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Anti-ICE protesters march across the Longfellow Bridge between Boston and Cambridge, Massachusetts, toward Amazon's Cambridge office after rallying at the New England Holocaust Memorial on September 5, 2019. The protest was planned by Never Again Action, a nationwide group of Jewish activists that formed to protest private companies doing business with ICE. Barry Chin / The Boston Globe via Getty Images

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As Donald Trump’s administration came to power in 2025, immigrant justice groups were immediately tasked with rapidly adapting to the intensification of immigration enforcement. Neighborhoods around the country began self-organizing, creating rapid response networks to prepare for impending Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids. In many of these places, immigration justice organizing was already underway, both by immigrant-led organizations and their allies in fighting the corrosive U.S. immigration system.

It was in this context that the Jewish-led immigration justice organization Never Again Action produced a guide for creating a congregational protective presence , a plan for local organizers to connect with religious communities that face threats both from agents of the state and white vigilantes. The guide built on the group’s underlying organizing model: people with relative forms of privilege, such as citizenship or whiteness, physically blocking and deterring state or racist violence in direct solidarity with those who are the primary target. By acting as witnesses, allowing for real-time communication, and de-escalating situations, they can provide just a small layer of safety to immigrant communities they are partnering with.

In partnership with the Community Safety Campaign, another radical Jewish organization that has created a dynamic guide to community safety outside the police, many Jewish activists and supporters, often with signs reading “Jews Against Deportation,” committed to creating a joint community safety program that extends the kind of self-defense organizing we’ve seen in cities like Chicago, Los Angeles, and Minneapolis . This was yet another new project for a Jewish-led immigration justice project attempting to bring the values and ethos of the Jewish left to support the growing movement to stop ICE’s unprecedented assault on immigrant communities, something that deeply connects with the memory many American Jews have of their own families’ histories.

In 2019, Jewish organizer Serena Adlerstein, working with the immigrant-led organization Movimiento Cosecha, called on Jewish activists to occupy ICE jails. The call went viral , the hashtag #JewsAgainstICE spread, and the organization Never Again Action emerged from the flood of young Jewish organizers getting involved in the fight against Trump’s immigration crackdown. Never Again Action then participated in a series of high-profile campaigns. When ICE made a 2020 announcement that it would create a “citizen” training cohort — widely understood to be a vigilante recruiting program — Never Again Action helped push the #FloodICE campaign , instructing people how to overwhelm the application system with fake applications. The group fought the expansion of the Wyatt Detention Center in Rhode Island, campaigned for a bill in Massachusetts to let undocumented immigrants get driver’s licenses, and pushed then-President Joe Biden on his immigration policy while campaigning against cooperation deals between ICE and police.

Now, nearly seven years since its founding, Never Again Action has continued to create a pathway for people to organize in solidarity with immigrant-led organizations and to build up a national movement with a distinctly local focus. In doing so, it has built a model for training those less directly affected by immigration laws to fight for those who are.

“I was among a Jewish community that really didn’t hold my values,” Shayna Solomon, a staff member at Never Again Action, told me. “When I saw Never Again get started, I thought: This is more what I want my Jewish community to look like .” The organization’s banner was raised at a number of actions across the country in its first year, 2019. Two hundred protesters with Never Again Action and Movimiento Cosecha blocked the entrances of the Elizabeth Detention Center in New Jersey on June 30 of that year, leading to 36 arrests .

Over the July 4 weekend that year, there were actions across the country at immigrant jails and congressional offices, and in August, the traditional Jewish mourning day of Tisha B’Av saw more than 50 Jewish-led ritual protests in cities around the country calling for an end to family separation and the incarceration of immigrants in prison camps. Later that year, 1,000 people marched from Boston’s New England Holocaust Memorial to the Suffolk County House of Corrections to protest ICE detentions in an action organized by the group.

Local Solutions Nationwide

Never Again Action’s work was launched under the first Trump administration, and while Trump’s open hostility to immigrants brought the organization together, the immigration regime the group was up against was entrenched in the government as a whole. With his second term seemingly built on a platform of retribution and mass deportation, there was a consensus that repression of immigrant communities was about to get more severe.

