Internationalist Standpoint is publishing an article by Steve Edwards. Steve is a lifelong socialist and labor union activist. He has been involved in anti-racist struggles since the 1970’s. He was an elected steward and later local President in the public sector trade union AFSCME Local 2858, Council 31 (Illinois) for many years where he represented workers in the welfare system, while also building links with organizations of consumers of Medicaid and other public benefits. He was a founder member of Socialist Alternative in the USA and he is currently a member of Chicago Solidarity Now. If you want to contact Solidarity Now you can use this email adress organize@solidaritynow.info
What the Trump regime represents is “shock doctrine” for the USA.
It’s the same principle as the GW Bush administration used during the invasion of Iraq – shock and awe, never mind what gets broken in the process. Elon Musk’s DOGE team used the slogan “move fast and break things” and that is exactly what’s going on.
The human cost has been horrifying. Mothers and fathers torn from their families. Children, in some cases, literally left on the sidewalk as their parents have been seized by masked Government agents on “reasonable suspicion” that they weren’t born in the US of A. Kids kept home from school because their parents are living in fear. School administrators and teachers’ unions having to make plans to keep their students safe from ICE raids, on top of the “active shooter” drills that US schools already have, because US politicians have handed insane power to the arms industry to keep pumping out guns. (Thousands of those guns are also flowing to arm the drug cartels in Mexico that exist to feed the US drug market, furthering the pressures that force people to come to the United States to escape what US imperialism has done to their own communities).
On the day of his second inauguration, January 20th 2025, Trump signed a dizzying welter of executive orders aimed at disrupting institutions, weakening regulations, handing power to unaccountable corporations and supercharging the already draconian border police with the goal of deporting a million people a year. One of these Presidential orders also claims to end birthright citizenship – the rule that anyone born in the country is automatically a citizen. Winning that required a civil war, although as author Greg Grandin has pointed out, “Nearly every country in the Western Hemisphere grants citizenship to children born in its territory irrespective of the nationality of their parents. It’s part of the promise of the New World, that… The children of the oppressed and persecuted would be citizens by right.”
The point of abolishing birthright citizenship is to create a permanent class of workers with no legal rights. It would also inflict a huge burden on hospitals, schools and local authorities and it points in the direction of a national ID for citizens – making anyone without one, essentially rightless.
When Federal courts imposed injunctions against this Constitution-wrecking Executive Order, the Supreme Court, without explanation, said that Federal district courts could no longer impose national injunctions against Presidential acts. Removing the ability of lower courts to issue national injunctions against an overreach of the central government has greatly increased Trump’s power to do as he pleases while allowing the Court to avoid actually taking position on the issue at hand.
Trump’s specific changes to the ways immigration laws are enforced are too numerous to list here but all of them are designed to make deportation easier, as far as possible without court hearings. Amongst other things they make a million previously legal residents illegal. This was part of the agenda that had been worked out, in excruciating detail, by the racist, nativist lawyers and economists that wrote the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 and they came into the White House ready to go from day one.
Attacks on migrants
Why is this happening and why have so many major bourgeois institutions, from the Supreme Court, and corporate mass media on down, caved in to it?
US imperialism is in a long term crisis of profitability. Trump’s offer to his billionaire backers is to return to profitability in the most sweeping way imaginable, by destroying the gains won by the working class over the past hundred and thirty years. If successful this would in theory return US society to the Gilded Age of the late nineteenth century when unions were outlawed, democratic rights were meaningless and railroad baron Jay Gould could boast that he could “hire one half of the working class to kill the other”.
In a future article we will analyse the nature of the Trump regime, including its attacks on students and academics who have protested the genocide in Palestine. The present article will focus on Trump’s attacks on immigrants, particularly the present day Ground Zero, Chicago. Since September 9th, a masked and militarized Federal police force – the Department of Homeland Security’s division of Immigrant and Customs Enforcement, known as ICE, has invaded every community in the Chicago area where the population is significantly Latine.
