Green shoots of resistance in the United States

President Donald Trump’s attacks on migrants have dramatically stepped up in recent weeks. But he has been met with protests and civil disobedience, including a national day of mobilisations involving several million people across the country.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents have dropped the pretext of targeting “the most dangerous criminals” and shifted their focus to immigrant workers. The ICE repression machine has been so brazen as to violently and publicly arrest four prominent Democratic politicians, most recently a senator from California and a high-profile New York City mayoral candidate, who have been critical of the raids.

With the number of border crossings from Mexico now at historic lows, the easy deportation numbers racked up by the Democratic administrations of Barack Obama and Joe Biden—by simply turning people around as they entered the US—have been out of reach for Trump’s racist machine. Top White House aide Stephen Miller therefore instructed ICE to “just go out there and arrest illegal aliens”. Miller, the hard-right architect of Trump’s anti-migrant policies, specifically directed agents to target workplaces.

The point is not only to terrorise and deport people, but to galvanise the MAGA political base by testing the limits of the federal government’s powers against non-citizens, protesters and Democratic-controlled states and cities. Trump wants to bulldoze the existing meagre “sanctuary” policies and wage war on their defenders. He wants ICE to be an unrestricted force of labour discipline and political repression. And he wants to establish that no-one—judges, mayors, governors, senators or protesters—can get in his way.

As an example of the atmosphere, the chair of the Senate Subcommittee on Crime and Counterterrorism has sent letters to organisations involved in protests against ICE, accusing them of “bankrolling civil unrest” and threatening criminal investigations.

A glimmer of hope

In Los Angeles, home to a million undocumented people and millions of other migrants and their descendents, the ICE onslaught sparked the most significant resistance we’ve seen since Trump returned to office.

Heroic protesters in Los Angeles have documented and disrupted ICE raids. They started a “No Sleep for ICE” campaign—locating the hotels housing federal agents and making sure they can’t rest after spending their days attacking migrants. They organised mass mobilisations, shutting down traffic and putting resistance at the centre of political discourse. And, unlike many previous waves of immigrant rights struggles, they have maintained a militant edge in opposing the police and the state.

Although the “No Kings” marches—the millions-strong mobilisations held on 14 June across the country—were organised by groups much closer to the Democratic Party establishment, the spark from Los Angeles helped make them younger and more diverse than the last national mobilisations on 5 April.

We have been shown glimpses of what is possible when determined activists give a concerted lead. And we have seen that some of the most marginalised and oppressed in US society can be a leading edge in a fight against Trump.

Despite the massive wave of protests that peaked on 14 June, however, the attacks on migrants have continued. And on top of migrant arrests, journalists documenting the brutality have frequently been targeted. Yet protests are still rippling through the country, and the dynamics of this powder keg could yet shift. Much will depend on how far Trump keeps pushing in his war on Democratic-controlled cities—particularly if the federal government goes all out against Chicago and/or New York.

Capitalist contradictions

Trump and his cronies want a campaign of federal terror and community division. They know that Trump’s stocks rise when racism, nationalism and a domestic war on “the enemy of the people” (meaning opponents of Trump) are the political currency of the day.

However, US capitalists were doing fine with the pre-Trump levels of anti-migrant brutality. Poverty and fear already kept undocumented workers’ heads down and resulted in most accepting far less—lower wages, fewer rights—than they deserve. Hungry bellies and fears of family separation across dangerous borders force people to accept horrible conditions in the de facto apartheid US labour system.

The wealthiest in US society have benefited greatly from exploiting the millions of undocumented workers—cheap housekeepers and nannies, cheap labour for businesses, an even more exploitable labour force across the border, more tax dollars for the state without a range of welfare obligations, downward pressure on the wages of other workers and so on.

Many capitalists, therefore, have opposed the more aggressive ICE raids for disrupting the labour supply and for generating bad press and disruptive protests. That’s why the face of the Democratic Party’s “resistance”, California Governor Gavin Newsom, talked from both sides of his mouth when the protests escalated in Los Angeles. Newsom rode the wave of sympathy for migrant communities while bragging about his government’s longstanding cooperation with ICE. He said that protests are necessary in the face of tyranny, while restricting access to immigrant legal support.

It was a cynical political calculation from the Democratic establishment’s presidential frontrunner; a nod to the wealthy that he can carry through the regular politics of divide and rule without being a wrecker.

Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, a stalwart of the left of the party, was arguably worse than Newsom. In the wake of the rebellion against the raids, Sanders misrepresented Martin Luther King Jr’s statements on riots to condemn the heroic Los Angeles protesters. Diverting attention from the need for protests, he emphasised the importance of governors, not the federal government, having the power to deploy the National Guard.

The Democrats want to prevent the federal government from undermining their local and regional authority. But they don’t want to spark resistance that could threaten the profits or interests of their capitalist friends and donors.

Where to now?

The protests have been an inspiration and a breath of fresh air. They point in the direction of popular resistance, rather than resignation, and in the direction of direct action, rather than reliance on the capitalist courts and politicians.

The more working-class people take to the streets in defiance of the government and its agents, the more they expose the bankrupt Democratic strategy of largely hunkering down until the midterm elections. Democrats don’t want mass democracy and the genuine involvement of the people—they just want Trump’s project to implode so that they can become politically relevant on the back of extremely low expectations, as they did in 2020 with Joe Biden’s presidential election victory.

It’s still early, but we haven’t yet seen the scale of disruption or economic impact that defined the wave of immigrant rights protests in 2006, when there were mass workplace walkouts. That was the peak of the first big wave of immigrant activism, which beat back the anti-immigrant Sensenbrenner Bill and shaped a generation of activists, this author included.

While there seems to have been a greater degree of militancy in this new wave of protests, the depth of the crisis and the appetite for months of disruptive street demonstrations fall well short of the 2020 Black Lives Matter rebellion. Those protests pushed the state back for a brief moment, and sparked a global movement against racism and police brutality.

Nevertheless, the protesters should be celebrated, even if they haven’t yet become the type of mass movement that could stop this authoritarian regime in its tracks. Activists discussing the need for a general strike and orienting their efforts towards the power of the labour movement are important. But organising independently of the forces that would undermine these efforts is crucial.

Real power lies in the working class, and a big fight from organised workers could shake this regime. Yet the strong links of the NGO and trade union wing of the immigrant rights movement with the Democratic Party lead far too many down the dead-end road of supporting a “lesser evil” that is perfectly happy to target and scapegoat migrants when it is politically expedient.

In Texas, I was part of nearly a dozen different immigrant justice organisations. More than half of them no longer exist because key organisers burned out or moved on. The other half have either limped on independently or have fallen further into the Democratic Party sphere of influence and moderated their actions.

The question for the left now is how much it can organise and build from this moment. The crucial task is to build an independent socialist left that sharpens its politics for this and the next fight.