As Trump’s second term began, his administration’s focus on “blue cities” and places with large immigrant communities was met by organizers ready to draw on that same base to fight back. The first major flashpoint was Los Angeles, a city not always known for its public activism but one with deeply connected immigrant neighborhoods that had been preparing for a storm. Organizations like the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights and the Community Self-Defense Coalition, some of which already existed and others that had formed to respond, used rapid response networks, intervention tactics, “know your rights” trainings, and existing community bonds to begin organizing people to resist ICE’s incoming onslaught.

That coalition included a robust Never Again chapter, which organized demonstrations against GEO Group, the private prison company in charge of the ICE jail in Adelanto, California. GEO Group had been on the radar of the national organization, particularly for its partnership with ICE.

In Los Angeles, as is common on the Jewish left, the Never Again chapter tied in the Hebrew calendar to its protests, with Hanukkah-themed demonstrations or even Purim shpiels, a form of bombastic theater based on reenacting the story of the Book of Esther during the holiday of Purim, which use the text in satirical ways to critique the decadence of today’s political leaders.

The Austin, Texas, chapter has its roots back in the movement’s founding in 2019 as Jewish activists joined a demonstration outside the T. Don Hutto Detention Center, building a sukkah in the crowd surrounding the building. A sukkah is a temporary shelter that Jews build during the autumn festival of Sukkot, which helps remind us of the fragile shelters so many of us still live in. Local Never Again member Libby Goldman told me that they were dealing with a situation in Texas not dissimilar to what is happening across the country today. Gov. Greg Abbott launched Operation Lone Star (OLS), a plan to significantly ramp up immigration arrests across the state. OLS has led to tens of thousands of arrests and sometimes resulted in bonds nearing $100,000 per person. Many who were captured under the operation were minors or even U.S. citizens. This Never Again chapter started by responding to OLS, and the policies the chapter initially saw in its home state are now nationwide, which meant the group was ready when the arrests expanded.

At the time, there was not much of an organized Jewish left in the city, so Goldman started organizing Shabbat dinners to talk about OLS, which evolved into monthly political Shabbat meetings. Eventually, a strategic team came together. Now, members are working to shift the narrative on Operation Lone Star and are joining coalitions and acting as a funnel for those who want to get involved. “All these arms of the fight … revolve around people who are mobilized and connected,” said Goldman. “So much of what we’ve been able to do has relied on being in relationship with one another.” One step the group has taken is building a bail fund for those dealing with OLS arrests, for which they regularly fundraise. More recently, the Austin chapter has been campaigning against the law enforcement adoption of automated license plate readers — an encroachment of the surveillance state that has furthered the reach of immigration authorities.

In New York City, Never Again is part of a larger web of the Jewish left, which has a broad and long-standing base across the five boroughs. Specifically, the group is closely involved as a committee in Jews for Racial and Economic Justice and collaborates on housing justice issues.

Because local needs and conditions must drive the local work, Never Again chapters, and even the national organization, are extremely adaptive to the needs of a particular state or city. In Tennessee, Never Again has two chapters working as a part of the Our State, Our Languages coalition to expand the languages used in driver’s license tests. Right now, the tests do not match the diverse population of the state, and not having access to a license opens the door to criminalization. As the coalition has pointed out, the state was violating federal guidance by not providing exams in Arabic, Kurdish, and other languages spoken by residents. By filing a federal civil rights complaint arguing that the Tennessee’s Department of Safety and Homeland Security and its Driver Services division violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by disallowing adequate language support, activists hope to embarrass officials into action.

Right now, the Wisconsin chapter is working with the Free Salah Sarsour campaign, attempting to free the Palestinian-born president of the Islamic Society of Milwaukee who has been in ICE detention since March.

