Everglades Detention Facility, Florida — [Editor’s note: This information is from a press release from Witness at the Border.] Grassroots human rights observers and activists from throughout the country affiliated with the network coordinated by Witness at the Border, will convene in South Florida February 28th – March 5th to protest inhumane conditions of confinement at the Everglades Detention Center and the Krome Processing Center, two of the migrant detention hotspots in our nation.
The multi-day convening will begin with an interfaith vigil at the Krome Processing Center at 1 pm on Saturday, February 28th. The group will witness daily at the Everglades Detention Center, March 1-5, in the spirit of peaceful civic resistance to mass detention and mass deportation, and to ICE and Border Patrol violence in Minneapolis, Chicago, LA and elsewhere.
Witness at the Border will be joining the Florida Interfaith Coalition, a group that has been instrumental in the effort to keep international attention on this cruel prison camp. The Coalition’s ongoing work includes bearing witness at detention camps, advocating for an end to the detention and deportation of nonviolent, law-abiding immigrant neighbors, and maintaining pressure on the camps, transfer facilities, and local law agencies involved in 287(g) agreements that funnel individuals via this cruel system.
Attendees will be coming from all over the country, including Minnesota, California, Colorado, Florida, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, New Mexico, New York, Pennsylvania,Texas and Washington DC. Among the attendees will be Joshua Rubin, the founder of Witness at the Border and Lee Goodman, who will be dressed in a replica of a World War II Nazi concentration camp prisoner uniform.
Nazi concentration camp badges, primarily triangles, were part of the system used in camps to identify the reason prisoners had been placed there. The triangles were made of fabric and sewn onto the prisoners’ jackets and pants. Each color had a specific meaning. The Nazis forced migrants to wear blue triangles to identify themselves.
“We should give serious consideration to the similarities between what our country is doing and what the Nazis did. Hitler did not start with death camps. He started with concentration camps, and he built on a history of persecution and government-endorsed programs,” said Mr Goodman. “Horrible things are happening inside these facilities.”
Learning from the atrocities of the Holocaust, Witness at the Border seeks ways to stop crimes against humanity and to create awareness of heightened and unchecked persecution of migrant families and communities through racist, inhumane, harsh, and punitive immigration enforcement.
“We will wear and display the Blue Triangle, to show that we stand in solidarity with those who seek asylum and those who exercise their human right to migrate,” said Mr. Rubin.
The South Florida gathering will also help launch a hemispheric initiative to convene a people’s tribunal focused on the most serious human rights crimes of the Trump administration including detention centers such as the Everglades and Krome camps.
Witness at the Border is a migrant advocacy group that was instrumental in bringing public pressure to close migrant child detention camps during President Trump's first term and has continued to stand witness to the situation on the U.S./Mexico border and the expanding detention of migrants.
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?”