Trump’s election promise to expel “criminal aliens”, “the worst of the worst”, has been used to justify deporting anyone who wasn’t born in the USA and lacks the resources to fight back. One of several legal maneuvers is to claim that those who ICE rounds up are members of a criminal gang; since criminal gangs are assumed not to keep membership lists, this is a catch-all that can be used against almost anyone from a working class background. The Alien Enemies Act of 1798 was invoked to deport around 250 people, alleged to be members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua, not to Venezuela but to an exceptionally brutal prison in El Salvador.
As these actions have been met with lawsuits, and growing public disgust, it became clear that ICE did not have the resources to deport the vast numbers that Trump had promised. But on July 4th the Republicans passed a reactionary budget bill, the so-called Big Beautiful Bill, which increases funding for ICE by an enormous $76 billion. ICE is now set to have a bigger budget than the armed forces of many countries in the world – a centrally directed national police force on a scale that the US hasn’t seen before. Its umbrella agency, Homeland Security, is already huge, with 80,000 employees, but ICE’s new budget is bigger than all other Federal domestic law enforcement agencies put together. It is recruiting its new agents from existing police forces and the military, offering generous salaries and a $50,000 retention bonus. The bonus alone is more than most Americans make in a year. Its recruiters are clearly aiming to recruit people who buy the racist idea that American culture is under attack, using slogans like “A Heritage to be proud of, a Homeland worth Defending” and “Remember your Homeland’s Heritage”, attached to nineteenth century paintings of white people setting the American West.
According to a detailed study by the Brennan Center for Justice, the largest percentage increase in the “Big Beautiful Budget” goes to “finding, arresting, detaining, and deporting immigrants already living in the U.S., most of whom have not committed a crime and many of whom have had lawful status.”
LA, DC, Chicago
The first round of these large-scale attacks was aimed at Los Angeles, with its enormous Latine population, and Washington DC, a Federal district where the laws allow ICE’s Presidential gendarmes to act most freely. Another round is aimed at Portland, Oregon where Trump holds a grudge over Black Lives Matter protests that occurred during his previous term in office. The raids were framed around the claim that Democrat-run cities, which passed sanctuary laws that limit local cooperation with ICE, are hell-holes from which ordinary residents need to be saved. The threats which Team Trump has invented include “violent criminal alien gangs” and “murder rates comparable to third world countries” or in the case of Portland, the ridiculous claim that the entire city is burning to the ground. Similar to the claim, put forward in advance of the Iraq war, that Iraqis needed rescuing from their dictatorial government and would greet American troops as saviors.
As a Department of Homeland Security spokesperson told ABC News
“Under President Trump and Secretary Noem, nowhere is a safe haven for criminal illegal aliens. If you come to our country illegally and break our laws, we will hunt you down, arrest you, deport you, and you will never return.”
In the 70’s and 80’s it was not impossible for immigrants to obtain legal residency and later, citizenship. This ended under the neoliberal administration of Bill Clinton, who along with turbocharging incarceration and boasting of “ending welfare as we know it” [but only for poor people, mainly women] also created the basis for the present mayhem with the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRAIRA) of 1996, which made millions of non-citizens liable for removal, regardless of their legal status, including expanding the range of offenses that could lead to deportation.
Today, contrary to popular mythology and Right wing tropes on social media, there is no legal path to immigration for the vast majority. This has provided the ruling class with a population of rightless workers with little choice but to take the lowest paid and most physically demanding jobs, unable to access the laws governing labor rights and health and safety. In every region of the US, workers in labor-intensive jobs in agriculture and food production, and service industries like hotels and restaurants, are disproportionately immigrants – a workforce which can be super exploited because of its lack of legal rights.
