ABOUT US

Our History

In June 2019, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez visited the U.S.-Mexico border. After witnessing the horror and cruelty of the detention centers, she compared them to concentration camps, eliciting backlash from right-wing anti-immigrant politicians, as well as many mainstream Jewish institutions.

But it was clear where the majority of the Jewish community stood. We were outraged on two levels — first, at the atrocities happening at the border, and second, that our community’s trauma was being weaponized against immigrants and progressive politicians speaking truth to power. We knew that the words “Never Again” meant “Never Again” for anyone. And we knew what “Never Again” called us to do. On June 30th, 2019, 200 Jews shut down the Elizabeth Detention Center in Elizabeth, New Jersey, resulting in 36 arrests. Over the next 2 months, thousands of people mobilized in over 40 #JewsAgainstICE actions across the country.

After the dust settled at the end of the summer, it was clear that despite our huge mobilizations, there was more work to do. We had activated thousands of people, but our partners made it clear that a single mobilization wasn’t enough — we needed to bring people into the movement for the long haul, not just for a single action.

Since then, we have trained hundreds of new leaders, taken on campaigns against detention centers and ICE training programs, organized mutual aid and deportation defense, and developed deep local and national partnerships. Read more about our impact here.

Our Partnerships

Never Again Action was born out of longstanding, deep relationships between Jewish organizers and immigrant organizers (which are not mutually exclusive identities!) and we continue to build strategies that follow the lead of those most directly impacted by the detention and deportation machine. We work in close collaboration with many different immigrant justice groups on the local and national level. Neither the immigrant community nor the immigrant rights movement is a monolith, and we believe that we need many different strategies and organizations in this fight.

Our Strategy

At our core, we believe in people power: ordinary people, when we organize strategically and in large numbers, can change the world. In order for the immigrant rights movement to win permanent protection and an end to detention and deportation, there needs to be a critical mass of active popular support to **make visible the crisis of the deportation machine, disrupt business as usual, and demand government action. **

That's where Never Again comes in: immigrant organizers have asked us to organize allies to be in this fight for the long haul, starting with our own communities. As Jews, many of our families carry stories of persecution, flight, and survival against all odds. This experience helps us speak to other allies with moral clarity: we know the stakes. Our task is to organize our community, speak to the public, and build a critical mass of support for the immigrant organizers who will lead us to victory.

** Learn more about our chapter strategy for 2024.**

Our Role

1. We flank the leadership of the immigrant rights movement. We flank to support the asks of our directly-affected partners by adding organizing capacity, moving money to directly affected partners, and modeling what direct ally interventions can do both materially and narratively. We use our privilege to throw sand in the gears of the detention and deportation machine wherever we encounter it.

2. We take direct action against fascism. We fight fascism through strategic, disruptive, direct action. We fight to reclaim the memories of our Jewish, queer, disabled, poor, and socialist ancestors, to make their memories a blessing. We disrupt attempts by the right to weaponize Jewish trauma against the left through a counter-narrative of solidarity.

3. We ground ourselves and our communities in the fight against racial capitalism. The fights for immigrant justice, Jewish liberation, gender justice, economic justice, racial justice, and disability justice are deeply connected to the broader fight against racial capitalism. We act as a model for the Jewish community (and other communities) of what it looks like to reject, disrupt, and dismantle racial capitalism. We build relationships of solidarity and support with others that are targeted by racial capitalism and white supremacy, and we take direct action to intervene in these systems.

Our Vision: We imagine a world where people of all races, identities, and origins come together to tear down the walls that have kept us apart from each other and build a new world.

** Read more about our role and strategy in the Never Again Action 101 Zine.**

Our Structure

Never Again Action is a decentralized national movement. Our local chapters work on a variety of issues in collaboration with local partners and national campaigns.

We have chapters in Boston, Chicago, Rhode Island, Tennessee, Texas, Washington DC and Wisconsin. Our full time staff's primary orientation is to support the work of the skilled volunteer leaders in our chapters, build our base and our collective power.

Currently, NAA has 3 staff members:

Jules Rose, Organizational Director

Shayna Solomon, Field Director

Symone Saul, Field & Membership Organizer

Our Principles

Principles are the basic agreements that everyone acting as Never Again Action agrees to. They hold our movement together, protect us from threats, and guide our people through action.

1. Never Again Action is a Jewish-led mobilization against the persecution, detention, and deportation of immigrants in the United States. We take direct action to raise the alarm about the current system and disrupt its operation, and to catalyze a popular movement for permanent protection for all undocumented people.

2. Our Jewish ancestors call us and sustain us. We see what is happening to immigrant communities in the US today, and we are called to act as we would have wanted others to act for our families. We are differently affiliated, unaffiliated, and allied, but together we draw from a rich well of Jewish traditions to unify and sustain our action.

3. We take action proportional to the moment. We take direct action that targets the system, demonstrates the stakes to the public, and inspires them to join us.

4. We’re empowering the public, not making compromises with the powerful. We don’t negotiate with candidates, politicians, or companies--but we welcome them to move to the right side of history. We act to change the common sense among the American public, to create the political conditions that politicians will have no choice but to follow.

5. We know that everyone has skills and experiences to contribute to the movement. We need people to organize, to plan, to hold us together, and to simply show up. We welcome all Jews and allies, regardless of age, ability, or background. We believe working toward justice isn’t an extra task that only some people can do — it’s an obligation all of us can uphold in our own way.

6. We trust each other to lead. We engage each other in good faith, trusting that we are all committed to our collective cause. If we’re going to win, we need people empowered to take action everywhere: to try new things, to make mistakes, to seek support, and to grow. We remember that we share the same goal, especially when we have different ideas about how to achieve it.

7. We learn how to build power together. We are new to an immigrant rights movement that directly-affected people have been leading and living for decades. We know that those affected by the daily violence of the immigration system know most about how to fight it—and that we can effectively contribute to that fight only when we build in real relationship with them. Our community has privilege and resources to support this fight: we know we have to learn from undocumented communities how best to do so.

8. We commit and we grow. We are committed to showing up even when it’s messy. We approach difficult conversations with humility in order to build trust across differences in privilege and oppression. We root ourselves in the Jewish practice of tshuva, our capacity to seek forgiveness and return to relationships when we cause harm.

9. We aren’t leaving anyone behind. The persecution of immigrants won’t end when the camps close, or when DREAMers alone gain permanent status. We don’t settle for compromises that benefit some people at the expense of the many. We join the tradition of those fighting to seek fundamental change for all undocumented people.

10. When we show up in the collective struggle against white nationalism and white supremacy, we show up for others—and for ourselves. We see how today’s antisemitism, anti-immigrant hatred, and other forms of bigotry uphold one another—and that our safety lies in solidarity. When we fight for ourselves as Jews, and for our allies in the immigrant community, we recognize that we are all in this together. Never again means never again for anyone.