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immigrant rights
Trump's Anti-Immigrant Agenda Turns the Ancient Story of Passover Into a Modern One
On Wednesday night, Jews sat down to the Passover seder and retold the story of how our ancestors, once welcomed into Egypt as refugees, were enslaved by a Pharaoh fearful of losing power. This year, it sounds like the news.
Apr 02, 2026
An authoritarian ruler seeks to consolidate his own power by stirring up fear about an immigrant population.
“These people are not like us,” he declares. “They are a potential fifth column, likely to join with our enemies and destroy us from within!” “We can keep ourselves safe only by controlling and oppressing them.”
On Wednesday night, Jews sat down to the Passover seder and retold the ancient story of how our ancestors, once welcomed into Egypt as refugees from famine, were enslaved by a Pharaoh fearful of losing power, and ultimately liberated through divine and human actions.
The Passover story has been retold in Jewish homes for millennia. This year, the ancient story tragically sounds like today’s news.
Now, the Supreme Court is considering overturning a core principle that once allowed those fleeing violence and oppression, my own great grandparents included, to find refuge in the United States.
President Donald Trump built his election campaign around stirring up fear of immigrants, refugees, and asylum-seekers, and, over the past year, has ramped up detentions and deportations, canceled temporary protected status for nationals of multiple countries, flooded major American cities with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents, and flouted US policy and international law by deporting people to third countries.
All these actions have been undertaken with intense cruelty. Families have been divided; mothers tackled in airports, on the streets, and in their homes; and people sent to prisons and to nations where they have no connections.
Now, the Supreme Court is considering overturning a core principle that once allowed those fleeing violence and oppression, my own great grandparents included, to find refuge in the United States.
The justices are deliberating on Noem vs. Al Otro Lado, which will determine the constitutionality of the US government’s policy of physically blocking asylum-seekers from presenting themselves at ports of entry along the Mexican border. Longstanding US law requires the government to allow asylum-seekers to request asylum at ports of entry, and to give these claims a fair hearing.
Instead, the US has been preventing asylum-seekers from even making a claim and instead forcing them back to Mexico, where they are often stranded without shelter, adequate food, or protection from violence.
All of the current Supreme Court justices identify as either Christian, mostly Catholic, or Jewish. We hope they look to our shared scripture as they consider their rulings.
The Torah commands the retelling of the story of slavery and liberation, and also specifies what lessons should be learned from this experience. “You shall not wrong or oppress the ger,” God commands, “for you were gerim in the land of Egypt.” (Exodus 22:20). The word ger (plural: gerim) most likely refers to a person who came from somewhere else to live among the Jewish people—in other words, an immigrant or a stranger. Versions of this directive appear 36 times in the Torah.
As God established a lasting covenant with the Jewish people, God also laid out a series of laws aimed at establishing a just society. Central among these are the commandments regarding just treatment of the ger, who “...should be treated equally under the law.” (Numbers 15:15)
God, Godself, cares for immigrants just as God cared for the Jewish people during the period of their slavery in Egypt. “[God] loves the ger, and gives them food and clothing.” (Deuteronomy 10:18) Acting as God acts demands not only protecting immigrants from oppression, but actively caring for their needs.
The Torah also offers a negative example of a society whose cruelty toward immigrants, travelers, and others in need condemns it to destruction. The evil city of Sodom is notorious for its inhospitality toward visitors. “This was the sin of your sister Sodom,” the prophet Ezekiel declares, “She and her daughters had plenty of bread and untroubled tranquility, yet they did not support the poor and the needy.” (Ezekiel 16:49)
The Talmud goes on to tell the story of one brave young woman who regularly sneaks food to a person in need, only to be tortured and killed once she is discovered.
These are the issues at stake in Noem vs. Al Otro Lado. When US officials turn asylum-seekers away at the border, rather than allowing them to plead their case, they are no different from the officials in Sodom who decreed, “Let us abolish the practice of traveling in our land.”
I've personally seen Jewish and other religious communities living out these ancient teachings. At the end of January, nearly 100 rabbis who are members of T’ruah, the organization I lead, half of whom live and work in Minnesota and half from out of state, joined some 600 other clergy to protest ICE in the Twin Cities.
These religious leaders are following the path that God has laid out, refusing to tolerate fearmongering or oppression of immigrants, and insisting on treating all people—whether born in the United States or elsewhere—justly, and according to a single legal code. The justices should do the same.
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Death in ICE Custody Reveals Preventable Systemic Failures
When the government takes custody of a person, it assumes total control over and liability for that individual’s safety, health, and survival. Unfortunately, in ICE detention, that obligation is being violated again and again.
