Question 23: Why did Mama get arrested at the Hilton last night?

Dear Nathaniel,

I’m sorry I missed bedtime last night. 

I love bedtime with you. I love making you dinner, giving you your bath, snuggling you into PJs, reading you stories (when you let me), and singing you the sh’ma. I love the smell of your little head and the coziness of your nursery with just the glow of the lamp. I love tiptoeing out of your room and hugging Dada and feeling a love and gratitude that can’t begin to be encapsulated with language. 

But last night, I couldn’t be home for bedtime. Last night, when Dada was turning off your light, I was getting arrested by the NYPD at a hotel in downtown Manhattan (a hotel is like your nursery only you have to share a room with Mama and Dada and nobody gets to sleep well). I was arrested as part of a protest against Hilton, which is a big hotel company that’s allowing ICE agents to book rooms at their properties. 

You’re not old enough to understand things like arrests yet, or, indeed, the idea of a hotel or the police, but when you’re older you’ll learn that the police are people who are theoretically supposed to help keep you safe, and when they see someone doing something against the rules, sometimes they arrest them. (No, you will not be arrested for pulling Dada’s DVDs off the shelves.)

I’ve only been arrested once before, several years ago, at a protest not so different from this one. Regular people, upset about businesses cooperating with government agencies who are doing bad things to other regular people, sat down where they weren’t supposed to sit, made a lot of noise, and didn’t listen when the police told them to move. An arrest like this is usually calm, especially for people who look and sound like me. Officers treat protestors with respect. The cuffs aren’t too tight. But the reason I got arrested was because of other arrests— arrests that aren’t calm or respectful and that don’t end up with the arrestees being released and arriving home in time to wake their babies up and make them breakfast the next morning. 

ICE is an agency that takes mamas and dadas and aunties and uncles and grandparents and cousins and friends away, holds them in really uncomfortable places where we don’t even really know what happens because we don’t have documentation of it, and then sometimes sends them to other countries far, far away from their families. ICE has existed for a while but recently it’s gotten to be bolder and meaner, with much more funding and much more violence. Many people have been killed by ICE, including American citizens and people who’ve lived in the United States for a long time. And many, many more people have been hurt in their homes and at work and at school and on the streets. 

Not everyone can take the risk of being arrested like I was, but nearly everyone can do something to show ICE that what they’re doing is wrong, and that we care about our neighbors whether they’re new immigrants or have been here for many generations. Grownups can call their representatives. They can learn how to report an ICE sighting. They can boycott companies like Amazon, Target, and Hilton that are collaborating with and enabling ICE. They can sign up for court watch shifts. They can join a mutual aid society or another organization in their neighborhood or city. They can literally just talk to their neighbors and build local community so that if something bad happens, there’s a collective network to draw on. 

A lot of the time, sweetheart, people don’t do these things not because they don’t care but because they don’t think it will make a difference. But it will. Last night it took almost an hour once the police arrived for them to begin arresting us, because the executives at Hilton wanted to avoid the optics of such arrests. If enough people cancel Hilton reservations, or stage protests like this at other Hilton properties, or call and email their corporate offices, eventually they will relent because they’re a business. Businesses care about profit. Representatives care about being reelected. We are not helpless, and if we can act with sustained courage— each of us doing whatever we can— we will help our fellow humans learn to be kind to one another and see in one another’s faces the divine reflection I see in yours. 

Nathaniel, you’re in a stage of your life where nearly everybody is kind to you, and I hope you stay there as long as you can. But part of being someone people are generally nice to is figuring out how to help people who aren’t as lucky. You’ll learn more about this as you grow. What it meant for me last night was that, even though I wanted to be home with you, I knew that missing one bedtime with you was worth it to help send a message to Hilton and to ICE. Because so many mamas and dadas are being taken away from their babies with no idea when or if they’ll see them again. Because agents are treating people as less than human, and as Jews we know all too well where that leads. Because if we want the society I dream of for you, and all the little ones like you, we adults have to build it. 

I promise extra snuggles tonight. I love you.

Mama