Migrants, yes! ICE, no!

Ever since Trump unleashed his fascistic Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) thugs earlier this year, especially in large urban areas, migrant workers, both documented and undocumented — along with their families — have been living in terror of being physically assaulted, detained and eventually deported.

Trump ordered the invasion of what amounts to the reincarnation of Nazi storm troopers, many of them masked, using slanderous charges that migrant workers are “drug dealers, rapists and criminals” as a pretext to arrest and deport them. The real not-so-underlying reason is to weaponize racism and xenophobia to divide and weaken the multinational working class’s ability to unite to resist the impact of the irreversible capitalist economic crisis on a global scale. 

Social media has exploded with videos showing ICE agents carrying out surprise raids in shopping areas, restaurants, construction sites, farms, schools and even day care centers, randomly kidnapping migrants without any warrants or any due process. 

Children are traumatized witnessing their parents and teachers dragged away by bands of armed thugs to places unknown. In some instances, migrant storeowners are forced to close their small businesses indefinitely to protect their customers and workers from ICE attacks. 

As in any class struggle, repression breeds resistance. And the militant resistance that first began in Los Angeles County months ago has spread to other parts of the country, especially to Chicago, Portland, Oregon, New York City and most recently in Charlotte, North Carolina. As a result, migrant communities have felt support in this fight whenever and wherever ICE raises its ugly head. 

Non-migrant communities have organized grassroots efforts using an array of tactics to show political solidarity with their migrant siblings. These include whistle–blowing campaigns to warn migrants when ICE is spotted in any neighborhoods, physically blocking ICE vehicles, forcing them to retreat and collecting funds for migrant vendors to pay for their goods and services so they are not visibly exposed on the streets by ICE agents. 

The raids have caused such a crisis in Chicago that the city’s Black mayor, Brandon Johnson, a former teacher and teachers’ union organizer, has called for a general strike against ICE there, drawing the wrath of Trump. 

Trump has made it crystal clear that his main objective is to use ICE to force out as many non-English speaking people, especially people of color, to stop the U.S. from becoming more Black, Brown and working class.

Workers World Party encourages our readers to organize even stronger political and practical solidarity with the workers ICE has targeted, whether those forced to leave their home countries located in the Global South or those born in the U.S. No person is illegal.

Just as capitalist exploitation knows no borders, the struggle for unity and solidarity within the working class on a global scale should know no borders. Our class enemy is the same — the profit-hungry, billionaire ruling class and its armed goons, including ICE and the police.