Feb 18, 2026
In the wake of the shootings of Alex Pretti and Renee Good in Minneapolis, nationwide attention has been fixed on the deeply troubled aspects of federal immigration enforcement. But beyond the use of deadly force, the preventable death of Parady La in Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention reveals another serious, often overlooked set of failures that demand examination.
A little more than a month into 2026, eight people have already died at the hands of the US ICE, signaling yet another year of lethal systemic failure. La was the fourth fatality, a 46-year-old Cambodian refugee, who died of drug withdrawal just three days after entering ICE custody at a federal detention facility in Philadelphia. This death was entirely preventable. When the government takes custody of a person, it assumes total control over and liability for that individual’s safety, health, and survival. Unfortunately, in ICE detention, that obligation is being violated again and again.
According to reports from inmates later confirmed by medical experts, La told detention staff he was withdrawing and requested medical care, but his symptoms, including persistent vomiting, were left untreated, resulting in his death. Drug withdrawal is a predictable physiological response when a person who is chronically dependent on a substance is abruptly cut off, often involving severe nausea, vomiting, dehydration, physical pain and panic, cardiovascular strain, and escalating medical instability. Substance dependence is a chronic medical condition, no different in principle from other conditions that carry known risks when left unmanaged, such as diabetes, heart disease, or epilepsy. When symptoms of chronic conditions go untreated, particularly in custodial settings where people are confined, closely monitored, and unable to seek care on their own, the resulting harm is entirely foreseeable. Rather than explaining why someone reporting severe withdrawal symptoms was left without basic medical care in government custody, the official death notice on ICE’s website devotes significant space to detailing La’s past criminal history.
This lack of accountability is not surprising given the decades long history of preventable deaths in ICE. A Human Rights Watch analysis of 18 ICE detainee deaths between 2012 and 2015 found that independent medical experts concluded substandard medical care likely contributed to at least 7 of those deaths, with evidence of dangerous medical practices present in 16 of them. In several cases, detainees repeatedly reported severe symptoms only to be dismissed or accused of exaggeration, with hours-long delays before staff intervened. One man was found unresponsive in a pool of bloody vomit after officers failed to enter his cell for minutes, and emergency responders were not called until it was too late. A peer-reviewed analysis of 55 deaths in ICE custody between 2011 and 2018 found that nearly all involved serious medical failures, including delays in care in 95% of cases, poor care delivery in 95%, missed or ignored red flags in 80%, and failures in emergency response in 82% of deaths.
These repeated failures point to a detention system with limited transparency and little independent medical oversight.
More recent findings reinforce these earlier conclusions. A 2024 joint investigation by the American Civil Liberties Union, Physicians for Human Rights, and American Oversight examined 52 deaths in ICE custody from 2017-2021 and found that 95% were preventable or possibly preventable with appropriate medical care. Medical experts identified recurring failures across cases, including misdiagnosis, delayed or denied treatment, interrupted medications, and inadequate emergency responses, with people living with chronic health conditions disproportionately affected. Yet ICE continues to rely largely on internal death reviews, limiting transparency and meaningful corrective action and allowing the same preventable failures to recur.
What makes this lack of accountability even more disturbing is that the agency has recently halted payments to the third-party medical contractors responsible for providing care to people in custody. Reporting indicates that ICE stopped paying outside medical providers in October 2025, with claims processing not expected to resume until at least April 2026, even as the detained population has grown to more than 73,000 people nationwide. Because ICE relies heavily on these providers for specialty and off-site care, the payment freeze has already led some clinicians to stop treating detainees altogether and others to delay or deny essential services, including medications and treatment for chronic conditions. For people held in civil detention, this decision further erodes the already slim access to basic medical care inside facilities.
These repeated failures point to a detention system with limited transparency and little independent medical oversight. ICE detention facilities operate largely out of public view and are structured through layers of bureaucracy and private contracting that disperse responsibility across agencies and vendors. Medical care is often delivered by outside contractors, oversight is primarily internal, and meaningful external review is rare. In this environment, gaps in care are difficult to trace, accountability is easily diluted, and preventable deaths are allowed to recur without clear consequences.
When the government confines a person, whether in a prison, jail, or immigration detention facility, it assumes full control over that individual’s ability to access medical care. People in detention cannot seek emergency treatment on their own, choose their providers, refill prescriptions independently, or remove themselves from unsafe conditions. Their health and survival depend entirely on the state. Providing timely and adequate medical care in custody is therefore a baseline obligation that must be followed.
