Opinion: Protesting ICE is dangerous, but we can’t back down now

After Minneapolis, it’s time to state the obvious: Standing up to ICE can get you killed. But here’s why it’s more necessary than ever.

Protest, a longstanding American tradition, has always been easy (at least for middle class white people). We have a 1st amendment that protects that activity, and we have a 4th amendment that protects us if law enforcement briefly forgets about the first. 

Except not now: Now the federal government is ignoring both the first and fourth amendments. If they take a notion, they’ll kill us, and nobody will run into any trouble. That’s hard stuff.

But it’s reality now, and if we’re willing to face it we can remember that however upsetting it is,  it’s not unprecedented. Ask them at Jackson State, at Kent State — for that matter ask the people who were at the Boston Massacre. Ask people killed in a hundred union protests or police actions. 

Killing its citizens is what a government does when it’s given up on the capacity to convince and has settled on violence to achieve its ends. 

Fortunately as a Jew, I’m well prepared for this situation. And this time of year the holiday of Purim (March 2-3 this year) brings up the hero — the heroine — who reminds us of this. I’m talking about Esther, the central figure of the Biblical book that bears her name.

I won’t remind you of the whole story, but here are the highlights: King Ahashuerus gets mad at Queen Vashti for refusing to do a dance for his drunken friends. He banishes her. The Persian king chooses a new queen: Esther, who is a Jew. On the advice of her uncle Mordechai, Esther keeps it on the down low. 

When the king’s advisor decides to kill all the Jews, Mordechai tells Esther it’s now or never. She must go to the king and speak up to save her people. She risks death by telling him. “If I perish,” she says in verse 4:16 of the book named for her, “I perish.”

As Americans we’re used to being able to protest, to speak our minds — as the old piece of parchment has it, “peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” When the government stops allowing us to do that — instead, for example, encouraging anonymized ICE agents to murder us in the streets — they do so to terrorize us into stopping all that petitioning for redress of grievances business.

They want us to shut up, and by reminding us we risk death by protesting they hope to shut us up. That’s them. That terror part, though — it turns out that’s up to us: we can decide whether to be terrorized. It’s not easy and it’s not fun, but it comes down to accepting a simple fact: I’m going to the protest. I might not come home.

As progressive reform American Jews, when we think about facing our imperfect world we bring up phrases like “tikkun olam”—“repair the world”—which we think of as our obligation. We think about positives, ways to help by making things better. We occasionally risk arrest, but until recently that has meant mostly a long afternoon at a police station and even something of a badge of honor. Now the rules are changed.

Like Esther, if we perish, we perish. All of us—Jews, gentiles, Muslims, those who profess no particular faith or who do without it—all of us must now do as Esther did. Is being alive myself worth ignoring the destruction of so many others? Do we want to live in a world defined by millions in peril because of our refusal to face risk?

Of course not. Esther approaches the king and speaks — and it all works out for her. She does not perish and she saves her people. 

We have no guarantee that it will work out so well for us. When we go to protests, when we stand up to the unlawful butchery of ICE, we know that we might face surveillance, arrest, violence, unjust imprisonment, and even the possibility, no matter how small, of death. 

The time for uncertainty has passed. We see what is already happening. We must stand and we must speak.

And if we perish we perish.