Trump’s agenda and court rulings
In 2006, a particularly vicious anti-immigrant bill sparked massive protests which, among other things, put May Day back on the calendar in the US, thanks to the Left traditions brought by Latin American workers. The Bush administration, unable to get that law passed, took revenge with a brutal round of workplace raids using the laws already passed under Clinton. This was followed up by mass deportations under Obama who to this day still holds the record for the greatest number of deportations carried out by any US President. The Democrats funded ICE and steadfastly refused to provide a path to legalization, keeping millions of undocumented immigrants in legal limbo, unable to vote on the policies that affect them and unable to access most of the welfare and medical benefits that their taxes were contributing to.
As recently as the beginning of this year the Democrats supported passage of the Laken Riley Act which mandates the detention without bail of noncitizens arrested or charged, as opposed to actually convicted, of a list of crimes some as minor as shoplifting. All of these measures laid the groundwork for the present attacks. Trump 2.0 expanded the policy of expedited removal but the biggest difference between Team Trump and their predecessors is the massively ramped up enforcement – which they can justify as “we’re just enforcing the laws” – and the massive increase in funding and hiring for ICE.
The increased enforcement, however, is only possible because ICE no longer bothers with getting arrest warrants, and is using “expedited removal” based on one of a series of Executive Orders that effectively do away with due process. Team Trump argues that due process – the right to a hearing in court – does not apply to people who are in the US without documentation – which means they’ve put the burden on the individual to prove that they are a citizen or legal resident; a recipe for disappearing people. ICE is blatantly using racial profiling, literally driving around in unmarked, rented vehicles looking for people who “look Hispanic”, particularly if they are engaged in occupations that tend to be done by Latine immigrants – landscaping, construction, food vending, working in restaurant kitchens or in the field. This racial profiling was banned by a Federal judge but as in numerous other cases, that ban was struck down by the Supreme Court using the so-called “Shadow docket”, meaning it was done without a hearing or any explanation, although two Justices did post their opinions after the fact. This is consistent with what the Court has done repeatedly – not fully committing itself to Trump’s positions but consistently striking down injunctions which stop him from acting on them.
Targeted attacks
As stated above, Trump’s renewed attack on immigrant communities began on his second inauguration day with a deluge of executive orders using exaggerated language like “Protecting the American People Against Invasion”.
The way the policy was carried out sent a message: that the administration was going to do this in the most brutal manner possible, without warning, using racial profiling, using racist tropes about gang affiliations and targeting political enemies. One of the earliest cases to come to public attention is that of Maryland construction worker Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who was sent, in defiance of a judge’s order, to a concentration camp in El Salvador. Team Trump brazenly admitted that he had been taken in error but insisted that he would not be coming back. The legal battle around Mr Abrego Garcia was in the headlines for weeks; after months of unjust imprisonment he was brought back to the US in August but was immediately arrested on trumped-up charges and threatened with being deported again, this time to Ghana, a country with which he has no connection. When the Ghanaian government said they were not accepting random deportees from the US, the State Department said they’d send him to some other country in Africa – either Eswatini or Uganda. The rendition of detainees to countries they’ve never been to, some of which have active civil wars going on, was done under the GW Bush administration during the Iraq war and has never been outlawed by subsequent Democratic administrations. Abrego Garcia’s hearings are still going on, clearly the government’s intent is to make an example of him, sending a warning that anyone else who resists will not be left alone.
Chicago braces for attacks
After mass raids on workplaces and neighborhoods were carried out in Los Angeles – where there was massive grassroots resistance – and Washington DC, Trump then set his sights on Chicago, a multi-ethnic city with a history of working class resistance which has long been a target of blustering Right wing rhetoric.
On September 6th, Trump posted a picture of himself on social media as the fictitious battle-crazed colonel from the movie “Apocalypse Now”, with the words “Chipocalypse Now” and the caption “I love the smell of deportations in the morning… Chicago about to find out why it’s called the Department of WAR”. In the background is the Chicago skyline, apparently in flames.
In Trump’s America we have a President who goes out of his way to portray himself as a cartoon madman but who is also the most powerful individual on earth.
