Across the country, the Trump administration is sending heavily militarized ICE agents to rip apart immigrant communities. They have snatched and dragged people away in unmarked vans, with officers in plain clothes, masked, and providing no identification. They have deported dozens of immigrants to brutal prisons in other countries. They have targeted children as young as four years old, students in elementary, middle, and high school. They’ve arrested people at their homes, their workplaces, at churches, the grocery store, tearing apart families. ICE has arrested people when they show up for their immigration hearings.
And now they have targeted Los Angeles, the second largest city in the country, with one of the largest immigrant populations. Sending large squads of militarized ICE agents with armored vehicles into immigrant working-class communities is a blatant provocation. Now they have used the resistance to their terrorism as the pretext to send in the National Guard and the Marines, in open defiance of both the L.A. Mayor and the Governor of California. They think they can make an example of those who try to resist.
These raids are meant to terrorize immigrant communities, to try to intimidate immigrant workers, to increase their vulnerability, and ultimately to increase their exploitation. They are meant to frighten people into submission, to try to get us to accept a generalized state of repression. Trump has made it very clear that he would like to arrest, round up and deport citizens in addition to immigrants — anyone who refuses to accept the blatant authoritarian rule of the billionaire class. This is another step in that direction.
But so far, rather than silence people into submission, their open attacks have rallied people to resist. Across the country, in big cities and small towns, people have been coming together to show that we are not falling for their attempts to divide and intimidate us. They think they can just repeat their lies that immigrants are criminals who suck up community resources. But we are not falling for this!
Immigrants are workers, essential to the day-to-day functioning of the society. Many of those under attack have lived here for years, many for decades, working, raising families, doing the most difficult and exploitative work in the country. They are not criminals — they are a part of the working class. Any attack on immigrants is an attack on us all!
The agenda of the Trump administration could not be any clearer. As they carry out a blatant transfer of wealth to billionaires, slashing vital social services, gutting programs that provide some assistance to the working class, they are escalating their assault on immigrants. They want to use their attacks on immigrants as a wedge to divide the working class. And they want to terrorize and intimidate us all into fear and submission.
There is only one thing that stands in the way of their agenda. It is not the politicians of the Democratic Party and the their empty threats and promises. They may be posturing now, but they too uphold this system and defend their own anti-immigrant attacks. The recent protests in Los Angeles have shown the limits of the so-called guardrails to this system — the courts, the constitution, Congress. None of these are enough! The only guardrails are us — the organized masses of working people, standing up and standing together to resist all of their attacks to our lives.
If we can remain vigilant, and deepen our organizing efforts, we can unite our forces, and bring together all of those who are under attack and those who are not targeted – yet. That is where our power lies! We are the majority, and the working class does the work to make society run. If we can stand together in defense of immigrants, and refuse to let them divide us, we can push back against Trump and the whole rotten system he defends.
