History is filled with tales of people who fled persecution and instability, walking thousands of miles on foot, leaving behind most everything and everyone they have known, not only to save their own lives, but the lives of their children. The plight of Central Americans currently waiting at the border to seek asylum is little different.

For the Jewish people, our history particularly is marked by expulsions and forced migrations, from Moses in Egypt to the Spanish Inquisition. In the past century alone, Jews desperately tried to escape the Holocaust and the pogroms of Eastern Europe and Russia. Ethiopian Jews had to seek refuge when their country was ravaged by civil war.

America has often served as refuge for Jews — it certainly was for our families. We were both lucky to grow up in Houston. One of us spoke Spanish over Shabbat dinner as parents talked about life in Mexico, which had been a haven for great-grandparents fleeing Ukraine. The other was told the story of her family, a great-grandfather walking on foot across Russia as a young boy without his parents, fleeing persecution, finding his way to Houston to make a life where future generations could succeed.

There is an undeniable, deep-rooted nexus between immigration and Judaism. No wonder that entwined in Jewish faith are the tenets of welcoming the stranger and Tikkun Olam (repairing the world through social justice). After all, Jews have continuously found themselves unwelcome as strangers in new lands. Our neighbors to the south, who are now “strangers” seeking a new life in America, similarly do not find themselves welcomed. It is astonishing to think that a nation whose history is so deeply (and richly) filled with stories of immigration would respond with such aggressive xenophobia.

It didn’t have to be like this. The United States has a structured, legal pathway to welcome those seeking asylum, process their claims and determine a legal outcome. The current panic at the border is the culmination of a coordinated dismantlement of the U.S. asylum process, which has included tearing parents away from their children and willfully ignoring case law built on years of established precedent. The Trump administration has declared that America is no longer a place welcoming those seeking a better life for their families. Instead, it has implemented a ban on certain asylum seekers and denied others due process. In the Houston area alone, more than 4,000 adult immigrants and over 1,300 child migrants — many of them asylum-seekers — have been detained without adequate access to attorneys or social services.

This anti-immigrant sentiment doesn’t end at the border.

On Saturday, Oct. 27, a man walked into a synagogue in Pittsburgh and massacred congregants attending services in what was the deadliest anti-Semitic attack in U.S. history. This horrific act of hate was not just aimed at Jews. It was inspired, in part, by hatred of immigrants and fueled by rhetoric that labels foreigners as “the other.” The perpetrator specifically mentioned the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HAIS) in his social media ravings, and equated Jews and immigrants as enemies against his vision of a nativist America.

HAIS is hardly the only Jewish organization to oppose policies like family separation and broader attacks on asylum seekers and refugees. Welcoming foreigners remains a key moral tenet of the Anti-Defamation League. In our current political atmosphere, that makes us a target.

The number of anti-Semitic incidents in the United States grew by 57 percent last year. Other hate crimes are on the rise, too. Just a few days prior to the Pittsburgh attack, a man publicly executed two African-Americans in a Louisville grocery store, apparently because of their race.

As long as politicians stoke fear about those seeking refuge, we must push back. We must hold our leaders, and each other, accountable for words that incite fear and perpetuate the demonization of immigrants. We must speak up and say: No, Central American migrants are not invaders any more than our ancestors were.

The dangerous behavior that perpetuates violent acts of aggression, whether pipe bombs in the mail or a mass shooting in a synagogue, will predictably lead to more bloodshed if calls for civility are not heeded.

As thousands of fellow human beings seeking asylum turn to us for protection, it falls on average Americans to speak up for our national ideals. We must recommit to our values of liberty and equality for all. We must call upon our elected officials not to succumb to xenophobic animus toward immigrants. Americans must respect the dignity and basic human rights of everyone and call on our communities to denounce anti-immigrant bigotry, racism and xenophobia wherever it exists.