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<\/a>Don\u2019t invoke the Holocaust in debate about ICE<\/a><\/strong><\/span><\/span><\/h3>\nJonathan S. Tobin<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n Is it 2020 in America all over again? To some extent, the fatal shooting of Renee Good in Minneapolis by an agent of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) on Jan. 7 has become a rerun of the events that followed the killing of George Floyd by a police officer in the same city on May 25, 2020. While the cases are very different, both tragic deaths almost immediately became fodder for an emotional national argument that transcends or even obscures the particular details of the incidents.<\/span><\/p>\n What happened to Good on a street in Minneapolis has fomented an angry dispute not only about whether the agent who fired on her had a reason to shoot, but also has become a referendum on President Donald Trump\u2019s determination to use ICE to enforce immigration laws. As such, reactions to the incident are a Rorschach test about opinions on not just Trump, but whether the agency\u2019s arrests of illegal immigrants are sound public policy. Inevitably, liberal and left-wing Jewish groups have been weighing in on the controversy in the wake of Good\u2019s death, joining the calls for the abolition of ICE and ending the enforcement of immigration laws.<\/span><\/p>\n This position is a reminder of the demands for defunding the police that were widespread after Floyd\u2019s killing. But while the national reaction to the death of a 37-year-old mother has not reached the same level of hysteria as it did over Floyd, it has provoked a loud and divisive politicized debate. Since last year, pundits, politicians and protesters have used language to describe ICE\u2019s conduct to bolster the argument that the policy being pursued by the government was not just misguided but something far worse.<\/span><\/p>\n The issue of what to do about illegal immigration is one about which reasonable people can differ. The problem is that many on the political left now treat any concern about the issue as illegitimate or proof of racism and xenophobia.<\/span><\/p>\n The massive flood of several million migrants into the United States without permission during the four years of the Biden administration had seemed to shift the discussion on the issue. The harmful impact of what amounted to an invasion of illegals lowered working-class wages, raised housing costs and overwhelmed the social service agencies of many communities. As such, it was a major factor in Trump\u2019s 2024 re-election and caused many Democrats to mute their previous support for amnesty for illegals and\/or support for government benefits for them.<\/span><\/p>\n The spectacle of ICE agents carrying out raids since Trump returned to the White House a year ago, however, has been portrayed in much of the liberal media as not only an abuse of government power but an authoritarian policy aimed at arresting innocent people.<\/span><\/p>\n The agency\u2019s actions are part of an effort to make good on Trump\u2019s promise to deport at least some of what may be as many as 20 million to 30 million people, rather than the 11 million to 14 million figure usually cited in the media (a 2018 Yale University study<\/a> showed that the number then was more than 22 million\u2014a number undoubtedly boosted by the invasion of illegals that happened on President Joe Biden\u2019s watch).<\/span><\/p>\n Democratic politicians like Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz have called<\/a> ICE \u201cTrump\u2019s modern-day Gestapo.\u201d Gov. JB Pritzker of Illinois, who is Jewish and ought to know better, told<\/a> NPR<\/em> last September that due to ICE\u2019s actions, the United States is \u201cessentially\u201d becoming \u201cNazi Germany.\u201d The use of this kind of inflammatory rhetoric has only gotten worse since Good\u2019s death, as, among others, various New York Times <\/em>columnists have called the agency a \u201csecret police,\u201d<\/a> as well as a fascist force whose main intent is to silence<\/a> political dissent against Trump.<\/span><\/p>\n This is being echoed by a collection of leftist Jewish groups not merely to condemn Good\u2019s killing, but to call for the abolition of ICE and a return to Biden\u2019s lawless \u201copen borders\u201d policy. Not coincidentally, some of these same groups, like T\u2019ruah<\/a>, have been in the forefront of those attacking Israel\u2019s efforts to defend itself since the Hamas-led Palestinian Arab attack on Oct. 7, 2023. The Jewish Council on Public Affairs, a coalition of liberal community-relations councils, has not only joined the ranks of those mourning Good but attacked <\/a>ICE for encouraging racism and militarizing communities.<\/span><\/p>\n This is hardly surprising, given the way that liberal Jews and some of their organizations have treated the issue of illegal immigration. Most American Jews, like most Americans, in general, are the descendants of immigrants. Still, the effort to portray the current dilemma as no different from the situation in the early or mid-20th century is both unpersuasive and disrespectful to the past.<\/span><\/p>\n For several years, the use of inappropriate analogies between illegal migrants in the United States and Holocaust victims has become commonplace. Actress Natalie Portman, who portrayed Anne Frank on Broadway as a teenager, compared<\/a> the Holocaust diarist to those seeking to evade American law enforcement. She wasn\u2019t alone. In 2023, Biden also spoke<\/a> of the flood of illegals coming into the country on his watch as akin to the victims of the Shoah.