Opinion | Bridge Over Icy Waters

Jews Against ICE!”
That was the main chant at a protest hundreds strong in Washington, DC, organized by progressive Jewish activist groups and clergy. It took place at the headquarters of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which for the past year has been carrying out President Trump’s brutal and bigoted anti-immigrant campaign.

The progressive Jewish mobilization against the oppression of immigrants to the United States is far more than a one-off or occasional cry for justice. It offers a potential vehicle for easing some of the recently acute acrimony—particularly generational acrimony—within American Judaism.

This bitterness, growing out of clashing perspectives about Gaza, the occupation of the West Bank and U.S.-Israeli relations, has divided families, friends, campuses and congregations. It is not a form of intramural resentment that will be easily healed. But recognition of shared revulsion toward Trump’s immigration policies, and a willingness to act on that powerful reaction, opens a door to recovering a sense of shared values and aims.

We have seen the positive possibilities where I live in northern New Jersey. Our friends-and-neighbors activist group, known as Montclair Sundays because we hold a boisterous weekly Sunday afternoon demonstration on a busy suburban corner, is not by any means a Jewish affair. But it’s fair to say that from its inception, in February 2025, as a local organization resisting Trump on a number of fronts, Jews of a certain (older) generation have been disproportionately represented.

As opposition to ICE’s stormtrooper tactics in Minneapolis and elsewhere has mounted, however, our ranks have been augmented by a contingent of teenagers and 20-somethings, many of them Jewish and many of them joining their parents on the protest line. Needless to say, the gray-haired contingent is delighted by this development.

Larger, more formal and more explicitly Jewish activist groups are using the anti-ICE cause as a way of uniting and organizing Jews on the left. Bend the Arc: Jewish Action, for example, sponsors phone banks urging Democratic U.S. senators to refrain from providing more funding to ICE. Center-left and even centrist Jews are also rallying to the anti-ICE cause. The mainstream Jewish Democratic Council, for instance, is helping to organize opposition to further funding of ICE “barring any safeguards on ICE’s actions and investigations.”

One recent addition to the Bend the Arc message is that Trump and his Republican allies are disingenuously using the war on Iran to pressure Democrats to support ICE based on the notion that Iranian terrorism is a threat to homeland security.

This MAGA position represents the height of hypocrisy. It is the Trump administration that has dramatically shifted resources away from counterterrorism investigations to favor the expansion of immigration enforcement. “Trump wants to seize more money from our kitchen tables to fund ICE’s abductions and killings of our neighbors,” according to Bend the Arc. “He wants to sacrifice collective safety to get billions for ICE to enact more violence in our communities.”

(It should go without saying that hiring more ICE thugs will not keep us safer from Iranian terrorists.)

Other groups on the Jewish left also have incorporated anti-ICE themes in their messaging. Jews for Racial and Economic Justice (JFREJ) has married an “ICE Out of New York” campaign to its broader push to “transform New York from a playground for the wealthy few into a real democracy for all of us, free from all forms of racist violence.”

The idea, in part, is to remind Jews, many of whom come from immigrant families, that they share experiences and aspirations with more recent arrivals to the United States. A position statement on the JFREJ website evokes “the persecution and danger that have made many long for home and passport, yearn to leave the wandering behind.”

This was very much the message at the February 11 protest at ICE headquarters. “We are watching ICE commit heinous acts of violence, of terror, and it’s designed to rid this country of the thing that makes us the strongest—which are our immigrant friends and neighbors,” Rabbi Sharon Kleinbaum said when she addressed the crowd that day. Kleinbaum, rabbi emerita of Congregation Beit Simchat Torah in New York City, added: “We know it from history, and we know it from God, what is demanded of us in this moment.”

T’ruah, a rabbinic global human rights group, has worked to hold Trump accountable since his first administration, linking defense of immigrants in the United States to opposition to anti-Palestinian policies in Israel. Named for one of the sounds of the shofar, T’ruah organized protests against Trump’s first-term Muslim ban and the cruel policy of separating children of asylum seekers from their families. In Israel, it has fought expanded annexation of the West Bank and demolition of Palestinian homes.

More recently, T’ruah rabbis joined clergy of other faiths in anti-ICE marches in Minneapolis. “We won’t stand idly by as our neighbors are kidnapped from their homes, schools, workplaces and neighborhoods,” Rabbi Jill Jacobs, the group’s chief executive officer, has written.

That’s a call to action that all American Jews need to hear and heed.

Paul M. Barrett, a former journalist with The Wall Street Journal, is an adjunct professor at the NYU School of Law.