Chicago has been populated by waves of immigrants since its inception in the mid 19th century. More recently, events like the US-sponsored “dirty wars” in Central America in the 1970’s and 80’s and a series of crises in Mexico, including the massive economic disruption caused by NAFTA, have pushed millions of workers to seek work in the US. Today Chicago’s population is about 30% Latine.
Elected Democratic Party leaders from Illinois and Chicago were called together by Democratic Governor and liberal billionaire J B Pritzker for a public open air press conference in downtown Chicago, to say that there is no crisis of criminality in the city and to publicly reject Trump’s imposition of Federal forces to solve this non-existent problem. This response to Trump’s claims about Chicago was in part a response to Democratic and independent voters’ frustration with the Democrats, and contrasts with the caving in to Trump of liberal institutions and national Democrats like despised minority leaders Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer.
For the Federal government to send the National Guard into a State without its Governor’s permission is widely understood to be against the US Constitution. But as with birthright citizenship or Federal district courts’ right to issue universal injunctions, today everything is up for grabs. The last time a President sent the National Guard into a state was in 1965 when President Lyndon Johnson was under the pressure of a national mass movement, with international ramifications, to protect the leaders of the Civil Rights movement. The present Federal intervention is aimed at reversing those victories.
“Operation Midway Blitz”
During the second week of September, Trump’s “Operation Midway Blitz” saw hundreds of battle-clad Federal agents, masked and without identification, descending on Chicago and its more working class suburbs.
They roamed the streets, raiding Mexican and other Latino restaurants and grocery stores but also randomly stopping families. They showed up early in the morning at the hardware chain Home Depot, outside which it’s common to see day laborers waiting in hopes that someone will hire them for the day. They raided car washes and other places where the workforce tends to be from South of the border.
Within days of their arrival, masked ICE agents had fatally shot a working class father, Silverio Villegas González, who had just dropped off his children at school in suburban Franklin Park. The ICE agents lied about the incident, claiming that he had dragged one of them with his car but this was later disproved by video footage. ICE also claimed he had a criminal record but this was another lie, the same one that the police so often use to justify killing people. Gonzalez’ body was sent home to his family in Michoacan, Mexico; in a strange twist, his children have been taken into care by the State of Idaho where their mother was living. A family absolutely torn to shreds as a result of the government’s brutal attacks on immigrant workers.
On September 16, Homeland Security chief Kristi Noem, former far-Right Governor of South Dakota, now the boss of Homeland Security, announced her arrival in the area by staging a televised raid on a house in suburban Elgin, smashing down the front door and arresting several men who were inside, who DHS claimed were illegal immigrants with serious criminal records. One of them, the homeowner, turned out to be a citizen, and none had criminal records.
On September 19th, peaceful protests at the local ICE facility in the small suburb of Broadview were attacked by federal agents with tear gas and pepper spray.
On September 24th, public news station WBEZ Chicago showed that ICE claims to have arrested 550 “illegals” in the two weeks since their arrival, weren’t true; separately, searches of names of alleged convicted criminal aliens, including sex offenders, published on the DHS website, have come up blank – although sex offender registries are public.
On September 28 federal agents paraded through the wealthy, tourist-rich River North and Gold Coast neighborhoods in a “show of force” – and seized a family with their two young children playing in Millennium Park. Despite the couple’s repeated demands to see a warrant, agents bundled the entire family into a van before taking them to a detention center near the airport. Passers-by video’d the incident but no-one intervened. The family, who are from Guatemala, were separated and are now awaiting transfer to a detention center in Texas before being deported.
