California National Guard mobilized during anti-ICE protests in Los Angeles / June 12, 2025. Photo from Public Domain via Wikimedia.
By M.J.
Maine
Trump has been in office for less than one year, and we have already reached new levels of cruelty and abuse embodied in the Florida “detention center” that is being called “Alligator Alcatraz.” While a federal judge has issued a ruling that has halted the expansion of the facility, it continues to operate.
Trump’s attacks on immigrants are not new. Ten years ago, in 2015, Trump proposed mass deportation as a part of his immigration policy. After his first term, this messaging ramped up significantly. Why is that?
As wealth disparities become more extreme, the ruling class feels a more urgent need to employ “divide and conquer” tactics. This involves pitting groups of working-class people against each other so that we’re too distracted to realize that the attacks are coming from above, not from other working people. If we use this lens, then the attacks on the rights of immigrants and trans people that have increased drastically in the past five to ten years feel less random and more intentional.
Attacks on immigrants in particular have been a top priority for the far right. Their untrue, malicious narrative is that dangerous immigrants are arriving in the U.S. “illegally” and en masse with the aim of destroying the “American way of life.” The “problem” of illegal immigration is being manufactured. The Trump administration is actively removing legal status and making people “illegal” and then targeting them. The fears that are being stoked are rooted in things like economic security. Positing immigration, then, as a “ruthless attack” functions to pre-emptively justify political calls where revenge, defense, and protectionism are central to the messaging.
This narrative, which was also whipped up by the Democratic Party, helped elect Trump, who returned to the Oval Office and began to carry out this promise of policing and deportation. Within months, a few high-profile cases emerged. In March, the arrest and detention of Algerian-Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil, who had led the student encampments at Columbia University in spring of 2024 as a member of the graduate workers’ union in United Auto Workers Local 2710, gained national attention after ICE abducted him in his apartment building on false grounds of green card application errors. Khalil was then held in a Louisiana detention center for 104 days before finally being released.
The same week that ICE arrested Khalil, the Trump administration illegally detained and deported Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, calling it “an administrative error.” Despite no criminal convictions, Garcia was imprisoned without trial in the Salvadoran Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT). CECOT was opened in 2022 as a maximum-security prison famous for human rights abuses. El Salvador’s President, Nayib Bukele, who commissioned the prison, is close friends with Trump and is offering to house U.S. detainees like Garcia at CECOT—with the promise that the alleged criminals will never be seen or heard from again.
But the U.S. has been building up its own mass detention facilities as well. In 2023, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis invoked a standing immigration “state of emergency” to seize the county-owned airfield that would eventually become Alligator Alcatraz. He then fast-tracked construction without the usual procurement or environmental reviews, and two years later mobilized a team of private companies to build the facility designed to house 5,000 detained immigrants. He also deployed the National Guard to secure the site. It is located deep in the Everglades, about 45 miles west of Miami.
Alligator Alcatraz was built in eight short days and will cost $450 million in its first year of operation. The State of Florida fronted the cost and will seek reimbursement through FEMA’s Shelter and Services Program.
Alligator Alcatraz opened on July 1st, and began housing prisoners within 48 hours. Its “grand opening” led to a boost in campaign contributions for state Republicans.
ICE
ICE agents—sometimes in plainclothes, sometimes in highly-militarized gear—are descending onto neighborhoods, schools, workplaces, and courts to violently beat, arrest, detain, and deport people who they suspect are immigrants, especially targeting Black and Latino workers. Reports from the inside of detention centers like Alligator Alcatraz are nightmare-inducing: inadequate and unsafe food and water, overcrowded conditions, abusive staff, denial of medication and medical attention, denial of legal representation, and more.
No due process or accountability—just complete chaos and cruelty.
