As protests against Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents’ attacks, arrests and brutality against immigrants, and those who come out to support them, spread, growing numbers of unionists and others have looked to come to their aid.
Socialist Workers Party members are finding that workers and young people are attracted to the perspective of building a powerful mass movement backed by the unions to fight to win amnesty for all immigrants in the U.S. They’re eager to discuss broader political questions exploding in the class struggle today.
After Alex Pretti, an intensive care unit nurse and member of American Federation of Government Employees Local 3699 in Minneapolis, was shot and killed in a Jan. 24 confrontation with ICE agents, his union called for vigils to remember him across the country. On Jan. 28 hundreds of nurses attended a vigil and rally at the Department of Veterans Affairs in Washington.
When Pretti confronted ICE agents he had a gun in his waistband, but videos of the confrontation showed he had been disarmed before he was shot and killed. Thousands of workers have turned out for protests against his being killed.
“This is a fledging movement. We need experience to organize and lead it. We need a savvy leadership,” ICU nurse Elizabeth Deal told SWP member Sarah Ullman at the VA action.
“Yes, we need working-class leadership, with the unions taking the lead. Disciplined protests, like this one is, so that workers — with papers and without — and their families can participate in large numbers,” Ullman replied.
“In 2006 some 2 million immigrants and other workers marched in the streets for an amnesty,” SWP member Arlene Rubinstein told Liz Grosh, an ICU nurse who is fighting to win her job back after being fired for union activity last March.
“At the hotel where I work,” Rubinstein said, “one of my co-workers said she participated in those protests in 2006, marching with her parents when she was 6. She remembers being inspired by the power and confidence of being part of a mass movement. This is possible to do again today.”
“I’ve been looking for this newspaper. Strengthen the unions whenever you can,” United Food and Commercial Workers member Yuval Lev said as he subscribed to the Militant at the Veterans Affairs action. Many participants said they were following and supporting the New York nurses strike.
Mass action led by unions needed
Thousands joined protests in San Francisco, San Jose and many smaller cities in the Bay Area Jan. 28-30. Students in Oakland walked out of school to protest ICE’s assaults, swelling a Jan. 30 rally at Fruitvale Plaza in the heart of a working-class immigrant community.
SWP member Betsey Stone reports many protesters stopped by the literature table that party members set up. They were interested in discussing the SWP’s proposals on advancing the fight to defend immigrant workers, the deepening crisis of capitalism, and the threat of more wars.
SWP campaigners found real interest in the example of Cuba’s socialist revolution, selling three copies of Cuba and the Independence War in Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde: The Fall of the Last Colonial Empire in Africa by Cuban revolutionary leader Víctor Dreke.
“There will be protests against ICE violence and deportations all across the country today,” Margaret Trowe — a member of the UNITE HERE union, hotel housekeeper and SWP candidate for Congress — told co-worker Henry Bautista over coffee before work. “There will be a big one in Minneapolis like there was last Friday, and one in Oakland at the Fruitvale BART station.”
Later in the day, Bautista told Trowe he had taken a video of the Berkeley protest from the hotel balcony. After watching the video together, Trowe thanked him, adding “Our class has the power to win.”
“I think so too,” Bautista agreed.
In Seattle Jan. 31 more than 1,000 people came out for a peaceful rally backed by the Service Employees International Union, teachers federations and others. SWP members participated with a banner reading, “For workers’ rights to organize & unionize! Amnesty for undocumented immigrants!” in both English and Spanish.
SWP member Rebecca Williamson spoke with Jennifer Beaton, marching with the health care workers contingent. Beaton described the life-and-death stakes in their fight for adequate staffing ratios.
“It will take a mass movement of tens of millions of workers to take power to begin to really deal with these issues,’ Williamson, a rail worker, replied. Beaton was one of eight rally participants to subscribe to the Militant.
Support Kurdish self-determination
Over 100 people took part in a rally at the Hollywood-Fort Lauderdale International Airport demanding the extension of Temporary Protected Status for Haitian immigrants. SWP member Rachele Fruit met an activist in a Haitian rights organization there.
“I just drove 15 hours to join a Kurdish demonstration in Nashville,” he told her as he bought a copy of the Militant with an article on the fight by the Kurdish people for their national rights. Nashville has the largest population of Kurds of any city in the U.S.
Several hundred people marched in Montreal Jan. 31 in solidarity with Kurds in Syria fighting violent government attacks. Joe Young, Communist League candidate in the upcoming 2026 Quebec elections, joined the action, bringing the CL’s support.
That evening three young Kurds, Ramazan Efe Dogan, Yilmaz Aydogan and Siyar Zana, joined CL member Annette Kouri on a panel at a Militant Labor Forum in solidarity with the Kurdish struggle. “Kurds don’t ask for pity. They seek the right to speak their own language, live on their own land,” Dogan told the meeting.
Two participants subscribed to the Militant and one got Is Socialist Revolution in the US Possible? which describes the victorious fight for immigrant rights in the U.S. in 2006 and 2007.
To campaign with the SWP and Communist Leagues, contact the Militant distributor nearest you in the Directory.