October 1st saw a dramatic, televised raid on a South Shore apartment building, using embedded reporters from the Right wing outlet News Nation to create a copaganda video in which the presenter claimed that ICE agents rappelled down from Blackhawk helicopters onto the roof of the building. Most of the video is a self-serving interview with the Trump-appointed Border Patrol chief Greg Bovino, who claims, without evidence, that he was cleaning out a nest of Venezuelan gangsters. There is a brief sequence showing three poorly dressed young Latino men being manhandled and handcuffed. What the video does not show is the approximately 100 mostly African-American people living in the building being awakened in the middle of the night by these unidentified, heavily armed police using battering rams to smash their front doors off their hinges, seizing everyone indiscriminately before detaining them in two sets of rental vans – Black people in one set, Latinos in another, zip-tying terrified children to each other. None of that was shown by News Nation but day-after photographs show apartments that were completely trashed and interviews with residents who had been denied any kind of due process, no access to a lawyer, no search warrants and no chance to open their own doors or lock them afterwards. They came back the next day to find their apartments pillaged and belongings stolen.
Since then, tenants have reported that the building, which was poorly maintained and had failed multiple inspections, was under foreclosure and that they expected the landlord would use this raid to empty out the building so that the bank which owns it could put it up for sale.
Protests and resistance
Every day since ICE descended on Chicago there have been demonstrations in the street outside of the temporary ICE headquarters, a detention center in the working class suburb of Broadview. ICE agents have responded to these demonstrations with a rain of tear gas and other so-called “non-lethal” and chemical weaponry, targeting peaceful demonstrators and journalists but also catching local residents including police and firefighters. Recently, a pastor who was peacefully demonstrating was drenched with pepper spray at close range and later shot in the eye with a pepper ball by an ICE agent standing on the roof. ICE also built an illegal eight-foot fence in the streets around the facility which the village of Broadview sued to have removed since it prevents emergency access to the community.
There are also activists who have chased ICE when they see them driving around looking for people to arrest. In one such case, 30 year old Marimar Martinez was shot five times by an ICE officer. Although seriously injured she was able to drive away and has survived. ICE claimed that she had an assault weapon and had also used her vehicle to ram them. These claims were contradicted by body cam videos, the gun charge has already been dropped and the evidence now points towards the ICE agent as the aggressor. Martinez has still been charged, but there is a pattern of these prosecutions falling apart, both in Chicago and L.A..
In another case a couple were accused of assault during the protests in Broadview. In a strikingly American twist, both were carrying loaded pistols, but they were doing so legally, under the concealed-carry laws that Right wing Republicans have long campaigned for. A grand jury refused to indict them after seeing video footage showing that they had not attacked ICE.
This and similar incidents have now led to legal injunctions by Federal judges, banning ICE from attacking peaceful demonstrators with these weapons, demanding that they remove the illegal fence mentioned above and ordering uniformed ICE agents to wear identification. It remains to be seen whether ICE will obey these injunctions but they add to a mounting public sense that they are out of control and need to be restrained.
In Chicago a number of City and County elected officials and one Congressperson, most but not all of them Latine, have called meetings in public schools, attracting hundreds of people to be trained in non violent resistance at various levels – from “know your rights” to more committed actions.
The response of other elected officials has been hypocritical. Mayors and Governors hold executive power and can instruct police under their control not to cooperate with ICE, but in practice they’ve given lip service to this while allowing local and State police to carry out “crowd control”. Katrina Thompson, the mayor of Broadview, spoke out against ICE’s racist attacks, comparing them to Southern sheriffs during the Civil Rights era, and as stated above, sued to have a barrier removed. But Thompson has since banned demonstrations at the facility before 9am – when ICE patrols have already left – or after 6pm – when most working people could attend. A video taken on October 10th shows Broadview and State of Illinois police shoving, brutalizing and arresting demonstrators. Scandalously, the State Police, who are commanded by Governor Pritzker, have in one case charged a Palestinian-American woman with a felony for resisting arrest. The Mayor of Chicago, Brandon Johnson, who is a member of the Chicago Teachers Union and sponsored by them, commands the Chicago police force who on one occasion did not go to the aid of an ICE contingent who were surrounded and boxed in by demonstrators. But that was followed up with a public lecture from the Mayor’s chief of police, warning people that blocking Federal forces could make them subject to arrest. Johnson himself was asked in a press conference if Chicago police would arrest Federal cops if they saw them breaking the law; his roundabout answer was ultimately no, that they would record the behavior and seek legal action after the fact.
