Editor’s note: The following is from a press release from Witness at the Border.
Brooklyn, NY – Witness at the Border has joined with over 30 immigration advocacy and support organizations to launch the Blue Triangle Solidarity campaign. The effort unites around the message, “I Stand With Immigrants.” It will include an in-person presence with symbols of inverted blue triangles at marches and rallies across the country and a social media campaign. Joshua Rubin, founder of Witness at the Border, explains it this way: “The Nazis forced immigrants to wear blue triangles to identify themselves. Immigrants are under attack, and, right now, we all have to be immigrants, don’t we?”
The Nazis used a classification system to persecute those they considered inferior, according to the US Holocaust Memorial Museum. Badges, primarily triangles, were used in the concentration camps to identify groups of prisoners. The triangles were made of fabric and sewn onto prisoners’ jackets and pants. Each color had a specific meaning. Immigrants were forced to wear blue triangles to identify themselves.
The Blue Triangle Solidarity campaign follows in the path of LGBTQ+ activists who reclaimed the pink triangle as a powerful symbol of defiance. Focusing on a throughline from Nazi concentration camps to the incarceration of Japanese-Americans during WWII to the mass detention and deportation of migrants today, activists are saying, “Never Again Is Now.”
Lee Goodman, an advocate with Witness at the Border, who often wears a replica of a prisoner’s concentration camp uniform when he stands up for immigrant rights, says, “It is appropriate and important to point out the connections between what is happening to migrants now and what has happened in the past.”
Learning from the atrocities of the Holocaust, Goodman says the group is seeking ways to stop crimes against humanity and to create awareness of heightened and unchecked persecution of migrating people through racist, inhumane and punitive immigration enforcement.
By wearing and displaying the Blue Triangle, Witness at the Border and their supporters say they are standing in solidarity with those who seek asylum and those who exercise their human right to migrate.
See this link for a list of over 30 groups and organizations (list of partners in formation) that are partnering with Witness at the Border in the Blue Triangle Solidarity campaign, including the People’s Tribune and Tribuno del Pueblo.
Find out ways to participate in the campaign here.
Brooklyn, NY – Witness at the Border has joined with over 30 immigration advocacy and support organizations to launch the Blue Triangle Solidarity campaign. The effort unites around the message, “I Stand With Immigrants.” It will include an in-person presence with symbols of inverted blue triangles at marches and rallies across the country and a social media campaign.
Joshua Rubin, founder of Witness at the Border, explains it this way: “The Nazis forced immigrants to wear blue triangles to identify themselves. Immigrants are under attack, and, right now, we all have to be immigrants, don’t we?”
