Since taking office, President Donald Trump’s administration has launched a far-reaching effort to deport hundreds of thousands of workers without papers, posing a serious challenge to the labor movement. Trump slanders immigrant workers, saying millions are criminals or worse, and calls them “garbage.”
He seized on the shooting of two National Guard troops in Washington, D.C., by a refugee from Afghanistan Nov. 26 to deepen the assaults. One of the guard members, 20-year-old Sarah Beckstrom, was killed. Rahmanullah Lakanwal was charged with the shooting. The administration immediately suspended all asylum applications by immigrants in the U.S. — some 1.5 million people.
It announced it will “reassess” all applications approved under the previous administration and indefinitely bar Afghanis from entering the country. Lakanwal had been granted asylum in the U.S. after fighting in a CIA-funded pro-U.S. paramilitary unit. He was evacuated when Kabul fell in 2021.
“If they can’t love our country, we don’t want them,” Trump said.
The administration paused all immigration applications from 19 nations, mostly in Africa and the Middle East. “They shouldn’t punish all of us because of one person,” Obaidullah Durani, a delivery driver in Arizona originally from Afghanistan, told the New York Times. “This is a country of laws and democracy; the man has been arrested.”
Trump’s deepening attack on immigrants comes on the heels of a step up in deportations and border stops under the Democratic administration of Joseph Biden. It has gone hand in hand with growing threats to target people for their religious beliefs and political views, a clear violation of the U.S. Constitution. Trump says he would like to strip U.S. citizenship from immigrants he says “undermine domestic tranquility” or hold views he calls “non-compatible with Western Civilization.”
The administration’s latest measures come after months of expanding raids by Immigration and Customs Enforcement in the streets, at car washes, Home Depot parking lots, warehouses, factories and farms. These swoops leave an entire layer of the working class, numbering in the millions, either incarcerated, deported or living and working in greater fear.
The government also ended protected legal status for hundreds of thousands of workers from Venezuela, Haiti and other crisis-ridden countries, to try to force them to leave the U.S.
Workers seized by ICE face brutal conditions in government or for-profit privately run detention centers, separated from their families and facing deportation.
But many immigrants find their neighbors, co-workers and others — including Trump supporters — don’t agree with these assaults. They see immigrants as fellow workers. Support can be won for the release of detainees from unions, churches and others in the communities where immigrants live and work. The scope, brutality and arbitrary character of the raids are unpopular among wide layers of the working class.
Hundreds turned out in Astoria, Queens, a neighborhood of New York City, Dec. 7 to protest against the arrest and separation of Fei Zheng from his 6-year-old son Yuanxin. They had fled from China, fearing deepening repression there. Zheng was reporting to a scheduled immigration appointment at the Federal Plaza in Manhattan Nov. 26 when ICE grabbed him. Its agents regularly stake out immigration hearings, a gross violation of people’s rights.
Zheng is being held at a detention wing of the Orange County jail, while Yuanxin is in custody of the federal Office of Refugee Resettlement at an undisclosed location. Many of his classmates at P.S. 166 and their families joined the protest, as well as area unionists.
Raids heighten insecurity of millions
ICE agents say they’ve seized an average of 1,100 people every day in recent weeks, up from 821 daily between mid-January and mid-October. The administration is building new detention centers to incarcerate 100,000 people at a time, up from the current capacity of 40,000.
To hamper workers picked up in the raids from winning release, the administration in July ruled that undocumented workers were to be denied bond hearings, undermining constitutional protection of equal treatment under the law. A federal judge overturned the ruling Nov. 25.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced Nov. 28 steps to tighten the use of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, passed under the Democratic administration of Bill Clinton in 1996. The act bars workers without papers from obtaining government benefits.
The administration tries to convince U.S.-born workers and immigrants with legal papers that this will mean more benefits will be available for them. In fact the only consequence will be to deepen divisions within the working class, as the bosses press forward their assaults against the jobs, work conditions and wages of all working people.
Since May the administration has urged judges to place more workers picked up by ICE into “expedited removal.” Also adopted under Clinton, this fast-track expulsion allows an immigration officer to act as prosecutor and judge, summarily deporting anyone they choose following a single interview. This undermines everyone’s constitutional right to legal representation and due process.
The goal behind Trump’s foul-mouthed smearing of immigrants, and his administration’s stepped-up raids, deportations and the denial of constitutional protections is not aimed at expelling all undocumented workers. It’s to create heightened insecurity among workers without papers, making them more vulnerable to superexploitation by profit-hungry bosses.
In fact, over the summer Trump exempted from this crackdown bosses in agriculture, meatpacking plants, hotels and restaurants, all of whom are dependent on immigrant labor.
While attacks on workers without papers are accelerating today, they’re consistent with the course of the U.S. ruling class regardless of which party is in the White House. The government seeks to regulate the flow of immigration to meet the bosses’ needs for cheap labor, and to do so in a way that deepens divisions among workers.
The bosses’ capacity to reap profits off workers’ backs depends on the competition among workers for jobs, which is inevitable under capitalism.
The scapegoating of immigrant workers by the bosses and their government does find an echo among some workers. But most want to see the working class united, the better to defend our own class interests.
The unions can advance a course to unify working people regardless of our immigration status, or our nationality, religion or race, so we can fight against the twin afflictions of joblessness and high prices. Crucial to that struggle is fighting for an amnesty for all workers in the U.S. without papers, the only road to ending the pariah status imposed on over 11 million of our fellow workers.