Trump’s assault on immigrants can be resisted

The new US administration of Donald Trump is moving fast to unleash hell on millions of undocumented migrants. Brendan Stanton, now based in Australia, was active in the Student Farmworker Alliance, United We Dream and the broader immigrants’ rights movements in Texas from 2007 to 2019. Here, he outlines what is at stake in the latest attacks.

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US President Donald Trump has signed at least a dozen executive orders to further criminalise undocumented immigrants and militarise the country’s southern border. The slew of directives includes a massive push for more criminal prosecutions and granting deportation powers to officers from other federal agencies.

On top of immigrants, the orders target anyone who “facilitates [a person’s] unlawful presence in the United States”. They are so far-reaching that jurisdictions and agencies that advocate protecting immigrants could be defunded. There are even suggestions that the Department of Justice could prosecute state and local officials who don’t comply with the anti-immigrant policies.

Tiny pockets of sanctuary are also being destroyed. Already, immigration authorities were arresting around 300 immigrants per day; Trump’s first wave of raids appears to be doubling that figure. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), a federal agency, is now publishing daily arrest totals and demonising individuals as part of the propaganda work of this campaign.

Meagre protections from raids in schools, hospitals, churches, domestic violence shelters and funeral homes have now been rescinded. There has already been one scare at a primary school and workplace raids in New Jersey. Everyone is awaiting the administration’s promised mass operations in big cities.

Declarations of an “invasion” feature in at least six of the executive orders, and Trump directed the military’s Northern Command to prioritise border enforcement. Since a national emergency was declared, he has added 1,500 active troops to the 2,200 already stationed at the border. These soldiers join the whopping 88,000 personnel working in various border agencies.

The US-Mexico border is the world’s deadliest land migration route; up to 80,000 people have died crossing it in the last 30 years. Countless others have been traumatised by the increasingly militarised area, which features buoys and razor wire designed to drown people crossing by river. And each year, dozens are killed by border patrol and the police.

Trump’s orders direct immigration authorities to expand migrant prisons. He’s giving enforcement agencies and the military the green light to use force more freely. In a related law, which many Democrats support, tens of billions of dollars are being allocated to more than triple the capacity of immigrant prisons in the world’s largest immigrant detention system.

The outcomes of the threatened offensive are yet to be determined, but it is a massive attack on some of the most vulnerable and oppressed people in US society. It’s a blaring announcement that the new regime aims to use its momentum to push further into the abyss of a labour system that relies on apartheid and an even bigger repressive apparatus to maintain it. That’s particularly true in agriculture, where more than 40 percent of workers are estimated to be “unauthorised”.

The immediate targets are obvious: the 14 million people either lacking documentation or holding some form of precarious temporary visa. Most have fled places dominated by US capital or that US imperialism has ravaged for decades, such as Mexico, Central America and Haiti. Allegations of immigrant criminality have been used to create a narrative that the new administration is fighting dangerous enemies at home. This is despite evidence that undocumented immigrants commit crimes at far lower rates than native-born citizens.

What is less obvious is that this is an attack on the entire working class of the region.

When there’s a permanent underclass denied rights and in perpetual fear of deportation and family separation, wages and conditions are broken down at all levels. Immigrant oppression only serves the bosses, as already underpaid workers in underserved communities are terrorised and sections of US workers turn their attention to “illegals” and away from their own exploiters.

The political project of the right is to create a meaner and more brutal society of nationalistic chauvinism.

The primary response of undocumented people has been to keep their heads down to avoid the waves of promised raids. There have been small actions for immigrants’ rights and against the new administration. But so far, these have not been big enough to challenge the onslaught coming from the right.

Some Democrats are speaking out—but they were largely silent under Joe Biden’s administration. The reality is that there is an existing colossal border apparatus that the past three Democratic administrations expanded. Indeed, Tom Homan, Trump's "border czar", previously worked for the Obama administration. “A lot of the same tactics are being dusted off”, John Sandweg, the acting ICE director from August 2013 to February 2014, told CNN in December. “What Tom is talking about are Obama-esque things.”