The Jewishness of Solidarity Politics

After the October 7 attacks in 2023 and amid the Israeli military’s genocidal response, Never Again Action began co-sponsoring ceasefire protests around the country and eventually went through a process to clarify the organization’s position on Israel and Palestine. The organization had not focused on questions of Israel or Palestine during its formation in Trump’s first term; it did not see it as essential to its work, and hoped to create a broad front for people horrified by the government’s treatment of immigrants in the United States. But with the U.S.-funded genocide beginning in 2023, and with ICE used to retaliate against Palestinian Americans and immigrant activists, Never Again increasingly became active in the movement to stop the assault on Gaza and the repression against those speaking up about Palestine. Staff and members told me that they see the issues of immigration and Palestinian liberation as directly connected — something that became painfully clear as Trump targeted immigrant student Palestine solidarity activists for arrest and deportation early in his tenure. Palestinian American communities have also seen disproportionate violence over the last several years, both from vigilantes and ICE , so any immigrant solidarity organization is going to have to consider the politics of the U.S.-Israel relationship when building out its vision.

“We also know that the use of Jewish safety to justify deportations is a big thing that is happening right now … we all need to be in it and need voices against it,” said Solomon. This is part of why Never Again took a vocal stance against the deportation of Mahmoud Khalil and other international students who were targeted for their pro-Palestine activism, especially as state officials used accusations of antisemitism to justify the repression.

This gets back to the type of Jewish community that Never Again Action wants to build, and how members hope to reframe those communal bonds away from Zionist politics to focus on the ethical and spiritual tradition that molded Jewish ancestral memory. Jewish life in the diaspora is often at the center of this reorientation, with its roots in the immigration story so many American Jewish families have and its connection to the prophetic Jewish tradition and social movements that have shaped Jewish life since the 19th century. Like so many organizations in the Jewish left, Never Again continues the tradition of employing Jewish ritual as a protest tactic through public seders, mourning processions, and celebrations, all in ways that are religiously authentic and draw on the tradition of Judaism to address the pressing issues of today. All of this makes Judaism real and tactile for those involved, drawing on its moral clarity and values of tikkun olam — world healing — at a time when many wealthy Jewish organizations suggest that the State of Israel is a manifestation of Jewish values in politics.

“People are reconnecting to their Judaism through this moment … some were pushed out of their institutions,” said Solomon, referencing the workers who were fired from Jewish organizations and the congregants who were forced out of their places of worship for their support of Palestine. Never Again Action is part of a Jewish left network helping to create a new home for Jews disappointed with mainstream U.S. Jewish institutions. Because many U.S. Jews come from families touched by fascist violence or who were excluded by antisemitic and racist immigration policies, issues of inclusion are deeply embedded in many Jewish histories.

The Past Informs Our Future

Now, by organizing the congregational solidarity plans, Never Again Action is attempting to build the infrastructure that can put into practice a longstanding principle of the Jewish left: safety through solidarity . Mosques are often attacked by the same far right figures that target synagogues, and as we see increasing violence directed at Muslims and immigrants, we are also seeing growing antisemitism, despite all the rhetoric of Jewish safety used by Republicans and their allies as a pretext for targeting refugees, defunding colleges, and singling out activists.

The guide creates checklists and plans for creating “solidarity presence” as faith institutions, in which people in religious communities show up for other religious communities when they are in need of security. Because so many ICE defenders are doing congregational presence to watch for ICE and to, hopefully, create a safe space for worshipers, this became the perfect opportunity for groups like Never Again Action to help put the “safety through solidarity” ethos into action. Now that the guide is available, organizers hope that it will grow as a tool both inside of Never Again chapters and within the immigration justice groups Never Again typically partners with.

Recently, Never Again leaders gathered in Philadelphia for the Derekh Tzedek (“Path of Justice”) strategy process to help establish a campaign for the rest of the current administration. That development is member-driven and has continued for several months with a hope of ratifying that strategy by the High Holidays (in the fall).

Never Again Action has successfully bridged different worlds of organizing to bring Jewish experiences and communities back into the fight for immigration justice, building on members’ own familial histories of displacement and border violence. This work can become one model for the fight against rising fascism, where solidarity is not simply an act of charity but a commitment to mutual prosperity with the knowledge that, ultimately, we will all be targets of the state’s racial violence.

“We are guided by Jewish principles and Jewish histories, and among those values are intersectionality. So it wouldn’t make sense for us to be exclusive, because a lot of this is bridge building work,” Never Again organizer Jules Aviv Rose told me. “Solidarity could not function if we were exclusive to Jewish people.”

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