On Tuesday, President Trump announced an expansion of the travel ban, which now extends to people from 39 countries. T’ruah: The Rabbinic Call for Human Rights responded by condemning the travel ban as racist, xenophobic, and Islamophobic, naming that it will be devastating for hundreds of millions of people, and calling for it to end immediately.
Rabbi Jill Jacobs, CEO of T’ruah, said:
“We strongly condemn President Trump’s expansion of the travel ban, just as we have unequivocally opposed previous versions of this ban. These 39 countries have populations that are predominantly Black, brown, and Muslim, and this ban is blatantly racist, xenophobic, and Islamophobic. It is absurd and harmful to make blanket assessments of people based on their nationality. This ban will be devastating to people who come to the U.S. from these countries for all kinds of reasons, including to visit family, to study at university, to work, to receive medical care, and to flee persecution and build a better life.
“We are particularly dismayed that the travel ban includes Palestinian nationals. At a moment when the United States government claims to be invested in regional stability and in securing a ceasefire in Gaza, policies that further isolate Palestinians directly contradict those stated goals and undermine the conditions necessary to achieve them. The ban is also extraordinarily cruel given that over 16,000 Gazans are in need of medical evacuation.
“This administration claims the travel ban will make Americans safer — even that it will make Jews safer. They claim that danger is somewhere outside of our borders and needs to be kept out, but we know this is false. Violence and antisemitism are alive and well in the U.S., including among white nationalists at the highest levels of our government. This ban will certainly further endanger Americans whose families came from the countries on the travel ban list. And the ban is itself rooted in white supremacy, which endangers Jews. Americans of all backgrounds deserve policies that actually keep us safe.
“We urge Congress to use every lever at their disposal to push against this ban, and all of the ways Trump is enacting his mass deportation agenda, which has swept up untold numbers of people and families in its racist, costly wake. To that end, we urge Congress to pass the NO BAN Act, reintroduced this past February by Senator Chris Coons and Representative Judy Chu, which would limit the president’s ability to restrict entry to the U.S. by non-citizens.”
“When it comes to how human beings should treat people from another place, we find the answer in our tradition. According to Midrash, God created the first person out of dust from the four corners of the earth so that ‘every place a person goes, a part of them is from there and a part of them is returning there.’ (Yalkut Shimoni 13:2) God formed human beings knowing they would move from place to place during their lives, and our very bones testify to our shared belonging. That is the bar, and we refuse to let President Trump lower it.”
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About T’ruah: The Rabbinic Call for Human Rights
T’ruah: The Rabbinic Call for Human Rights brings the Torah’s ideals of human dignity, equality, and justice to life by empowering our network of over 2,300 rabbis and cantors to be moral voices and to lead Jewish communities in advancing democracy and human rights for all people in the United States, Israel, and the occupied Palestinian territories.