The unqualified defense of constitutional protections to prevent government interference in our lives, our unions and in political activity is vital for workers. In the U.S. — where the ruling capitalist families ruthlessly exploit working people — free speech, freedom of assembly, the right to due process and other fundamental freedoms are crucial whenever workers organize to defend our class interests.
These protections are essential for workers as we take steps to build our own political party, a party of working people necessary to lead millions to take political power into our own hands.
The freedoms enumerated in the U.S. Constitution were won as part of giant revolutionary struggles, from the war for independence from the British crown to the Civil War that overthrew slavery. These gains have since been reinforced over decades of class struggles.
For the last nine years the primary threat to constitutional freedoms has come from the Democratic Party and the middle-class, meritocratic layers who increasingly shape its political course. In their panic-stricken reaction to Donald Trump, they sought to disenfranchise tens of millions of working people, who they view as “deplorables,” by conducting an unprecedented witch hunt using frame-up cases aimed at driving Trump out of politics.
Millions of workers saw nothing for them with the lesser-evil choices presented by the two main capitalist parties in 2024. Many stayed at home, some voted for Trump, fewer for the Democrats, and Trump won. But this hasn’t ended the threat to constitutional freedoms.
Rulers erode freedoms
These protections have been continually eroded by successive Democratic and Republican administrations, as they seek to defend the U.S. rulers’ interests by expanding the powers of the imperialist state.
Flight attendants, postal workers and rail workers fighting for better contracts have all come up against laws that say they have no right to strike. Under the bipartisan “war on terror,” both the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations sought to refurbish the image of the FBI and expand its use of informers and wiretaps to spy on political groups and individuals because of their country of origin, religion or opposition to Washington’s policies.
The same woke social layers that led the assault on Trump are at the forefront of efforts to restrict what working people can read, say or do, often openly disparaging the First Amendment’s protection of free speech.
Since taking office for a second term, President Trump’s administration has ruled by issuing a record number of executive orders. By sidelining debate in Congress, Trump is furthering steps taken by the Obama and Biden administrations, which also moved to centralize power in the hands of the presidency, eroding “checks and balances” written into the Constitution.
Constitutional protections are also being shredded by the Trump administration’s offensive against workers who are immigrants, including a frontal assault on the right to due process.
The government has launched workplace raids and deportations that are aimed primarily at striking fear into millions of workers without papers in the U.S. and reinforcing their second-class status. The rulers hope this will make them more vulnerable to superexploitation, deepen divisions among working people and drive down wages and conditions for all.
Workers start from an opposite class standpoint. In the course of the class struggle, working people seek to find ways to overcome the division the rulers impose on us, so we can fight more effectively. Protecting political rights, organizing opposition to the government’s deportations and fighting for an amnesty for workers without papers are central to advancing that aim.
Days into the administration, a bipartisan Congress adopted the Laken Riley Act. It makes mandatory the detention of any worker without papers who is arrested or charged with a crime, even if they haven’t had the right to a trial. The law violates protections guaranteed in the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, which says the government can’t “deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.”
The fight by the family of sheet metal worker Kilmar Abrago Garcia and his union against his illegal deportation to El Salvador has become a flashpoint in this battle.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials seized and deported Abrago Garcia, a member of SMART Local 100, March 15, despite the fact he has never been convicted of anything and that an immigration judge in 2019 specifically barred deporting him to his home country because his life would be in danger there.
Immigration authorities arrested and deported him anyway, “without the semblance of due process,” Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson of the U.S. Court of Appeals wrote April 17 in ruling against this.
‘Alien Enemies Act’ targets workers
Two days later the U.S. Supreme Court issued a temporary order April 19 blocking the administration from invoking the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to summarily deport immigrant workers, including alleged members of a Venezuelan criminal gang, Tren de Aragua. The high court had previously ruled that the government has to give these immigrants advance notice and that they had the right to challenge their removal in court.
The Alien Enemies Act was invoked during World War I to try to compel German Americans to register with the government. Some 6,000 were detained.
It was used again during the second imperialist slaughter when Democratic President Franklin Roosevelt carried out the mass arrest and internment of more than 100,000 people of Japanese descent. Their homes and property were seized as they were hauled off to concentration camps. To their shame, the internment of Japanese Americans was backed by the Communist Party, part of its support for the U.S. rulers’ war.
Trump’s invocation of the Alien Enemies Act sets a dangerous precedent, opening the door for its further use against working people as the crisis of capitalism deepens. It’s a reminder of what the U.S. rulers will do whenever they prepare for war. And it underscores the importance of working people and our unions fighting to safeguard constitutional protections against state intrusion.