<\/span><\/p>\n Such analogies are both outrageous and divorced from the facts. While conditions in Central America or other nations, whose citizens have sought to cross into the United States without going through the legal process, may not be good, very few of these millions of illegals are in the position Jews were in the Europe of the 1930s and \u201940s, literally fleeing for their lives because they were members of a group marked for death.<\/span><\/p>\n While sympathy for immigrants may be understandable, no matter how they entered, it\u2019s not an issue where order should be tossed aside; that only shows contempt for the rule of law and for Americans harmed by this policy.<\/span><\/p>\n The Reform movement came perilously close to counseling<\/a> its congregations not to cooperate with federal agents if they sought to search synagogues for lawbreakers, while still claiming that they were not giving legal advice. The Conservative movement joined<\/a> in a lawsuit brought by a variety of liberal faith groups that sought to make their institutions the moral equivalent of medieval European cathedrals, where those on the run from the law could claim \u201csanctuary.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n This effort to demonize ICE seems to be rooted in a viewpoint that regards laws against illegal immigration as invalid\u2014in essence, an effort to declare that the United States, alone among the nations, has no right to determine who may or may not enter and under what circumstances. It also reflects a highly selective and hypocritical attitude toward the question of whether it is appropriate to harass or even attack law-enforcement officers when they are carrying out their duties.<\/span><\/p>\n One day before the Minneapolis shooting was the anniversary of the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021. Those events five years ago quickly morphed from a disgraceful incident into one in which Trump acted recklessly, turning it into a political weapon his opponents then tried to employ to discredit all who had voted for him and to brand half of the country as opponents of democracy. Politics aside, Jan. 6 was an example of what happens when activists think that they have the right to ignore or abuse law enforcement.<\/span><\/p>\n The beatings of Capitol Police who attempted to stop the rioters from entering the halls of Congress are frequently cited as a great crime that should not be forgotten. But it\u2019s also important to remember that, misleading news reports notwithstanding, the only person actually killed that day was not one of the policemen but one of the rioters, 35-year-old Air Force veteran Ashli Babbitt.<\/a> A conspiracy theorist, she was in the process of breaking the law by illegally entering the Capitol and deserved to be punished for that.<\/span><\/p>\n Babbitt was unarmed, though, and posed no immediate physical threat to the Capitol Police officer who shot her dead. Had that officer killed a BLM protester under such circumstances, he would probably have been prosecuted and convicted of murder, like Floyd\u2019s killer. Instead, he evaded accountability and was praised for carrying out his duties by the same people now comparing the agent who killed Good to Hitler\u2019s murderers.<\/span><\/p>\n The circumstances of Good\u2019s death are also highly controversial, and the question of whether the ICE agent broke the law has not been clarified by the various videos of the incident that have been released. Even if he was wrong to fire his weapon at her, that doesn\u2019t mean he had no reason to fear for his life. Nor does it obscure the fact that she and others had been actively seeking to prevent ICE agents from obeying lawful orders to arrest illegals.<\/span><\/p>\n That ought not to be interpreted as a license by officers to fire when they should not. That\u2019s true even if the officer in question had previously been the victim of an incident<\/a> in which he was dragged by a felon\u2014seeking to avoid arrest\u2014behind the wheel of a car. Yet the notion that she was merely an innocent bystander or protester who was murdered by Trump\u2019s \u201cGestapo\u201d is to ignore both the facts and the context of the situation. Whatever their motives or intentions, when people impede law enforcement, it\u2019s bound to lead to unfortunate results, no matter what government agents do.<\/span><\/p>\n Just as Floyd\u2019s killing became fodder for a national moral panic about race that was largely unjustified, Good\u2019s death is also being inappropriately employed for political purposes.<\/span><\/p>\n However horrific Floyd\u2019s death was, the incident was seized upon as proof that the unjustified killings of blacks in America by police were a routine event and that the United States was still an irredeemably racist nation more than half a century after the triumph of the civil-rights movement. That was a myth<\/a> rooted in falsehoods. But it didn\u2019t stop many on the political left from using this widespread belief, fueled by media misinformation, as justification for advocacy for defunding the police. It led to a summer of demonstrations that rocked major cities, with millions participating, as well as hundreds of \u201cmostly peaceful\u201d riots that led to the deaths of at least 19 people and as much as $2 billion in damage to property, including federal, state and municipal buildings.<\/span><\/p>\n The response to Good\u2019s death has not been as extreme. But it is also being interpreted as justifying the rhetoric about Trump being a fascist and ICE as his Storm Troopers.<\/span><\/p>\n That, too, is unjustified.<\/span><\/p>\n The images coming from ICE raids may disturb anyone sympathetic to illegal immigrants. But the reason for them is that for decades, under both Democratic and Republican presidents, illegal immigration was allowed to continue, and millions evaded the law with impunity. As with any act of law enforcement, the case of each individual can be argued on its own. Nevertheless, the notion that it is wrong for officials to arrest those who have evaded deportation orders or are flouting the law is simply untenable. It would not be applied to any other form of law-breaking. The reason in this case is that the issue has become a political football for Trump\u2019s opponents.