In response to the recent Supreme Court decisions on immigration, Rabbi Sandra Lawson, Executive Director of Carolina Jews for Justice, issued the following statement:

Yesterday, the Supreme Court ruled to allow the administration to end Temporary Protected Status for approximately 350,000 Haitian immigrants and 6,000 Syrian immigrants who have been living and working legally in the United States,  many for years, some for decades.

Here in North Carolina, we are home to a growing Haitian community of over 13,000 residents, centered in Wake County, Mecklenburg County, and the Triad. These are our neighbors. Taxpayers. Business owners. Parents. They came here legally. They built lives here. And now the Court has cleared the way to remove them.

We have seen this before.

In 1939, the MS St. Louis carried over 900 Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany. The United States turned them away. More than 250 of those passengers were later killed in the Holocaust. We tell that story every year as a moment of moral failure we vow never to repeat.

But here is the difference: those refugees were turned away at the door. These families are already here. They are already woven into the fabric of our communities. Uprooting them is not turning away strangers — it is expelling our neighbors.

As the Jewish Council for Public Affairs stated: "This is the same cruelty that shut out Jews fleeing the Holocaust not very long ago."

At CJJ, we believe that Jewish safety and immigrant safety are bound together. The same white supremacist ideology that fuels antisemitism fuels xenophobia. We cannot fight one and ignore the other.

Lo ta'amod al dam re'echa.

"Do not stand idly by the blood of your neighbor." — Leviticus 19:16