MINNEAPOLIS — Hundreds gathered in South Minneapolis Feb. 16 for a march and rally sponsored by the Minnesota AFL-CIO to protest the Immigration and Customs Enforcement and border control agencies’ ongoing arrests and brutality here.
Speakers urged people to keep protesting. The march proceeded to the memorial sites where Renee Good and Alex Pretti were killed by federal agents as they tried to confront and obstruct ICE agents’ operations.
As the much publicized Donald Trump administration’s wind down of its deployment of ICE and Border Patrol agents in Minnesota proceeds, surveillance and arrests of immigrant workers continue. On Feb. 12, auto mechanic Jesus Flores was surrounded and grabbed by ICE agents as he was lured out of his home by a female agent posing as a stranded motorist.
Volunteers acting as a neighborhood watch continue to follow agents driving around the area, as well as stand watch in defense of restaurants and stores owned and frequented by immigrants.
Democratic Party officials like Gov. Tim Walz and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey are patting themselves on the back for denouncing ICE and standing up for the city’s cops as an alternative to federal forces. Overall, they tell workers their problems are the result of a reactionary Republican in the White House.
It is time to draw a balance sheet of what has unfolded here over the last couple of months to help workers and our unions project a road forward to unify the working class.
The Socialist Workers Party is campaigning to explain the class roots of the attacks on immigrants are built into the very nature of the capitalist system. Kevin Dwire, Socialist Workers Party candidate for U.S. Senate from Minnesota, explains that the boss class needs immigrant workers so they can superexploit them in a variety of industries — from work in the fields, to construction, restaurants, garment, delivery and much more.
By scapegoating them because they were born overseas, the capitalist rulers aim to turn them into a pariah layer under constant fear of deportation. They tell U.S.-born workers that immigrants are here to “steal” their jobs, trying to turn two sets of workers against each other. Their overall goal is to drive the wages and working conditions of all workers down and to weaken the fighting capacity of the working class.
Even if all the Border Patrol agents leave Minnesota, Dwire notes, there are still millions of immigrant workers in this country without documents. They are our co-workers, neighbors, and have children in the same schools as ours. Many have lived here for decades.
The SWP calls for the labor movement to take up a fight for amnesty for all undocumented workers in the U.S., Dwire says. This is the road to unify the working class, strengthen the unions and fight for our class interests.
It must be a movement that all workers, including those without papers, can participate in and help lead.
The capitalist rulers always have their border and ICE cops out on the prowl, to intimidate immigrant workers and to find ways to pit them against U.S.-born workers. After that, their immigration system is like a spigot, Dwire says. When they need more labor, they open it. When their economy contracts, they start up new raids and deportations.
In 2006 and 2007 millions of undocumented workers set a marvelous example to think about today, Dwire says. When the draconian Sensenbrenner bill was introduced in Congress, which would have made it a felony to be in the U.S. without papers that the capitalist rulers deem proper, immigrant workers poured into the streets. Their banner was, “We are workers, not criminals.”
The first major action of the campaign, on March 10, 2006, drew some 100,000 people to a march in Chicago.
On May Day protesters launched a nationwide boycott, called A Day Without an Immigrant. Undocumented immigrants stayed away from work and school. Millions marched in the streets in cities big and small. Over 1 million marched in Los Angeles alone. Unions were attracted to the protests. The bill went down to defeat.
A dead-end class alternative
The Democratic Party, the liberals and the middle-class left have a different perspective. They urge people to demonstrate March 28 in yet another “No Kings” rally targeting Donald Trump as the source of all the “peoples” problems. They say what is key is to elect Democrats to retake Congress.
But Democratic presidents from William Clinton to Barack Obama to Joseph Biden were responsible for the deportations of millions of immigrants when it served the interests of the capitalist rulers.
In 1996 Clinton signed into law the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act and the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act. These laws were directly responsible for expanding arrests of immigrants, creating a “fast track” for deportations without due process, setting the foundation for local police and ICE collaboration and making it harder for workers without papers to win legal status.
On Jan. 14 Mayor Frey bemoaned the fact ICE was in Minneapolis. He also said, “I do not support abolishing ICE,” but want to know, why aren’t they going after immigrants in “Texas or Florida or Utah, where you do actually have a large number of undocumented immigrants?”
This was intended as a dig at Trump and Republican governors, but makes it clear the liberal mayor has no principled objection to arrests and deportations. It all depends on the needs of the employers.
The majority of working people in the U.S. are opposed to widespread arrests, deportations and abuse by ICE. They would be attracted to a labor-led campaign for amnesty today.
The fight for amnesty is a life-and-death question for the unions. It is a crucial step in the fight against exploitation and oppression endemic to the crisis-ridden capitalist system.
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