ICE deportations are a direct attack not only on working-class migrants but on the working class all over the United States, revealing the violent structural foundations of capitalism.
Since Trump ramped up ICE’s mandate against the US undocumented working class, more than 72,000 people have been deported since the start of his term. Many were incarcerated in El Salvador or returned to the dangerous conditions they fled, often separated from their families. Following a rhetoric of fear and nationalism, the White House aims to detain and deport over 1,000,000 people by the end of the year.
These are not the individual actions of a racist presidency, but the capitalist system working as intended in a time of profitability crisis. On one side, the deportations cast migrants as scapegoats for the capitalist failings; on the other hand, deportations respond to the material need of the bourgeois state to manage its reserve army of labour – offloading surplus workers, especially those who are unskilled, organised or politicised, during moments of crisis.
In this way, the USA ensures that labour wages remain low and profits high for capitalists – regardless of whether the administration is Democratic or Republican. Cheap labour is a key point of the current reinstitutionalisation agenda – a project embraced, though with differing rhetoric, by both parties. Under Biden, ICE operations surpassed those under Trump’s first term, deporting over 775,000 migrant workers in a single year.
The strategy of making migrants ever more politically and economically precarious deepens the exploitation of the whole of the working class – both migrant and USA-born. It is no surprise that during the raids, bourgeois enablers, ICE and LAPD arrested David Huerta, president of the California janitors’ union SEIU-USWW.
The vilification of protestors through absurd allegations and the brutal onslaught brought on by the street militarisation – including LAPD, 700 Marines and 2,000 National Guards – is a further flexing of the bourgeois muscle. Any excuse is good to roll back any worker and social rights through arrests, physical violence and curfews that follow.
The last 5 days have shown opportunistic politicians filing paperwork and offering symbolic gestures. Yet, only the workers who have the class interest and the capacity to stop ICE from continued mass deportations. The ruling class will not solve the issues it created, its solutions will always be at odds with the needs of working people. Only a conscious and organised working class will be able to strike capitalism at its core.
Solidarity with the organised workers rising all over the US in NYC, Omaha, Chicago, Seattle, Atlanta and LA!