Los Angeles “A Day Without Immigrants” demonstration on May Day, 5/1/2006 (Jonathan McIntosh / Wikimedia Commons)
The Trump regime’s mass deployment of ICE agents into working-class neighborhoods across the country is terrorizing communities, schools, hospitals, stores, and workplaces. Backed by National Guard troops and militarized federal and local police, ICE is emboldened to abduct, detain, and disappear innocent working people, regardless of immigration/residency status.
Families have been torn apart by ICE and children left abandoned. ICE has thrown people into private prisons, where they’re made to endure inhuman conditions. There’s often a lack of medical care, food, and clean water. Victims have been deported, at times to places other than their native countries. Some have been killed by ICE during raids, others have died in detention centers. Many immigrants fear going to work or being out in public, and some feel they have to self-deport to be safe and to keep their families together.
The Trump administration relies on a divide-and-conquer strategy to implement its wholesale attack on working people. It’s carrying out kidnappings and deportations, while at the same time imposing deep cuts to healthcare and SNAP benefits, implementing mass layoffs of federal workers, and eliminating many rights won in past struggles, including trans rights, union rights, and civil rights.
In Chicago and elsewhere across the country, strong opposition by community members has sometimes successfully stopped ICE. But most of the time, ICE and other federal police forces get away with their violent assaults and kidnappings. It’s difficult for working people to mobilize at a moment’s notice, and difficult for us to be everywhere at all times. Immigrant rights groups, progressive groups, left organizations, and unions can unite in organizing even larger mass protests and rallies against ICE. These should also include workplace walkouts, occupations, and strikes on a city-wide, regional, and national scale.
The so-called “resistance” of the corporate Democratic Party has not stopped Trump and the Republicans. Lawyers and lawsuits have not been enough to prevent ICE’s armed thugs from carrying out Trump’s right-wing agenda. The Democrats have helped lay the groundwork for the ICE raids by increasing funding to ICE when they were in power and including anti-immigrant propaganda and policies in their campaigns in 2024. In 2020, Biden ran on closing the border camps and ending funding for the border wall, yet once in office, continued both, more than doubling the number of ICE detainees from 14,000 to 39,000. Obama’s administration carried out 3.1 million deportations, more than any previous president. Even Bernie Sanders – a Democrat in every way but name – praised Trump in late October, saying: “Trump did a better job. I don’t like Trump, but we should have a secure border. It ain’t that hard to do. Biden didn’t do it.”
The working class can’t rely on either corporate political party to stop ICE. We need our own political party independent of any corporate funding or influence. Corporations are the ones exploiting immigrant labor, including using undocumented children in poultry processing factories, sawmills, and other dangerous jobs, and exposing many immigrant workers to dangerous conditions while using their immigration status as leverage to ignore labor and minimum wage laws. But union workers are in the schools, hospitals, and communities that ICE targets. Unions can play a greater role in fighting against the exploitation of immigrants. Union leaders and activists can use the tactics of the 2006 Day Without an Immigrant strikes and protests to help to stop ICE. The capitalist system hyper-exploits immigrants for their labor and tries to divide workers across borders. A crucial part of the fightback against Trump and for immigrant rights is to put pressure on the profits of the corporations and the billionaires.
Independent Socialist Group attending an anti-ICE protest in Waltham, MA (11/8/2025)
The Independent Socialist Group stands for escalating the fight against ICE. We call for:
- An end to ICE raids, stop the deportations, and release detainees.
- Abolish ICE!
- No one is “illegal”! Amnesty for all undocumented immigrants.
- “An injury to one is an injury to all!” Unions to organize active solidarity with immigrants, including mass rallies, walkouts, and strikes.
- Mass union drives to help organize and defend immigrant workers.
- Independent progressive and left candidates to run for office as part of organizing a workers’ party that can oppose the two corporate parties and fight for immigrant and workers’ rights.
- Organize a mass socialist movement for international working-class solidarity across borders.
Independent Socialist Group 