Listen 11 min
Share
Comment on this story Comment
Add to your saved stories
Save
Gustavo Torres had just left a pro-Palestinian rally at Freedom Plaza in D.C. when he reached for the words to express his solidarity with a people who are suffering.
Nearly a month had passed since Israel began attacks in Gaza after the killing and kidnapping of Israelis by Hamas militants, and Torres, the longtime executive director of CASA, a consequential immigrants’ rights group based in Maryland, felt moved to weigh in. He, too, had endured violence in Colombia, his native country.
Fast, informative and written just for locals. Get The 7 DMV newsletter in your inbox every weekday morning. ArrowRight
So on Nov. 6, he called for an immediate cease-fire to “halt the systematic ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people” alongside protest photos uploaded to CASA’s accounts. He condemned the use of U.S. tax dollars to “promote the ongoing violence,” and offered his strong support of “the rights of Indigenous peoples and historically colonized nations to reclaim their land.”
Advertisement
For Torres, the 255-word statement was a call for peace. But in the politically powerful D.C. suburb of Montgomery County, home to Maryland’s largest Jewish population — it has created anything but.
Within an hour, Torres said, his words came down, but the fallout continued. In the days that followed, a major donor pulled its funding and lawmakers questioned the group’s political activity. Some even called to defund it. The organization, lauded for decades as a champion for the rights of the disenfranchised, now finds itself embroiled in a public, personal fight for its future.
Torres was initially taken aback by the uproar, he said, and questioned how words that spoke for peace and humanity caused pain.
“We said, what is wrong with this?” he recalled in a recent interview. But as public call-outs escalated, he began making his apologies in private. “Our friends call us and say, ‘Gustavo … Let me tell you what the language means for us, how that is wrong, if you allow me to educate you.’ And we realized that was clearly, clearly wrong language.”
Advertisement
In numerous private conversations, which he declined to detail, he listened to several people, many of whom he considered friends, identify the lines and words that had caused harm.
And he worried about what the fallout could mean for all the good he still hoped to do at the organization he has led for nearly 30 years.
Shouldn’t the work he and his colleagues had done providing English classes and connecting people with jobs, health care and vaccinations count for more than one mistake?
“I made that statement and, yes, I made a mistake,” Torres said. “Now, they say that they are going to cut our funding. I feel really sad.”
A donor pulls out
When Torres became director of the group in 1994, it had a budget of less than $500,000 and operated out of a church basement. Now, it’s a multimillion-dollar operation running out of a historic mansion in Langley Park, with branch offices in York, Pa., northern Virginia and Georgia.
Advertisement
It expanded alongside a rising and diversifying immigrant population in Maryland’s D.C. suburbs, focusing initially on obtaining licenses for undocumented immigrants.
The left-leaning group has also become known for its advocacy. It has joined other progressive groups in fights for policing reform, access to health care and an expansion of tax credits for the working poor.
With Torres at the helm, CASA has successfully fought in Maryland for in-state college tuition for undocumented students, to prohibit local jails from housing detainees for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and to keep police from asking people about their immigration status during traffic stops and investigations.
The group’s members, clad in red T-shirts, have become a staple in Annapolis and on the National Mall.
Advertisement
To help pay for the services CASA provides, members pay dues and the organization has built relationships with state and local governments, which cover about a third of its annual funding. The rest largely comes from philanthropic partners, including foundations and corporations. Among them is the Harry and Jeanette Weinberg Foundation, which has given CASA $5 million over 16 years, including capital grants for two buildings that bear the name of the foundation’s founders.
Days after the posts, foundation officials met with Torres and members of his senior team and told him how deeply disturbed they were by the statement. Subsequently, they learned about one of the photos that accompanied Torres’s statement on social media. In it, a protester held a sign that read “from the river to the sea,” words that, foundation officials said, “call for the elimination of the State of Israel and the removal of its Jewish citizens.” (Others have debated its meaning.)