The border has been increasingly militarised since the early 1990s, and the state has invested more than US$4 billion since 2003. Previous administrations justified this militarisation using the War on Terror; the new talk of combating an “invasion” is serving a similar function. The ruling class in the US wants to create a more militaristic society on all fronts.

Before Trump’s election, the immigrant detention system held 35-40,000 migrants on any given day. While using less belligerent language, Biden deported more people than Trump’s previous administration. Obama earned the moniker “deporter-in-chief” by overseeing the highest rate of forced removals of any president in history. Kamala Harris used her first diplomatic trip as vice president to tell Guatemalans: “Do not come to the United States”. She responded to the rampant racism of Trump’s campaign promises by pledging to add thousands of border patrol agents and by raising the bar for asylum claims.

There was a consistent level of immigrant rights activism from the 1980s through the first Trump administration. But there was a severe decline under Biden, and the movement seems to be at one of its lowest ebbs as these new attacks are rolled out.

However, there are recent precedents for a fightback.

Growing up in Texas, I was exposed to a flood of stories about immigrant oppression. Migrant farmworker classmates drifted in and out of school between harvests. Friends struggled as their families were divided by an increasingly militarised border. Workmates were forced to brave the desert borderlands and evade ICE helicopters, only to be rewarded with demanding jobs paying $3 per hour for 70-hour weeks.

Shortly after starting university in Houston, my friends and I joined campaigns to shut down a notoriously abusive family detention centre and to end the collaboration between our local police agencies and ICE. These were long and arduous campaigns, but, for a time, we won an end to family detention at the nearby T. Don Hutto prison in 2009, and local collaboration with ICE was officially ended in 2017.

Our activism came in the shadow of the most significant wave of pro-immigrant protests the US had ever seen. The Border Protection, Anti-terrorism, and Illegal Immigration Control Act of 2005—also called the Sensenbrenner Bill, after its sponsor, Wisconsin Republican Sensenbrenner—carried similar threats to what we see now. It was introduced in December 2005, and by March 2006, thousands of high schoolers had walked out across the country. Countless workers refused to work as waves of protests crashed through the Southwest and all major urban centres with significant Latino populations.

During “The Day without an Immigrant”, as it was called, millions of people marched in hundreds of cities, including the largest-ever rallies in a host of places. Big cities like Los Angeles had several rallies with over half a million people; in relative backwaters like Dallas, 300,000 marched. From February to May 2006, the movement exploded; Sensenbrenner’s bill was voted down during this wave of revolt. The movement kept generating massive rallies, organising deportation defence networks and countering armed anti-immigrant militias. It revitalised May Day, turning it into an immigrant worker protest for years.

Even under the Obama administration, my brave comrades infiltrated immigrant prisons to report on the abuses, and we organised solidarity protests for incarcerated undocumented families who were engaged in hunger strikes for freedom in T. Don Hutto prison. I remember the unflinching defiance of young undocumented fighters hounding the Harris County sheriff in Houston—screaming at the racist monster as we gate-crashed his fundraiser in the pouring rain.

When Trump was first elected, we protested on election day, organised an immigrant rights contingent at the Women’s March and built networks to defend against deportations. When the new president’s so-called Muslim ban was instituted, we converged on Houston’s airport, shutting down its regular operations. During the height of child separation, authorities had the gall to turn a Houston homeless shelter into a child prison, so we defiantly flooded the streets to shut it down, too.

Tragically, many activists became entrenched in the broader world of immigrant NGOs or the Democratic Party apparatus. We didn’t have the class consciousness or political understanding to predict the consequences. Many of my fellow activists retreated from politics altogether, resulting in a decline in activism. It’s essential to learn from those mistakes.

The working class on both sides of the border has immense power. But charity work and advocacy alone can't harness it. Turning the tide against the Trump administration requires reinvigorating the fighting spirit that animated the last wave of victories.