Maurice B. and R. Nesbitt | Red Phoenix correspondents–

Convicted felon and predator Donald Trump has unleashed ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) on the communities of undocumented persons throughout the United States. Within the first month of his sham administration, Trump and his ilk have turned undocumented immigrants into public enemy number one, and wished everything short of ethnic cleansing upon them as he scapegoats their presence as the answer to this nation’s issues with crime, drugs, and employment.

Trump and his criminal cabinet have even resorted to invoking the 1798 “Alien Enemies Act” (only previously invoked three times; all during wartime) to accelerate their “shock and awe” deportations. As several of those arrested by ICE find themselves on their way to Guantanamo Bay, a place known as a bastion of torture and dehumanization, the barbarity of the fascist policies of Trumpism become ever more clear.

Along with flights to Guantanamo, the Trump administration has penned deals with the Latin American bourgeois governments of Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Costa Rica, Panama, and Venezuela to extradite “deported” immigrants to these countries, despite most of them being sent to countries that are not their nations of origin. Further proof that the short-lived resistance to Trump’s trade war and expansionist rhetoric was purely an attempt to pull wool over the eyes of the international working class, the capitalists and imperialists don’t despise Trump; they work together like hand in glove. Their shared interests are found in the exploitation and oppression of the working class of both their respective countries and those of the countries in which they invest capital. Cruelty, persecution, and chauvinism are par for the course in their war against the toiling masses.

Worldwide there are 35 to 40 million refugees, and in the United States 60,050 refugees were admitted in 2023 alone. In addition, the Biden administration accepted 54,350 asylum seekers largely from DRC and the Middle East. Refugees and asylum seekers leave their native countries due to persecution, conflicts and crises, and the search for better opportunities and safer communities.

While criminal elements exist in all countries under capitalism, and some may become migrants both to escape the law and to continue their outlaw ways – migrant status of any distinction is not equivalent to being violent or being a criminal. This so-called correlation has been definitively disproven: “empirical research has consistently shown that immigration does not increase crime. At the individual level, foreign-born residents are less likely to commit nearly all forms of crime and delinquency, whether violent, property, or drug offending, compared with native-born populations.” The supposed link between immigrants and crime is a fabrication of reactionary ideology and fueled through bigoted rhetoric drenched in xenophobia and chauvinism.

Furthermore, despite bourgeois fear mongering about crime rates nationally, “Using the FBI data, the violent crime rate fell 49% between 1993 and 2022, with large decreases in the rates of robbery (-74%), aggravated assault (-39%) and murder/nonnegligent manslaughter (-34%).” So not only are immigrants not committing crimes generally speaking, but Americans overall are committing fewer crimes. The bourgeois media highlights the most violent and frightening cases to stoke flames about “issues of crime.”

Immigrant labor makes up about 15% of all jobs in the United States at just under 30 million employees nationwide. Conversely, as a result of free trade agreements including NAFTA, CAFTA, PNTR (with China), and the USMCA, over 14 million jobs have been lost since the 1990s. Automation in the last twenty years has cost roughly 18.6 million jobs, including 1.7 million in manufacturing alone. Currently, nearly 25% of all jobs in the United States are at risk due to automation. On top of this, there are presently 5.9 million jobless Americans and 4.3 million part-time workers who have polled desire to work full-time hours, over 6 million workers under the age of 18, and 800,000 “employed” in prison labor.

The math simply does not add up that immigrants – who hold up vital industries such as agriculture, home manufacturing, and infrastructural development – are a malignant force that are at the root of unemployment and under-employment in the United States. Outsourcing, automation, tariffs, prison (slave) labor, child labor, part-time labor, and the abuse of migrant labor are all schemes of the capitalist class to intensify their profits and oppress a desperate working class, whose desperation is weaponized by the xenophobic policies of Trumpism. It truly is abuse, as migrant laborers are not eligible for benefits, are often not able to organize, and can be paid below the federal minimum wage working in incredibly unsafe conditions, from everything to traffic on major highways and pesticides on the fields.