It was “indefensible,” they said.
Advertisement
The foundation cut its remaining $150,000 grant for the 2024 budget and plans to redirect it to another nonprofit committed to serving refugees and asylum seekers in Maryland. It also decided to remove Harry and Jeanette Weinberg’s names from the two CASA buildings that the foundation helped fund and said it would pay for the costs associated with removing the signage.
Through a spokesperson, the Weinbergs declined to comment.
Torres in an interview thanked the foundation for its support and said he understands and respects its decision.
But the losses were piling up. Suddenly, a man who for so long had been seen as an advocate for human rights, who had himself fled violence and political persecution in his native Columbia, was the target of public condemnations and private calls for his ouster.
With the posts, Torres inserted CASA into what has become an increasingly bitter debate that has played out across college campuses, on social media and among Democratic voters over the conflict and the United States’ response to it. President Biden has come under fire from liberal members of his party for the administration’s support for the Israeli military operation. And as the war continues, recent polls show a splintering in the party with young voters and voters of color increasingly expressing more sympathy with Palestinians.
Advertisement
CASA’s statement struck a softer tone than other recent public statements in Maryland that have elicited public condemnation.
Share this article Share
The Maryland attorney general on Tuesday suspended Zainab Chaudry, the director of the Maryland chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, from her seat on the state’s Commission on Hate Crime Response and Prevention over her social media posts.
In one, Chaudry directly compared Israel to Nazi Germany — a juxtaposition that is widely seen as antisemitic — with the caption “That moment when you become what you hated most.”
“There are very chilling parallels between what we see occurring in Gaza with other very disturbing, terrifying moments in our world’s history,” Chaudry told The Washington Post in an interview about her posts. She said that she is using her personal social media account to express support for Palestinians who are suffering through attacks and a growing humanitarian crisis, and to recognize the pain of Palestinian Americans who live in Maryland, but that she also condemns attacks on Israeli civilians.
Advertisement
Johns Hopkins Medicine placed Darren Klugman, a doctor and medical school professor, on leave following a series of vitriolic anti-Palestinian social media posts.
Klugman’s account on X, formerly known as Twitter, has since been deleted, but screenshots still circulating online show posts referring to Palestinian people as “animals,” opposing humanitarian aid from the United Nations, and supporting the “massacre” of people living in Gaza.
Kim Hoppe, vice president of communications for Johns Hopkins Medicine, said that Klugman’s posts were “deeply disturbing” and that the doctor had been placed on leave pending a thorough investigation to determine whether he had violated any policies. Klugman did not immediately return a request for comment.
Threats to cut state funding
The discourse occurs against a backdrop of increased incidents of antisemitism in Maryland and the nation.
Advertisement
Montgomery County Council Vice President Andrew Friedson (D) said the statement from Torres showed a “divisive disregard” for the Jewish community in Maryland, which experienced nearly a doubling of reported antisemitic incidents between 2020 and 2021.
He wrote in a response to Torres that, by denying Jews’ historical connections to the region that includes Israel and not recognizing Jews of color, “CASA inexplicably failed to recognize the connection so many Jews have to CASA’s mission and to their own homeland as a people who have been systematically persecuted and forced to flee countless countries for over 2,000 years.”
After receiving calls from constituents, the Montgomery County delegation to Maryland’s state Senate told Torres in a statement that his words were “hurtful, divisive and antisemitic.”
Sen. Benjamin F. Kramer (D-Montgomery), who chairs the delegation and helped craft the letter, said Torres displayed “a complete and total lack of understanding and knowledge of the complexities of the Middle East, the history of the Middle East, the history of both the Jewish people and antisemitism in its myriad forms.”
Kramer said he was disheartened that there was no recognition of the Jewish people in the statement and that Israel was characterized as the aggressor. (One sentence in Torres’s statement condemned the “outrageous attack by Hamas in Israel. Our hearts go out to the innocent children and families caught in the midst of this horrendous conflict.”)