<\/span><\/p>\n Those who say that the efforts of ICE violate Jewish values are misinterpreting those beliefs. Sympathy for the stranger is part of the Jewish tradition. So, too, is the concept of obeying the laws of the nation where Jews reside.<\/span><\/p>\n There is nothing in Judaism or Jewish history that ought to dictate whether the United States should have open borders or that those who enter it illegally should do so with impunity, regardless of the deleterious impact this has on most Americans. Illegal immigration does not harm corporations that rely on it to depress working-class wages. Nor does it bother members of the country\u2019s credentialed elites (Jews among them) who rely on such workers to perform menial tasks at wages lower than they would have to pay U.S. citizens. But that is not a reason to view those living outside the law as being no different from those who fled the Nazis.<\/span><\/p>\n That said, non-enforcement of immigration laws does harm Jews in other ways.<\/span><\/p>\n The unregulated torrent of people over the border (before Trump effectively halted the flood of illegals) raised questions about the flow of not merely illegal drugs and sex trafficking but also terrorists, especially at a time of rising antisemitism. Similarly, ICE\u2019s efforts to arrest those who had violated the terms of their visas by taking part in illegal pro-Hamas protests and acts of intimidation aimed at Jews are also part of Trump\u2019s campaign against campus antisemitism. Abolishing ICE wouldn\u2019t just mean open borders; it would facilitate the way Marxist and Islamist mobs seek to make it an open season on American Jews.<\/span><\/p>\n Left-wing Jews are, like everyone else, free to advocate for a return to Biden\u2019s lax policies or to change the laws to give amnesty for illegals or to make it easier for migrants to enter the country. But what happened to Renee Good is no reason to end efforts to enforce existing laws. Nor should anyone rush to judgment about the circumstances of her death in a way that creates a precedent that legitimizes efforts to obstruct law enforcement that no sensible person should wish to set.<\/span><\/p>\n Equally important, it is wrong to treat this issue as one even remotely comparable to what happened in Nazi Germany to 6 million Jews, who were legal, productive citizens of the European countries in which they lived. Doing so doesn\u2019t just dishonor the Holocaust. It undermines the rule of law, which is, in America and elsewhere, essential to Jewish security.<\/span><\/p>\n Zawarto\u015b\u0107 publikowanych artyku\u0142\u00f3w i materia\u0142\u00f3w nie reprezentuje pogl\u0105d\u00f3w ani opinii Reunion’68,<\/em> Don\u2019t invoke the Holocaust in debate about ICE Jonathan S. Tobin Liberal Jews are rallying behind the partisan effort to use the death of Renee Good to end the enforcement of immigration laws. That isn\u2019t defending Jewish interests or values. Portland Avenue and 34th Street in South Minneapolis, where an ICE agent shot a woman […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[6],"tags":[33,24],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/127315"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=127315"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/127315\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":127329,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/127315\/revisions\/127329"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=127315"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=127315"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=127315"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nLiberal Jews are rallying behind the partisan effort to use the death of Renee Good to end the enforcement of immigration laws. That isn\u2019t defending Jewish interests or values.<\/strong><\/h4>\n<\/div>\n
![](\"https:\/\/me.jnsi.org\/uploads\/2026\/01\/ICE-Minneapolis-Protests-Renee-Good-Killing-1320x880.jpg\")
Portland Avenue and 34th Street in South Minneapolis, where an ICE agent shot a woman leaving an immigration protest by car, later identified as 37-year-old Renee Good, Jan. 7, 2026. Credit: Chad Davis Photography\/Flickr via Wikimedia Commons.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\nDemonizing ICE<\/strong><\/h4>\n
Inappropriate analogies<\/strong><\/h4>\n
When police shoot protesters<\/strong><\/h4>\n
The rule of law is a Jewish value<\/strong><\/h4>\n
\n![](\"https:\/\/me.jnsi.org\/uploads\/2024\/06\/Jonathan-S.-Tobin-480x480.png\")
Jonathan S. Tobin<\/strong> is editor-in-chief of the Jewish News Syndicate, a senior contributor for The Federalist, a columnist for Newsweek and a contributor to many other publications. He covers the American political scene, foreign policy, the U.S.-Israel relationship, Middle East diplomacy, the Jewish world and the arts. He hosts the JNS \u201cThink Twice\u201d podcast, both the weekly video program and the \u201cJonathan Tobin Daily\u201d program, which are available on all major audio platforms and YouTube. Previously, he was executive editor, then senior online editor and chief political blogger, for Commentary magazine. Before that, he was editor-in-chief of The Jewish Exponent in Philadelphia and editor of the Connecticut Jewish Ledger. He has won more than 60 awards for commentary, art criticism and other writing. He appears regularly on television, commenting on politics and foreign policy. Born in New York City, he studied history at Columbia University.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n
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