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Knitting the Anti-Trump Resistance—One Pink or Red Hat at a Time
The color of the hats might have changed over these years, but what has not changed is the core message: the symbolism of knitting as the slow work required to build a movement, and the need to take the time to plan before acting.
Feb 15, 2026
The pattern for a bright red melt the ICE hat popped up in my news feed the other day, and I immediately knew I had to knit one. That the pattern for the freshly renamed hat reproduces the pointed, tasseled hats Norwegians wore in the 1940s as a symbol of protest against Nazi occupation; that it comes from a small woman-owned yarn store in Minnesota at a time when it feels we are not far away from the catastrophe of Fascism and Nazism; that the proceeds from buying the pattern go to organizations that protect immigrant rights. All of this made it even more urgent that I get hold of some red yarn and start casting my stitches without delay.
I learned to knit as a young child from a woman who had herself learned from a woman who had herself learned from a woman. In Italy, where I was born and grew up, this was the norm for girls, though boys were never taught the craft.
As a teen, I enjoyed the meditative quality of the repetitive work of making something grow, one knot at a time. I marveled at the magic of my hands transforming linear yarn into a multidimensional artifact. I learned the patience needed to make and unmake and remake something until I could get it not perfect but good enough. I absorbed the anti-consumerist message of frogging, or unraveling, an old sweater that no longer fits and reusing the yarn to make a new one. I grasped the necessity to create plans before jumping into action.
Then life got in the way, and I let it all fall to the side while I concentrated on becoming a scientist and relocating to the United States to work in biomedical research. My hands turned to handling pipettes and tubes rather than yarn and needles.
But symbols are important. They speak through history, they tell us we are not alone, they let us say things that words often cannot express.
But without my consciously knowing it, it became clear that the same skills were needed in the lab as in putting together a knitting project. There it was, the need to slow down and plan ahead, to repeat the same gesture over and over again, to reuse old concepts for new discoveries, to build step by step until a complex theory emerges from the simplicity of a single experiment. During those years, my brain might have forgotten the practicalities of knitting, but the underlying lessons were all there.
In early 2016, after more than 20 years in the US, I applied for citizenship, hoping to contribute my vote against what would become President Donald Trump’s first term. Bureaucracy was too slow to allow me the privilege to cast my vote that year, but it did not stifle my willingness to protest what I saw as a dangerous development.
The pussyhat, which became a symbol of the protest movement against President Trump, brought me back to knitting. I got hold of some bright pink yarn and needles at my local women-owned yarn store and discovered that my hands still had the muscle memory of what I had learned decades earlier on the other side of the world. I knit a bunch of pussyhats for myself and my friends, which we sported at the Chicago’s women’s march on the gorgeous, hopeful day that was January 21, 2017.
It’s now almost 10 years later, and here we are again, knitting hats against the dangers to our democracy. The hat’s color has changed, from the pink that represented women’s rights to the red now pointing to the defense of immigrants’ rights. As a woman immigrant, I need both and I am sure I will need more in the future.
The color of the hats might have changed over these years, but what has not changed is the core message: the symbolism of knitting as the slow work required to build activism and resistance, and the need to take the time to plan before acting. Knitting as the symbol of the patience it takes to build something meaningful and complex, one knot at a time. As the symbol of the need to constantly make and remake, to reuse what we built in the past to create something that fits the moment. And of knitting, just like quilting, embroidery, and other textile crafts, as reclaiming the role of women in history.
Yes, I know, a handmade hat will not determine the success of our resistance. Just like the pussyhats did not prevent a second Trump term, the melt the ICE hats by themselves will not stop the violence perpetrated against immigrants and those who try to protect them. But symbols are important. They speak through history, they tell us we are not alone, they let us say things that words often cannot express.
When I went to get my skein of yarn the other day, a young man wearing the same bright red hat I was planning to make was at the store, chatting with the owner, who had set aside a basket of skeins of red yarn. The young man told me, matter-of-factly, that he had just finished knitting the hat he was wearing and was there to buy some yarn to make a few more hats for his friends.
And there it was, the symbolism personified. A male knitter, unthinkable when I was a young girl, who let me know, without needing to explain it, that women’s history should not only be reclaimed but also shared with those who can treasure it. A red hat and a basket of red yarn that signaled, “You have nothing to fear here.” That told me that the accent that inflects my English was welcome, not despised. That I did not need the copy of the US passport I have started to take with me wherever I go. That we can do this, together, one knot at a time.
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