The Palestinian BDS National Committee (BNC), the largest coalition in Palestinian society that leads the global BDS movement, stands resolutely in solidarity with activists and immigrants across the US, particularly in the Latinx community, who are protesting the intensified illegal and deeply unethical abduction, disappearance, detainment, and deportation of members of their communities by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
While ICE abductions have been ongoing since the agency’s founding in 2003, since March of this year, the second Trump administration has rapidly escalated ICE abductions into “all-out kidnapping mode,” targeting pro-Palestine, labor union, and immigrant rights activists, as well as members of immigrant communities, particularly Latinx communities, en masse. These ruthless mass kidnappings have most recently targeted Los Angeles, California, where immigration raids across the city followed the announcement last week of a renewed attempt at the first Trump administration’s “Muslim ban.” The LAPD, later joined by the National Guard, has unleashed violence on protestors and journalists akin to the tactics used by the Israeli military on Palestinians under its 77-year-old regime of settler-colonialism and apartheid and its 20-month livestreamed genocide. This is not a coincidence.
The struggles of the US immigrant rights movement and of Palestinians have historically been connected. The Israeli military, militarized police, and intelligence organs have trained US “law enforcement” forces, including ICE and LAPD, through Israel’s Deadly Exchange program. In this program, run for years partly by the deeply racist Anti-Defamation League (ADL), “worst practices” are shared to promote and extend discriminatory and repressive policing in both countries including extrajudicial executions, shoot-to-kill policies, police murders, racial profiling, massive spying and surveillance, deportation, detention, and attacks on human rights defenders. Military tactics tested on Indigenous Palestinians for decades have been traded from Israel to countries around the world, aiding the US in fueling violence and displacement in Latin America and now wielding that same violence in an “imperial boomerang” against predominantly Latinx migrants and protestors coast to coast, from Los Angeles and San Francisco to Boston.
New technologies that made these ICE raids possible, sparking this uprising, are also the same surveillance and biometric AI technologies tested on Palestinians. Corporations that are priority targets of the BDS movement for their complicity in Israel’s regime of colonial oppression, apartheid, and genocide are unsurprisingly present on the front-lines of violent immigration repression in the United States from the colonial US/Mexico border wall to the violent ICE raids we are seeing currently. These include Israeli weapons manufacturer Elbit Systems, whose patrol towers line the US/Mexico border wall that has been built through bi-partisan cooperation, by Trump, Biden, and multiple US presidents before them.
Israeli company Elta, a subsidiary of Israel Aerospace Industries, was contracted to develop a non-concrete, “smart wall” prototype of the border wall by US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) under the Trump administration in 2017. It beat out the Israeli company Magal, known for its “smart fencing” used by Israel on the borders of Gaza, the West Bank, and Egypt, and US long-standing Israeli military supplier Caterpillar for the contract.
Israeli tech company NSO Group’s Pegasus software is used to surveil both activists and migrants. US tech companies Palantir, Cisco, and Google, are among the growing list of complicit companies that have developed surveillance tools used by US ICE and CBP, as well as city police departments across the US. These dual-use technologies are also sold to the Israeli military police as to enable its ongoing genocide against 2.3 million Palestinians in the illegally occupied Gaza Strip.
But just as our oppressions are intertwined, so too is our liberation. This is affirmed by the now common site of Mexican and Palestinian flags flying side-by-side on the front-lines of protests in Los Angeles and elsewhere. When people chant “from Palestine to Mexico, all the walls have to go,” it is more than just a slogan. It is a shared reality of colonization and corporate exploitation that translates to a shared struggle for collective liberation. It is therefore no surprise when, as students across the country have mobilized in support of the academic boycott of Israel’s deeply complicit universities and have voted to divest university endowments from Israel and complicit Israeli companies, they have included as top priorities companies that are complicit with both the US and Israeli militaries, prison systems, and “law enforcement” agencies.
The statement made then by the BDS Movement’s North America coordinator, Olivia Katbi, about the campus mobilizations against institutional complicity in Israel’s genocide in Gaza rings as true now: “it is becoming impossible to be ‘progressive except [on] Palestine’ because it is becoming impossible to silence our movement. The Palestinian struggle for freedom, justice, and equality so clearly intersects with all other struggles of oppressed peoples everywhere.”
The Palestine solidarity movement in the US is inspired by and organically connected to the civil rights movement, the Movement for Black Lives, movements for immigrant rights, and others. We call on all progressives and people of conscience to continue to stand against repression by ICE agents of our movements and our activists, to join intersectional campaigns to defend democratic rights, advance freedom, justice, and equality, and to escalate boycott and divestment campaigns against the complicit tech and weapons companies that enable ICE’s brutal oppression of the immigrant rights movement in the US and Israel’s genocidal oppression of the Palestinian people.
Our movements have consistently stood together against systemic racism and repression and for a world without walls. Reiterating our calls for a world without racism and oppression, we stand with all racial, economic, migrant, gender, climate, and social justice movements for true emancipation for all.