Because "We've Seen This Before," Never Again Action Protesters Shut Down Amazon Offices in Boston

Demonstrators with the Jewish activist group Never Again Action on Thursday shut down a Cambridge, Massachusetts Amazon office in protest of the tech giant’s coordination and cooperation with President Donald Trump’s war on immigrants. 

“As a Jewish person, we’ve seen this before,” Ben Lorber, one of the protesters for the action, told The Boston Globe. “I had ancestors killed in the Holocaust. We feel this in our bones. We need to mobilize.”

Amazon’s work with the White House on immigration detention has been a controversial flashpoint for the world’s largest online retailer. As Common Dreams reported in July, the company’s work with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has drawn protests from both the company’s opponents and workers. 

Never Again marched from Boston’s New England Holocaust Memorial to Cambridge on Thursday, temporarily snarling traffic on a number of city streets.

The group occupied the Amazon office until 12 of the demonstrators were arrested.

In a dispatch from his column Hell World, Boston-based writer Luke O’Neil noted the current climate in the city’s courtrooms, including, as Common Dreams reported Wednesday, Judge Richard Sinnott’s refusal to allow Suffolk County DA Rachel Roillins’ office decline to prosecute demonstrators from last weekend’s so-called “Straight Pride Parade.”

“You would think they will be let off easy with a warning like others have in similar recent arrests,” wrote O’Neil, “but considering how bad the situation involving the people arrested at the protest last weekend has gone under the fascist watch of Judge Sinnott—who refused DA Rachael Rollins’ request to dismiss charges against many of the protestors leading to a whole fucking thing—who is to say what will happen.”