Defeating Mass Deportations
The Critical Battle of the Moment
Building powerful, overwhelming resistance to Trump’s mass deportations is the critical battle at the moment. It’s the hook that the New Confederacy (the fascist forces coalesced around Trump, which have inherited the mantle of the Old Confederacy) is hanging its hat on. It’s the one thing they think they can hold onto as Trump's popularity sinks on issues like tariffs and inflation. While centrist establishment Democrats are pearl-clutching and privately counting the days to the next recession which they hope will bail us out, those of us who are fighting for a Third Reconstruction should be focusing on fighting mass deportations, in the courts and legislatures, and most importantly, in the streets.
Fighting mass deportations points us at the darkest core of the New Confederacy's evil heart, head on: its performative cruelty rooted in white supremacy. And we can win on this issue.
Despite the bravado by the Steven Millers and Steve Bannons of the Trump world that immigration is their "80-20 issue" (where they win popular opinion by that margin), they are now losing ground there as well. Michael Podhorzer's analysis in "The Re-Emerging Anti-MAGA Majority" makes a compelling case, made stronger since he qualifies and even understates his conclusions. He writes that “if voters had known in November what they know now—which could and should have been possible—Trump would have lost.” There has been no large-scale shift to the right on immigration any more than other issues, and people think Trump is, at the very least, “going too far.”
The Boston Globe reports on "growing community resistance" in my own home state of Massachusetts to fascist masked gangs who are snatching people off the streets and shipping them away from their families without due process. Notably, the writer covers actions in places like Worcester and Acton, not known as bastions of the left. It also describes people getting involved who do not consider themselves "activists" at all—neighbors, families, preachers, city councilors, and more.
The bottom line is that there is a growing resistance to Trump on what the right thinks is its strongest issue. The racism is increasingly clear, as "refugees" from the most privileged sector of South African society, the Afrikaners, are welcomed into the New Confederacy's waiting arms while working-class people of color are spirited to gulags in El Salvador and South Sudan. Podhorzer's analysis tracks my own experience and that of others I talk to. Many undocumented folks, as I have described elsewhere, are not against jailing or deporting violent gang members from whom they may have already fled in their home countries. A Dominican friend in Chicago said, “Every Latino family I spoke to during the last election told me 'We need a Bukele’”—the El Salvador president who is popular, for now, in his country for a vicious crackdown on crime. People often did not believe that Trump's actual plan was what he sometimes promised straight out: to deport every immigrant of color they can get their hands on, even US citizens, to Make America White Again.
How to Talk About Deportations
In discussions and protests about the deportations, I have found this obvious distinction to be very powerful: they aren't deporting criminals, they are deporting hard-working people who have committed no crimes, and are our friends and neighbors—our own people, whether you are an immigrant yourself or not.
Some leftists reject that framework, arguing “We can't imply support for mass incarceration, or for Calvinist capitalist propaganda about hard work.” But these are really debates among activists, with little actual impact among working-class people. They miss the best and wholly righteous way to build the anti-racist fight against mass deportations. There is nothing wrong with being concerned about crime, and there is nothing wrong with respecting people who work hard to build a life for themselves and their families. We need to meet people of all nationalities where they are and move them closer to an anti-racist, pro-democracy position.
Plenty of other arguments will do fine also: we need people to do these jobs, immigrants commit fewer crimes than native born folks—or as I told my ward councilor, "I agree we need to lower the crime rate—so let's open the borders and bring in more immigrants!" Immigrants do in fact pay taxes, they just often don't get the benefit of paying them; for example, they help keep Social Security solvent by paying into accounts that are not their own and from which they can never collect.
Faith organizing on this issue is particularly important. We need to increase the splits among evangelicals of all races on this issue, reminding them of Leviticus 19:34: "The stranger who dwells among you shall be to you as one born among you, and you shall love him as yourself; for you were strangers in the land of Egypt: I am the LORD your God." Already those who were the strangers in Egypt, the Jews, are standing up against Trump's mass deportations by a majority and opposing his attempts to use the phony campaign against antisemitism to justify kidnapping foreign graduate students and suppressing free speech on campuses. Every church, temple, and mosque: a sanctuary by those of faith.
Further, there simply is no bold line between “citizens” and “non-citizens.” According to the Pew Research Center, undocumented folks live in 6.3 million households, 70% of which have families of “mixed status.” The crackdown on undocumented people is simultaneously an assault on US families and citizens: children, fathers, mothers, cousins. The attacks on immigrants’ access to benefits like Social Security will also hit citizens and non-citizens alike.
Voluntary deportation, or “auto-deport” intimidation, is one of Trump’s most powerful tools. Because mixed-status families are common, it affects whole communities. Families fighting deportations of loved ones are faced with mounting legal and survival fees, so some are just leaving whether they are citizens or not.
One of my friends went to his children's school to withdraw his child before the end of the year so they could return to their home country—and was told that this was becoming common. The son of another friend was accosted by a stranger who demanded his papers—a random bigot, not even ICE. That mother and son are both citizens, but because relatives across the US are experiencing deportations and detentions, they are thinking of returning home, citizens or not. A building trades leader told me, “This is a great country—but this is not the country I thought I immigrated to.” The three people I describe here are from three different countries in South America.