What is Hamas, and why did it attack Israel now?
Two days after Torres’s post, Kramer and his colleagues threatened CASA with the possibility of losing its state funding in the letter.
The services it provides could be offered by organizations other than CASA, he said in an interview, adding the group should search its soul for whether it wants to stick to its mission or “start participating in world politics on issues that they clearly have no understanding about.”
Torres was a college student and union organizer when he fled Columbia in the late 1980s, facing threats on his life. He said he had no idea that the words on the photo promoted Jewish hate. “When I received the call from our friends, I said, ‘WHAT?!’” Torres explained. “That’s why we immediately took it down.”
The senators’ letter prompted groups to come to CASA’s defense. The ACLU of Maryland wrote a letter objecting to the senators’ threat to scrutinize and possibly cut CASA’s funding, citing the First Amendment. Del. Gabriel Acevero (D-Montgomery), an immigrant, said he would “fight any attempt by any Democrat in Annapolis to target resources for new Americans.” And several progressive activists, including a group of Maryland Jews, wrote an op-ed in Maryland Matters supporting CASA. Supporters also placed calls to lawmakers, senators said.
Instead of shining a spotlight directly on the innocent Israeli and Palestinian children and families caught in the midst of this horrendous conflict, we caused dear friends and partners pain and confusion.
Read CASA’s full statement https://t.co/5XEgKyWOOc pic.twitter.com/XyiqXzKfFG
— CASA (@CASAforall) November 16, 2023
Senate Judicial Proceedings Committee Chairman William C. Smith Jr. (D-Montgomery), who signed the Senate delegation letter, said Monday that he supports free speech “but I also believe racially, culturally and religiously insensitive speech should be called out, even amongst friends.” He said that Torres’s words undermined the mission of CASA but that his apology should be enough for everyone to move on.
An apology
Ten days after posting the first statement, Torres finalized another that captured the results of his listening tour and went through about 40 sets of eyes before it was released late last week. He hopes it will be enough.
In the apology, Torres said his goal with the original statement was to “shine a spotlight directly on the innocent Israeli and Palestinian children and families caught in the midst of this horrendous conflict.”
He said he failed.
“Our message was flawed, diminishing of Israeli people, hurtful to many of our Jewish allies, and counter to our goals of advancing peace. For that, I am sorry,” the statement reads, in part.
Kramer said he personally accepts Torres’s apology, describing it as a “good first step with more work to come.” He found it sincere.
The two spoke on Monday night, four days after CASA’s second post.
Kramer asked Torres pointedly whether the apology was rooted in the blowback or an acknowledgment of the harm that was done. “He unequivocally said the apology comes as a response to the harm that we did and the misinformation that he stated,” he said.
It remains unclear what the fallout will be. “The movie’s not finished yet, so we don’t know exactly how it is going to end,” Kramer said.
The conflict erupted as CASA had decided to elevate its voice on international issues, with the creation of an international solidarity committee.
It will deal with world issues that impact “our families and our communities,” said Torres, who plans to implement internal training on antisemitic, anti-Arab and anti-Muslim bias.
The first session, on antisemitism, is scheduled for next week.
Katie Shepherd contributed to this report.
Share
Comments
More coverage of Maryland
HAND CURATED
Family ‘distraught’ after man’s death at Johns Hopkins was ruled a homicide
November 4, 2023
Family ‘distraught’ after man’s death at Johns Hopkins was ruled a homicide
November 4, 2023
Runaway zebras delighted the nation — and exposed their owner’s dark past
October 27, 2023
Runaway zebras delighted the nation — and exposed their owner’s dark past
October 27, 2023
U.S. officials pick Greenbelt, Md., for new FBI national headquarters
November 8, 2023
U.S. officials pick Greenbelt, Md., for new FBI national headquarters
November 8, 2023
View 3 more stories
Loading...