Rather than turning on our fellow workers, the questions must be raised: “Who is not hiring? Who is cutting hours? Who is driving down wages? Who is shipping jobs overseas or replacing them with automation? Who is taking advantage of migrant labor?” The answer is none other than the capitalist class, the class of bosses and investors who own all productive property while the wage-workers, the producers, own nothing.

In times of great crises, capitalists will direct the blame towards elements of the working class and the petite bourgeoisie to distract us from our common enemy. Rather than dedicate resources to solving homelessness, hunger, poverty, the opioid crisis, or any other real issues threatening the lives and livelihoods of the American people, the bourgeoisie bends truths to fit into their narratives meant to defer outrage at the state of our world amongst ourselves and not at the billionaires and CEOs.

Immigrants have not been the people giving $17.9 billion in military aid to the Zionist project of Israel since October 2023. Immigrants are not the people who overturned Roe V. Wade. Immigrants didn’t sign executive orders putting the future of transgender rights, healthcare, financial aid, education, and national security at risk. Our enemies are sitting in the White House, smugly peering down at us all like subjects meant to bow to their whims and shriek with their proclamations. Their war on the working class has started by targeting our migrant and transgender communities; next, Trump and his regime move onto other targets in a fruitless endeavor to tear up working class solidarity and paint the US in his white supremacist and American exceptionalist image. As such, ICE functions as the brutal arm of terror of Trumpism, bearing down upon our comrades like a plague.

Under Biden, despite running on a promise of a “deportation moratorium,” ICE deported 271,484 people in 2024 (as of Sep. 30) and 142,580 in 2023, which was the highest deportation count in a decade — 315,943 were deported in 2014. Now, the White House is revoking protections for 600,000 Venezuelans and attempting to end birthright citizenship in an effort to deport as many people as possible while vilifying them as inherent criminals along the way. Add these measures on top of the Laken Riley Act (which makes it easier to deport undocumented persons charged with violent crimes or other crimes that result in bodily injury) and it becomes obvious that regardless of the final aims of this administration’s war on immigration, many, many innocent people are going to get hurt and possibly killed along the way.

By widening the umbrella of potential wrongdoers, it widens the amount of people who will become collateral or “fit the description” and face the consequences of harmful policy. ICE made up 44% of the 33,000 complaints of sexual assault and physical abuse filed to the DHS Office of the Inspector General between 2010 and 2016. Other confirmed abuses include extensive use of solitary confinement in detention centers and inhumane living conditions. In addition, charges have been consistently leveled, as recently as February, of human trafficking and forced labor imposed on migrants detained in ICE facilities. So even if there was a surge in “immigrant crime” and even if ICE could in any way effectively arrest all supposed “migrant criminals,” they have a track record for abuse of authority, grotesque exploitation, and blatant cruelty, all with no oversight. They are an aggressive force of capitalistic violence that has been emboldened by hate and nothing more. What more can you say about an organization that separates children from their parents?

In this atmosphere of xenophobia and hate, the looming danger of vigilantism can’t help but enter our minds. It’s quite possible it’s already started to happen. When the president and their administration brutally criminalize entire peoples and groups most often associated with them and their circumstances, it becomes a clarion call for fascists and white supremacists to “aid” the government against these “alien tyrants” by taking matters into their own hands. By emboldening action from the reactionary elements across class lines, Trump is uniting together the American right-wing in an effort to consolidate his fragile power in Washington. By making enemies out of people of color (by way of attacks on DEI), immigrants, and transgender people, Trump is able to divide the working class between those he deems worthy of being considered American and those he deems not only non-American but subhuman.

Under Trumpism, the capitalist class seeks to make examples of the most vulnerable, isolated, and scapegoated strata of the working class to terrorize and intimidate as well as to divide. In this way, Trump’s war on immigration is a war on us all. The ability to get away with these inhumane and unconstitutional deportations allows for the chance to do it again with another section of the working people. To defend our lives and the lives of our comrades, we must organize against the fascist vultures at our door. Down with ICE! Down with Trump! Stand together with all immigrants against reactionary tyranny!

Categories: Immigration, U.S. News