There is a growing, largely informal network of ICE-watchers who have been out filming ICE activities and running interference when they see someone being grabbed. On October 3rd, two ICE agents driving around in a rental SUV paused outside of a popular Mexican grocery store and found their path blocked by a person on a scooter. The response of the ICE agents was to throw smoke bombs out of the window in the rider’s general direction – on a busy street, outside a grocery store, fifty yards from an elementary school. The incident was video’d -showing one passer-by throwing a canister back in the vehicle – and within a little over an hour about fifty people had been alerted by rapid-response networks and gathered outside the school to protect parents picking up their children from a possible raid. At gatherings like this, people exchange contact information and are added to text chats to communicate about which schools and workplaces to cover.
Contributing to the strength of this movement is the experience of recent popular struggles like the 2012 and 2019 Chicago Teachers’ strikes, the 2013 demonstrations against school closures under Democrat Mayor Rahm Emanuel and in 2015, the explosion of protests against police murders, in particular that of Laquan McDonald. These movements allowed a broad layer of working class people to exercise some political muscles, in many cases for the first time in their lives, and were strong enough to drive Emanuel from office. In 2020 the whole country exploded in response to the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis. Although these movements won only limited gains – of which police-worn body cams are one – there is now a very broad layer of ordinary working and middle class people, plus at least one union, the teachers, willing to confront State forces on the streets.
What’s next?
ICE claims to have made 1,000 arrests in the Chicago area so far; experience has shown that they exaggerate all of their claims but despite the growing resistance they are undoubtedly getting away with thousands of detentions nationwide.
Once someone has been seized by ICE, conditions are frightening. People are treated as beasts with no rights. There have been multiple reports of people kept for days with no food, water or access to toilet facilities – or contact with relatives or lawyers. Nationally, hundreds of people have been deported, in some cases to countries with which they have no connections, and their families only finding out after the fact. For those who remain in ICE custody in the USA, it’s common for them to be transported out of state without notice, making it harder for them to access legal assistance and almost impossible to have contact with their families. The most extreme and terrifying case is that of the tent city that the State of Florida built on a disused airport in the midst of the Everglades – the so-called Alligator Alcatraz – from which hundreds went missing and remain unaccounted for, after the camp was dismantled following a judge’s order.
This is an incredibly grim picture for which decades of US war crimes, disappearances, drone assassinations, extreme renditions and legalized torture have paved the way.
As this is being written there have been a number of important legal developments.
On October 9th, in response to a lawsuit filed by the State of Illinois, a Federal judge temporarily blocked the Trump administration’s use of the Texas National Guard in Illinois. This is similar to the rulings banning Trump from using the California National Guard in Portland, Oregon.
On October 7th, Federal judge Jeffery Cummings ruled that ICE has been in violation of a consent decree, banning most warrantless arrests, since February of this year. The lawsuit he was responding to, was filed in response to a workplace raid in Kansas City, Missouri when 11 workers were simply grabbed based on their appearance and the fact that they were working in a restaurant. Another 11 plaintiffs were arrested in Chicago in their vehicles or on the street.
If upheld, this ruling would theoretically free hundreds of people who have been randomly seized by ICE since the beginning of the year. It will be fought ferociously by the Trump administration because it goes to the heart of their method, which is precisely to terrorize people by grabbing anyone who “looks illegal”, without a warrant, without identifying themselves and without any regard to due process.
A previous injunction from a Los Angeles judge, banning arrests based on racial profiling was put on hold by the Supreme Court pending an appeal, using what’s known as a “shadow docket” ruling which means the court doesn’t give any justification. This has been a tool of the Trump Supreme Court, which has ruled in Trump’s favor the vast majority of the time.
So despite the fact that Team Trump is acting against the plain language of the laws and the Constitution, all of these rulings can be set aside by the Supreme Court.