The Courts, the Legislatures, the Streets
Even before Trump took office for his second term, the battle lines were drawn in the courts, our legislative bodies, and the streets. The courts have been inconclusive but stood up to Trump more than I had anticipated. This is a legitimate field of struggle, and one way to gum up the works for the fascists and keep them from consolidating power. Plus we are winning back the freedom of an occasional detainee, like Rümeysa Öztürk, a Turkish graduate student from Tufts University in Massachusetts. But the courts are also compromised by the systematic efforts by the New Confederacy to bring them to heel—and they are SLOW, and offer little in the way of public engagement or base-building opportunities. Part of Trump's strategy has been to slow things down in the courts, so that even if he loses some major cases when they get to the Supreme Court, 1) the damage against our people and the propaganda appeals to whiteness can't be undone, and 2) he will just attack the "liberal courts" who are standing in the way of his efforts to save us, in the normal fascist line of attack.
The legislatures are often either under the thumb of the New Confederacy, like the national Congress or the 23 states where the New Confederacy has a trifecta—that is, controls both houses of the legislature and the governor's office (and often the state attorney general as well). Even where that is the case, there can be field hearings held by Congressional representatives, the Anti-Oligarchy Tour by AOC and Bernie, televised Congressional hearings, and protests joined by elected representatives. In this moment we need leaders, not just legislators. Some Democrats seem to be getting this message. And in blue states we can call on legislators to actively support immigrants, like the bill in Massachusetts to provide an emergency $10 million in funding for legal defense of our immigrants. This will shore up the overworked legal advocates who are intervening and occasionally winning—or at least slowing down the fascist machine.
But the streets are key, and will push the other fronts along. The Globe article describes the creation of LUCE, a network of immigrant and other activists who develop rapid-response mobilizations whenever they can verify an ICE presence in our communities. Neighbor to Neighbor and a broad alliance of groups that make up LUCE have trained over 1,000 "verifiers" in over 25 "hubs" across the state. LUCE is modeled on the work that the Latine base-building organization Siembra NC pioneered in North Carolina during the first Trump administration. Now Siembra has created a “defend and recruit” workbook for people looking to expand this model in other states. Verifiers respond to calls to a statewide hotline and show up on site when ICE (or their various law enforcement partners in crime) is spotted. The verifiers who approach ICE are under strict training not to directly interfere with the ICE and to be non-violent. They film ICE cars and license plates, ask them what they are doing, ask for their names and badge numbers, etc., and report back to the hotline, which is staffed in multiple languages. Massachusetts has been a priority state by the feds in the last few weeks, and LUCE is receiving 700 or more calls each week.
This has multiple positive impacts. First, the videos fly over social media and the mainstream press, showing the world the brutal ugly face of aspirational fascism in the US. The video of the cruel kidnapping of the gentle and kind Rüymesa was more powerful than a thousand Substack articles like this, or a million leaflets. My wife and I watched the arrest of the daughter of a woman snatched by ICE in Worcester online—from Palermo, Sicily.
Second, ICE agents are cowards and bullies, who are masked to conceal their cowardice, even as they follow orders and leave children on streets without parents, break windows in the cars of people who only asked to see their lawyers, and drag them out to jail from in front of churches and schools. Often they simply leave. LUCE in Lynn claimed 100% effectiveness for the retreat of ICE over the last weekend when they could mobilize verifiers quickly enough. At a recent New Lynn Coalition board meeting, we viewed a video of just such an interaction. In some cases LUCE verifiers had to go back again and again to keep warding off ICE agents.
Finally, these rapid-response actions give people something concrete to DO, especially the combative youth and immigrants and others who have come to realize that this will not stop until we stop it. There is no imaginary cycle of history that will save us, this is not something that will just pass, and it is not a drill.
The scale of this kind of resistance is growing, and will continue to grow as more and more people are drawn into action. This goes beyond the regular activists who may attend Hands Off rallies. These are the people who are moving left, laying the basis to go beyond just “Hands Off what we used to have”—moving instead toward building something much better.
To be clear, immigrant defense work by groups like LUCE and Siembra will not stop mass deportations all on its own. It will take a variety of tactics by different social actors and sectors of the people, including legal and legislative efforts and other forms of both passive resistance that puts sand in gears of the repressive regime, as well as aggressive direct action. At times it feels like we have a great 10-year plan to respond to an existential 10-week crisis. Things inevitably heat up over this summer. The New Confederate thugs will no doubt respond to resistance with more repression. Fascism is not a dinner party, either. We need to expect that and prepare for it as the cost of doing our business.
But the street action of LUCE and multiple other similar efforts provide a place to win some victories, learn and uplift our own roles as working class people, and drive successes on other levels. Ultimately, it is through building and connecting these strategic defensive battles that we will lay the groundwork for the strategic counter-offensive needed to decisively defeat the New Confederacy, and put an end to its fascist agenda.
For we can win. Indeed, we already winning over public opinion on what was supposed to be Trump’s strongest issue. The American people stand with immigrants. Give light, and the people will fight.
 | A guest post by
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I get a bit irritated every time I read another article about what we "must" or "should" do without mention of what people are actually doing on the ground, or what experience led authors to their conclusions. I would rather hear about failed efforts and what can be learned from an honest examination of that failure than yet another exhortation. I have some false vanity as someone who has been in this since I was a teenager (which I am no longer!) and who takes some pride in no longer getting over-agitated about anything - but I still have trouble riding the highs and lows of this moment.
I get super inspired by the efforts of, for example, our heroic educators who are helping our kids through the brutality of mass deportation. Then I read the morning paper.....
I agree, Jeffrey. Recently in an exchange over this issue with some folks I am working with I made a similar argument: we need to have arguments that will move millions to win this. I actually tempered an earlier draft that went at "ultra-leftism" harder -- since these are folks I work with who are working their butts off for various immigrants rights efforts in an admirable way. But this kind of issue around crime or hard work is quibbling among left activists, not something that makes much sense to worry about when talking to regular folks. And I am getting more determined to speak up in opposition to it -- it wastes time and hurts our efforts if we want to talk to someone besides ourselves.