ICE agents have been recorded taking pictures of “targets” and protestors, following people, demanding or forcing entrance to their homes without warrants, kidnapping people, and beating bystanders for filming the raids. These include the assault and arrest of the president of the largest union in California, SEIU president David Huerta. The point of these actions is to instill terror, demonstrate power, and get working people to fear organizing resistance. The ruling class does not want to provoke a mass fightback against their policies, but they want to stage a show of force to intimidate and send the message that they are capable of extreme violence, arbitrary arrests, and that it is hopeless to resist, to demand more, or to unite and fight back.
Democrats No Alternative to Trump
The Democratic Party has done nothing to stop Trump’s attacks on immigrants. The Democrats don’t have an issue with ICE. They just don’t like the way in which ICE agents under the current Trump administration carry out detentions in a brutal, more public fashion than under the Obama or Biden administrations. They’d like a “nicer” ICE, one where agents show warrants and badge numbers and don’t wear masks.
The Democratic Party has doubled down on their commitment to “law and order.” In June, while Trump was sending over 4,000 National Guard troops and 700 Marines into LA to squash the anti-ICE protests, LA Mayor Karen Bass and California Governor Gavin Newsom – both Democrats – also sent increased LA Police Department forces out into the streets and put in curfews against protestors. The Democratic Party’s vision of democracy can include human rights abuses, so long as they are carried out by the book. Five years ago, Newsom called in 8,000 National Guard troops to crack down on the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests at the time. More than half were sent to LA, where 3,000 protestors were arrested.
Unsurprisingly, the attacks on working people carried out by the Democrats alienates many on the left who have been holding their nose voting blue and getting increasingly sick of it. Who wouldn’t be disgusted? What would radicalize you, if not watching your neighbors get snatched off the street and getting life-threatening injuries while peacefully protesting against the abductions? Many are identifying in real time the contradiction of the ruling class being able to afford to build a maximum security prison in one calendar week and to spend $134 million to send out the National Guard and Marines against protestors, but claiming to have no money in the budget for public housing and school lunches. Historically, the Democratic Party has strung along all major civil rights movements in an effort to gain votes and delay or prevent true change, only to help build the right.
The Democratic Party helped lay the groundwork for Trump by shifting to the right, campaigning in 2024 on anti-immigrant policies and increased military power. Any opposition by the Democrats to the ICE raids have been rooted in the way in which the Trump administration puts into question “the law,” not because ICE is violent, anti-worker, or because it cracks down on rights, and the way in which the Trump administration might make working people push beyond the limits of the capitalist legal system to organize a more serious fightback against the ICE raids, one that ignores capitalist laws meant to hold workers back from more powerful and successful methods of opposition that can build independent working-class power.
Where Do We Go From Here?
Significantly, working people have been organizing against the ICE raids. SEIU held nationwide rallies in June against David Huerta’s arrest. Locally, unions and union members have also participated in protests against ICE’s abductions of students, patients, and community members. On the streets, protestors have helped drive ICE agents away and prevented raids. But while some of these efforts have been successful, the larger project of the Trump administration’s campaign to carry out 3,000 detentions per day is still largely undeterred.
Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” is providing ICE with more funding than any federal law enforcement agency has had in history. This money will go toward private contractors and vendors that supply the aircrafts, prisons, cars, supplies, facilities, and weapons needed to make increased deportations possible. Taking on these corporations, along with the Democratic and Republican parties that back and have built up ICE for over twenty years, will require greater organization as well as a working-class political party that actively opposes anti-immigrant policies. Unions can help lead mass protests, walkouts, and strikes to build a larger nationwide movement that can stop the ICE raids, including in our schools, hospitals, workplaces, and neighborhoods.
The Independent Socialist Group calls for:
- Defend and extend immigrant rights.
- Abolish ICE.
- For immediate, unconditional legalization, amnesty, and equal rights for all undocumented immigrants.
- Fight for the right to asylum, and a real path to legal residency.
- Reunite separated families and repeal the separation policy.
- Close the camps, close the detention centers!
- A workers’ party to oppose the anti-immigrant policies of both the Democratic and Republican parties.
Independent Socialist Group 