-year-old senior at the Emery/Weiner School, held up a sign with a quote by Holocaust survivor and Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel: “To forget a Holocaust is to kill twice.”
She took issue with politicians like Pence who have said protests comparing detention centers to concentration camps cheapen the memory of the Holocaust. “A lot of right-wing policies are coming from the name of resisting antiSemitism,” she said. “That’s why we have to say: Not in my name!”
Her grandmother, Emalee Foldes, watched approvingly.
“I have three generations here (at the protest),” she said. “We remember the Holocaust. Things started small and they grew. … Every generation has to take the baton.”
Lomi Kriel contributed to this report.