In the face of escalating anti-immigrant rhetoric and policy, a growing movement is drawing a stark and necessary line from the past to the present. With the launch of the Blue Triangle Solidarity campaign, activists at Witness at the Border and more than 30 allied organizations are reclaiming a historical symbol of persecution and transforming it into a call to action: “I Stand With Immigrants.”
The inverted blue triangle, once a Nazi classification mark forced onto migrants in concentration camps, has been adopted as a symbol of solidarity and resistance. Like the pink triangle, once used to brand queer people in Nazi Germany and later reclaimed by LGBTQ+ activists, the blue triangle now stands as a reminder: the crimes of history echo into the present. And we must answer.
Joshua Rubin, founder of Witness at the Border, puts it plainly: “Immigrants are under attack, and, right now, we all have to be immigrants, don’t we?” His words reflect the urgency of our moment.
From indiscriminate ICE raids to mass detention and deportation to the denial of asylum at the southern border, to the dangerous dehumanization of migrants in political discourse, the United States is repeating old mistakes, mistakes that history has shown can lead to atrocities.
This campaign is not just symbolic. It’s a warning. The Holocaust did not begin with gas chambers; it began with language, laws and identification.
Today, migrant families are held in for-profit detention centers, children are separated from their parents and thousands are turned away at the border without due process. These are not distant, isolated events. They are the result of deliberate policy choices that criminalize movement and treat migration as a threat rather than a human right.
The Blue Triangle Solidarity campaign brings a powerful visual reminder of this injustice to rallies, marches and social media. It links the cruelty of the past to the cruelty of now.
Activists like Lee Goodman, who wears a replica of a concentration camp prisoner’s uniform with a blue triangle attached, asks us to remember. Not out of nostalgia or grief, but out of duty.
Goodman is clear-eyed in his call: “It is appropriate and important to point out the connections between what is happening to migrants now and what has happened in the past.”
He and others are invoking a simple, terrifying truth: persecution doesn’t always come in the same form, but it often comes from the same place—fear, ignorance and the systemic stripping away of another’s humanity.
There are those who will say that the comparison between today’s cruel treatment of migrants and Nazi practices is too extreme. That today’s immigration enforcement is not the Holocaust. They are correct, and yet they miss the point.
The Holocaust is not a single event, it is a warning. It shows us how systemic persecution begins. How violence is slowly normalized. How humanity is gradually erased.
The United States has its own history to reckon with: from the Indian Removal Act to the Chinese Exclusion Act to the incarceration of Japanese-Americans during World War II to the mass deportations under “Operation Wetback,” Trump 1.0’s family separation policies and Trump 2.0 initiatives such as the new detention center in Florida’s Everglades, which evokes some of the worst abuses of slavery and the era of Jim Crow.
The Blue Triangle Solidarity campaign calls us to connect the dots and to break the cycle.
This is a time for moral clarity. It is not enough to be vaguely sympathetic to immigrant struggles. It is not enough to decry racism in the abstract. We must take a side. The blue triangle asks us to do just that.
Wearing the blue triangle says: I see what is happening. I will not look away. I will not be silent. I stand in solidarity with immigrants. If you are an immigrant, I will do what I can to provide a safe space for you.
To stand with immigrants is to stand with the principle that no human being is illegal. That borders must never be barriers to compassion. And that migration, forced or chosen, is not a crime, but a reality of our interconnected world.
In reclaiming the blue triangle, we are not only remembering the past. We are committing to a future in which we will not let history repeat itself.
The choice is ours. Let the symbol be a signal: There is a line we must not cross.