Developments in consciousness
Despite the really positive development of neighborhood networks to protect against ICE, and the positive role played by some local elected officials, activists and the Chicago Teachers’ Union, the tradition in liberal US politics is one of relying on the courts. Most histories of the Civil Rights movement focus on court decisions, not how the movements were built that forced the courts to act in the interests of preserving their system. That said, the stance of the current Supreme Court is eroding that idea, and illusions in the courts are at an all time low.
So Trump’s attacks are driving a growing recognition, not limited to the Left, that no-one is coming to save us.
The brutality of the ICE raids is also driving a change in public consciousness about immigration. It’s very difficult to ignore the fact that the vast majority of immigrants arrested in these raids are working people – construction workers, washeros, street vendors, restaurant workers, families picking up their kids from school.
A poll taken in December 2024 showed that at that time the economy was seen as the most urgent issue on people’s minds, and only 55 percent of those polled thought there should be a path towards legal status for the undocumented.
A poll by the same institution, taken in June, shows nearly two-thirds of voters (64 percent) now favor giving undocumented immigrants a pathway to legal status, while 56 percent disapprove of the way ICE is doing its job. “Preserving democracy” tops the poll as the most urgent issue facing the country.
And this was three months ago.
Another poll, published on July 11th but taken during the assaults on Los Angeles, and long before the fiasco in DC or the raids in Chicago – showed that
“Americans have grown markedly more positive toward immigration over the past year, with the share wanting immigration reduced dropping from 55% in 2024 to 30% today. At the same time, a record-high 79% of U.S. adults say immigration is a good thing for the country…
The same poll finds many more Americans disapproving than approving of President Donald Trump’s handling of immigration. Trump’s 21% approval rating on the issue among Hispanic adults is below his 35% rating nationally, with the deficit likely reflecting that group’s low support for some of the administration’s signature immigration policies.”
Today, nine months into Trump’s Presidency, most Americans disagree with what he’s doing and a big majority of Democrats think, correctly and very obviously, that that party’s responses to Trumpism are weak and ineffective. For most people there is no vehicle to express the rejection of both parties, let alone to cohere a movement that can fight them. The development of the immigrant defense networks we’ve seen in Chicago, Portland and L.A. is creating a movement which so far, is not controlled by the Democrats although it has links to them. In future articles we will go into greater depth about the character of the regime and what’s needed to fight back. At the present time, most Left groups including the biggest, DSA, don’t connect with struggles on the ground effectively enough to be seen as building an alternative.
The labor unions with some exceptions, notably in education and healthcare, are giving no lead. Teamster boss Sean O’Brien is increasingly allied with Trump. The other most notable leader to have come out of recent industrial actions, Shawn Fain, is backing away from political action in favor of a list of purely trade union issues which are disconnected from Trump’s war on immigrant workers. Unfortunately, Fain also rejects the idea of a new party outside of the Democrats.
Trump’s policies are deepening an already existing economic crisis. Hiring is already at its lowest since 2009, almost 2 million jobs have been wiped from the economy in the last year and a half, and grocery prices have increased 30% since 2021. The potential for a fightback is enormous, including among some of Trump’s working class base. There is a wide recognition that there’s no going back to the “normal” of Obama’s or Biden’s time in office, let alone any period before that. Struggle is now on the agenda and socialists should be fighting for it to be conducted in the broadest, most class conscious manner possible. We should intervene in every struggle to fight for workers’ and human rights and against this repressive regime, placing no faith in the Democrats but not standing aside in a sectarian way from movements that they may be involved in. There are also growing splits within the Democratic Party, as we’ve seen in the debates around Zohran Mamdani’s campaign for Mayor of New York City. Those of us who are fighting Trump’s attacks but also fighting for demands like free healthcare, affordable housing, decent public schools and a livable minimum wage should be in every fight. This means fighting for a way forward that’s based in the power of the working class. An injury to one is an injury to all!
