The surge in immigration raids under President Donald Trump’s administration is aimed at deepening divisions between workers in the U.S. with papers and those without and to intensify the exploitation of all. Millions of undocumented workers have been forced into second-class status, living in fear of arrest and deportation, with fewer rights to defend themselves.
The Democrats and Republicans — the capitalist rulers’ two main parties — both strive to provide exploitable immigrant labor, as needed by the bosses and big capitalist farmers. The Joseph Biden administration excluded or deported over 4.6 million immigrants during his term.
Today Trump has made detention and deportations a prominent hallmark of his administration, using especially cruel measures to try to assure a significant layer of the working class lives in fear. That is, in conditions the bosses hope will make them submissive to attacks on their wages, working and living conditions.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrests have more than doubled, while the number of workers without papers held behind bars is at an all-time high. The Department of Homeland Security claims to have carried out some 400,000 deportations.
As the government steps up its attacks on immigrants, a recent New York Times and Sienna University poll found that even people who believe immigrants who enter the country illegally should face deportation, have growing unease about the extent of the raids and the denial of these workers’ right to due process and a court hearing. Many workers are open to offering solidarity to those who’ve been in the country for years.
One of the best known cases is that of Kilmar Abrego García, a 30-year-old sheet metal apprentice and member of the Sheet Metal, Air, Rail and Transportation Workers union. ICE seized him and deported him to a supermax prison in El Salvador without a hearing, despite the fact a court had specifically ruled that shouldn’t be done.
Abrego García, backed by his union, is now back in the U.S. fighting for his freedom.
Building a working-class movement
The openings to build support to push back the government’s attacks are a product of the fact that large numbers of immigrant workers have lived and worked together alongside native-born workers for several decades. They face the same grinding assaults on living standards. In some cases, they’ve been part of the same union struggles.
Landscape gardener Narciso Barranco was picked up by ICE as he worked trimming the shrubs at an IHOP restaurant in Santa Ana, California, June 21. Mexican-born Barranco has been in the U.S. for 30 years. As he tried to escape, the Department of Homeland Security claimed he menaced ICE agents with the weed whacker he was carrying. They pepper sprayed and beat him, shackled and arrested him.
Barranco asked his son Alejandro to sell the truck he uses in his landscaping business so he could hire a lawyer. But Alejandro and his two brothers set up a GoFundMe account instead, explaining his father’s case and raising more than $200,000 in contributions. In addition to funding his legal defense, some of the money was deposited into Narciso Barranco’s account. He used it to buy food for fellow detainees at the ICE facility where he was held, and to provide funds for prisoners to phone their families.
His sons hooked up with a local immigrant rights group and organized a vigil and march in his support.
Twenty-four days after his arrest, Barranco was released. “There’s so many more people going through situations like this right now,” Alejandro Barranco told the press. “It finally hit me that this is bigger than us.”
In Rochester, New York, ICE agents raided a construction site Sept. 9, arresting one worker who had been working on a roof. Two other workers there targeted for arrest refused to come down. A crowd of about 100 people gathered at the site to protest the raid, organized by immigrant rights groups and local churches. After a four-hour standoff, the ICE officers backed off. The two workers got away.
Not all these fights end in victories. Harjit Kaur, a 73-year-old seamstress, was arrested in San Francisco Sept. 8. Several hundred people joined a protest against her detention Sept. 12. Despite having lived in the U.S. for over three decades, Kaur was deported to India.
These fights and others like them attract widespread support from working people. But the media has concentrated on confrontations and deadly assaults at ICE facilities carried out by antifa, other “woke” radical middle-class groups and individuals.
Joshua Jahn took a high-powered rifle, climbed up a nearby building and opened fire at ICE personnel at their office in Dallas Sept. 24. He killed one immigrant detainee and wounded two others before killing himself. He wrote “ANTI-ICE” on his ammunition.
For months an ICE facility in the South Waterfront area of Portland, Oregon, has been the site of nightly attacks by black-outfitted, masked and helmeted groups. The Trump administration seized on the clashes as justification to order the National Guard to Portland Sept. 28. The administration is now appealing a court ruling that blocked the deployment.
The government is testing how far it can go deploying troops as a repressive force at home as it prepares the ground for their use in wars to come overseas, and against union and other working-class struggles that lie ahead in the U.S.
The unions should take the lead in struggles against raids and deportations. A union-led struggle for an amnesty for all workers in the U.S. without papers can unify the working class and strengthen the unions, the better to fight for the class interests of all workers.