Just weeks into his second term, Trump has unleashed a shock-and-awe campaign to publicize his supposed war against “foreign criminals” and fentanyl. Within the first month of his presidency, ICE has rounded up and deported 37,660 undocumented workers and their families.
Liberals paved the way
The Democrats paved the way for Trump’s anti-immigrant offensive. In Biden’s final year in office, ICE averaged 57,000 removals and returns each month. There were 1.9 million deportations in Trump’s first term—compared to 4 million under Biden, and 5.3 million under Obama.
While Biden and Obama worked to keep their campaigns of terror against undocumented immigrants off the front pages, Trump is actively seeking headlines and flooding social media with statistics about how many have been arrested and kicked out.
Some Democrats are leaping to support Trump’s crackdown. Along with 11 other Democrats, Arizona Senator Ruben Gallego, formerly of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, voted for the racist Laken Riley Act. It grants law enforcement with similarly broad powers to those Gallego himself fought against early in his political career.
Gallego claims that stronger border protections are what “working-class” Latinos want. But like most demographics, Latino voters’ top concerns in the presidential election were inflation, the economy, and housing. Deporting undocumented migrants won’t seriously address any of these bread-and-butter issues—especially if food prices climb due to a shortage of agricultural workers.
The real beneficiaries of “strong border” hooliganism are the capitalists, who enrich themselves by exploiting undocumented workers, using the fear of arrest and deportation to discipline and control them. This is why both capitalist parties carry out raids and deportations whenever they are in power.
Bullying tactics
Trump threatened several Latin American governments—including Mexico, America’s top trading partner—with tariffs, sanctions, and more if they don’t cooperate with his mass deportation program. This bullying has convinced the presidents of Mexico, Colombia, and Venezuela to receive US military jets full of deportees.
ICE agents kitted out with flashbangs and armored vehicles are executing raids more fitting for an episode of a television series like S.W.A.T. or NCIS. In addition, Trump sent 1,500 active-duty troops to join 2,500 already at the US-Mexico border, and has promised to increase the deployment to 10,000.
The Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 prohibits the federal military from conducting domestic law enforcement. Nevertheless, federal troops are providing “intelligence” for the 18,000-strong Border Patrol, and “reprioritizing” Department of Defense funds to build Trump’s border wall.
This is a continuation of the 30-year bipartisan practice of using military force on the southern border. The original 2,500 troops were stationed there by Biden; his predecessors Obama, Bush, and Clinton also sent soldiers to the border.
On January 29, Trump ordered that the infamous Guantanamo Bay naval base and detention center, located in Cuba—where Posse Comitatus doesn’t apply—expand its facilities to hold up to 30,000 detainees. Last month, Secretary of State Marco Rubio struck a deal with the president of El Salvador to transfer detained migrants and imprisoned Salvadorean citizens to the Central American country’s notorious CECOT megaprison.
Indiscriminate violence and intimidation
The armed bodies of the state are training their military-grade weapons indiscriminately on undocumented Latinos. An NBC investigation showed that, in one day’s raids, nearly half of arrestees had no criminal background. Trump’s highly-publicized campaign has more to do with terrorizing working-class immigrants than it does with stopping the illegal importation of fentanyl.
If Trump is going to keep the cameras rolling, ICE will need to secure enough money for the would-be Deporter-in-Chief’s daily quota of 1,200–1,400 arrests. In January, daily arrests only reached an average of 1,100, with ICE officers working six or seven days a week in some locations.
Tom Homan, Trump’s “border czar,” wants to increase the agency’s capacity to hold up to 100,00 detainees, over and above its current limit of 40,000. Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, who reported that Homan was “begging” for more money, is happy to oblige by introducing a bill to provide $175 billion to “secure” the southern border and another $150 billion in new military spending.
If Trump really intends to deport 11 million undocumented workers from the US, it will cost an estimated $300 billion to expand ICE’s operations, build new detention facilities, and burn more jet fuel deporting migrants. It won’t be Trump or his billionaire friends who foot that bill, but the American working class—and taxpaying immigrants, too.
Workers have nothing to gain by Trump’s deportation program, which is just another way for the ruling class to divide us along national, racial, and ethnic lines.
Fight back with workers’ unity!
Immigrant rights protests have flared up since the dramatic ICE raids began, with thousands of protesters in the streets of Los Angeles, Houston, Denver, and other cities. But it is not enough to distribute “know your rights” literature, nor is it possible for small groups of activists to throw themselves against ICE to stop the deportations. It will take nothing less than mass working-class mobilization to end the crackdown.
There is historical precedent for just such a movement. In 2006, the Bush administration targeted immigrants with the repressive Sensenbrenner Bill to distract from the disaster facing American imperialism in Iraq. Millions of immigrant workers and their supporters hit the streets, culminating with strikes and mass mobilizations on May Day—the closest the US has ever come to a national general strike. This militancy succeeded in killing the Sensenbrenner Bill.
A real fightback against Trump’s anti-worker offensive will require bringing the economy to its knees by shutting down workplaces. In such a struggle, communists will demand quality jobs, universal healthcare, and affordable housing for American-born and immigrant workers alike.
In this fight, when it becomes evident that an injury to one worker is an injury to all, native-born workers will come to recognize that their enemy is not foreign-born workers, but the capitalists who exploit us all. It is the imperialist ruling class that has created hell on earth across Latin America, leading to mass immigration. Only by seizing the commanding heights of the economy can we bring about America’s second “Golden Age”—one led by workers fighting shoulder-to-shoulder, regardless of where they were born.