The righteous rabbis protesting those immigration raids in Los Angeles
‘It all feels different, militarized, dehumanizing,’ said Rabbi Susan Goldberg
Over 300 immigrant rights activists protest multiple immigration sweeps across Los Angeles by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in front of the Federal Building in downtown Los Angeles on June 5, 2025. Photo by Genaro Molina/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images
Senior Columnist Rob Eshman June 9, 2025
Once again my city is burning.
This time, the smoke is coming not from wildfires but from tear gas, flash-bang grenades and protest fires set off in a confrontation between agents of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, or ICE, the National Guard, and Angelenos who oppose ICE’s crude round-ups of people it suspects are undocumented immigrants.
There are three things you need to know about what’s happening here: 1) It is completely unnecessary. 2) President Donald Trump produced and created this crisis with a Tony Award-worthy degree of cynical premeditation. And 3) a handful of Jewish leaders are standing against these cruel and performative ICE raids.
“I don’t understand how anybody could watch what’s going on in the city of Los Angeles right now who’s Jewish,” said Rabbi Ken Chasen of Leo Baeck Temple, “and not see the obligation to do for others what we would want done for ourselves.”
Chasen, the leader of one of the city’s larger Reform congregations, was slated to speak along with Rabbi Susan Goldberg, the spiritual leader of the Nefesh congregation, at an interfaith rally downtown on Sunday evening. The event’s interfaith organizer, L.A. Voice, canceled it after protesters shut down the freeway through the city center and the confrontation between National Guard and protesters led to arson and other acts of vandalism.
“There is a feeling that something significant has changed in Los Angeles as of Friday,” Goldberg told me by phone Sunday evening. “It all feels different, militarized, dehumanizing.”
And none of that had to happen.
Trump announced his intention to round up and deport a million undocumented immigrants before the election, and a majority of voters in our democracy approved his message. Under President Joe Biden, undocumented immigration exploded — something that frustrated Biden himself until, too late in his term, he was able to bring down the number of illegal border crossings.
Once in office, Trump could have enacted a policy that identified, detained and deported undocumented immigrants with a violent criminal record — the people that he and Stephen Miller, a senior adviser, made into symbols of Biden’s feckless border control.
Detaining and deporting such people needn’t be provocative nor controversial. In 2023 and 2024, ICE removed and deported 7,342 undocumented immigrants from Los Angeles for immigration violations and criminal convictions. The operations didn’t create a high-profile public spectacle or elicit fervent public protest, and certainly didn’t require the National Guard or the threat of Marine deployment.
But Trump didn’t want to be effective or pragmatic. He wanted a show.
Mayor Karen Bass, who was inexcusably AWOL when the January wildfires struck, acted conscientiously to preempt Trump’s severe decree.
On Saturday night, she spoke to Tom Homan, the White House official in charge of border enforcement, and said L.A. can handle the protests without federal intervention. Gov. Gavin Newsom sent the same message.
“I’m very concerned about the potential civil unrest if there was federal intervention,” Bass said she told Homan, stressing that high-profile immigration raids were “the last thing we need” given the city’s wildfire recovery efforts.
L.A. didn’t need federal intervention, but Trump wanted it. ICE agents swarmed into Home Depots and Chinese restaurants. They swooped up people reporting for meetings with immigration officials, in one case arresting and detaining a fourth grader and his father who were checking in on their status.
‘People have felt really terrorized’
Members of Goldberg’s congregation, which is located near downtown L.A., have volunteered to accompany immigrants to meetings with immigration officials and to doctors’ appointments. They have walked with parents and kids to schools so they could at least serve as witnesses to arrests.
“People have felt really terrorized.” Goldberg said.
Four congregations — Leo Baeck, Nefesh, IKAR and Temple Israel of Hollywood — are part of L.A. Voice, which has mobilized religious congregations and clergy to protect immigrant rights.
“We do ourselves no service when we continue to appear parochial with regard to human suffering.”Rabbi Ken ChasenLeo Baeck Temple, Los Angeles
To Chasen, the Jewish imperative is clear. Just as we are expected to follow the law, so must the government. And because we were once strangers, we are called to protect the stranger.
“After Oct. 7, all of us were deeply concerned that we were not hearing from others who should have been noticing that we were suffering,” he said, “and did we call that out, frankly, with some fair justification. We do ourselves no service when we continue to appear parochial with regard to human suffering.”
I have run those arguments by Jewish Trump supporters before, and the response is that ICE is going after undocumented immigrants, people who are here illegally.
That’s why I asked both rabbis what Jewish law has to say about hypocrisy — because any Angeleno who turns a blind eye to the crude round-ups and the Trump-provoked protests is full of it.
For years, all of us in California — Democrat, Republican, rich, poor or middle class — have benefited from the labor of 1.7 million undocumented people, a population the size of West Virginia or Hawaii. They make up 14% of our construction industry workers, 7% (or 1 million) of our food and hospitality workers, and 13% of our agricultural workforce. They watch our children, groom our dogs, mow our lawns.
We have lived better and paid less because of them — and we have been willing, knowing participants in an economy that depended on them showing up and working hard. Now, we are letting them be hounded, harassed and harried out of our sight.
“You have to pay people right away, and pay people fairly who are working for you,” said Goldberg when I raised this point, “and none of this has been fair.”
Sure, shame on those protesters who turned to violence and vandalism. But, honestly, the bigger shame is on us.
