Immigration and the Fight for Democracy
The Left must coordinate mass resistance against Trump's ethnic cleansing program
By Bill Gallegos, excerpted from our new fall issue of “¡Adelante!” Read the full issue here.
U.S. GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump demonized Mexicans and immigrants as a central part of his 2016 presidential campaign. In 2024, he has doubled down. If elected, he promises to unleash an ethnic cleansing campaign to deport the 12 million undocumented immigrants in the U.S. This is horrible enough as a complete violation of human rights. But this pogrom is only one piece of the larger anti-democratic ‘Project 2025’ of the Heritage Foundation. They are coming for all of us. While singling out Mexican immigrants, Trump aims at all immigrant communities, including growing communities in the South, Midwest, and East.
Thankfully the political energy has shifted since President Biden dropped out of the presidential race. Vice-President Kamala Harris is now the Democratic Party candidate, and the polls show a significant shift in her direction. More than a million new volunteers have signed up for Harris, and hundreds of millions of new dollars have been contributed to her campaign.
The Biden-Harris Administration has been mixed on immigration: on one hand, it continues to support the legalization of Dreamers (DACA) and pushes for a path to legalization for the spouses of immigrants with legal residency. On the other hand, it has denied asylum protections for refugees crossing the southern border and supported legislation for increased militarization as well as new administrative hurdles. While our most important fight is against the MAGA right, the fight for full rights and protections for immigrants is a long-term struggle beyond the November elections.
The Biden dropout also creates significant opportunities for the left and progressives to advance the fight against the fascist threat, to advance a progressive platform, and to put new pressure on both Biden and the Harris campaign to demand a ceasefire in Gaza. It enables us to push back strongly against Trump’s racist threats against immigrants while advancing a positive program for immigrant rights.
What Trump’s ethnic cleansing campaign would mean in real life
Trump has made his anti-immigrant campaign the centerpiece of his fight for office. He promises, on his first day in office, to unleash a massive deportation campaign. This will be a military operation aimed against many communities throughout the U.S. with large immigrant populations. Armed U.S. immigration agents will invade neighborhoods, workplaces, schools and other gathering spaces suspected of having undocumented immigrants. These troopers would seek out, arrest, and transport to concentration camps anyone who cannot prove their “right” to be in the U.S. It’s no exaggeration to predict a scenario of armored vehicles and military helicopters in our cities and towns, especially in the prioritized communities of Mexicans, Chicanos, and Centro Americanos. But assaults will also be directed against Chinese, Asian, and Pacific Islander, Haitian, Muslim and Arabs, and African immigrant communities.
This campaign could directly affect 12 million undocumented workers and their families, an estimated 40–50 million people. We’ve already seen children coming home from school to find their parents taken away by ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) to who knows where. And past experiences like the infamous 1950’s “Operation Wetback,” which Trump claims as his model, shows that these campaigns often end up arresting and deporting U.S. citizens who “look illegal.”
Immigrant communities—and all who live there, immigrant or not—will suffer enormous impacts at their schools, unions, churches, social and athletic clubs, small and medium-sized businesses, and so on. The ripple effects have the potential to destroy the economic, social, and cultural fabric of rural and urban communities. It will be a horrendous crime against humanity.
Trump and the GOP have also pledged to build a network of concentration camps along the U.S.-Mexico border. The U.S. Border Patrol is already the largest domestic military force but will be bolstered by state National Guard units if Trump retakes the White House. Armed white racist “militias” already active along the border will certainly receive support from Trump to move into urban areas with significant immigrant communities.
Trump’s previous attacks on immigrants outraged the souls of most people in the U.S. and the world. The kidnapping and incarceration in dog-kennel-like facilities of 3,000 immigrant children from Latin@ families seeking refugee asylum, haunts us. Hundreds of those children still remain separated from their families. The promised mass deportations will result in tens of thousands more children facing a similar fate. This is state political terror: threatening to harm a child if the adult does not cooperate. The Party of so-called “Christian” and “family values,” like the slave owners of the past, do not believe non-white families are fully human.
Trump hopes to catapult himself into the White House with the support of bigoted white voters who rabidly agree with Trump’s slander that immigrants are “poisoning the blood” of the United States, a horrendous echo of Adolph Hitler’s demonizing of Jews as the Nazis prepared the Holocaust.
As horrible as mass deportation would be, it will be only the first phase of the Trump-led New Confederacy’s destroy-democracy campaign aimed at completely institutionalizing white minority rule, or apartheid. The goal is to enable major sectors of the capitalists (agribusiness, service sector, construction) to more freely exploit workers and destroy the planet in their never-ending pursuit of profits. If Trump and the New Confederacy win in November, everything is on the table: voting rights, political representation, union rights, women’s rights, LGTBQ+ rights, our environment and climate, free press and media, an independent judiciary– all the elements of a democratic society.
The defense of immigrants is therefore, not only a question of basic human rights, but a crucial part of building a broad and inclusive movement to defend and expand democracy in the U.S., and advancing a program that truly meets the needs of working people throughout the country.
“The defense of immigrants is therefore, not only a question of basic human rights, but a crucial part of building a broad and inclusive movement to defend and expand democracy in the U.S.”
Program for Resistance
Our Strategy:
We must build local, state, and national opposition to Trump’s ethnic cleansing program. Our campaign should take leadership from the Chicano-Latino and other communities that will be most directly impacted, but should aim to build a broad popular front of unions, worker centers, civic organizations, grassroots organizations, civil liberties groups, art and cultural activists, academics, and elected officials. Our strategy should include grassroots organizing, voter registration and mobilization, creative use of all forms of social media, and non-violent self-defense plans to keep ICE out of our schools, workplaces, places of worship, etc.
Internationalism must be central to our strategy. We must support and expand the ongoing efforts to build solidarity with the social movements in Mexico and encourage them to pressure the Mexican government to refuse to cooperate with any ethnic cleansing campaign initiated by a Trump Administration. There is already precedent for a stance like this from Mexico’s president, who has refused to accept immigrants that the government of Texas is attempting to deport to Mexico. The Mexican government can also be encouraged to suggest a similar position with the governments in Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, and with other “pink tide” governments in America Latina, as well as with China. The growing attack on Chinese immigrants to the U.S. should be considered an important element of the militaristic efforts by the U.S. ruling elite to make China “enemy number one” of the United States.
Workers (of the world) Unite! Ethnic cleansing is a workers’ issue. The labor movement can, indeed it must, play an active and aggressive role in the immigration fight. Not only do unions have large numbers of Latin@ members, but strengthening workers’ rights at home and abroad stops the global race to the bottom. In 2000 the the AFL-CIO, reversed a hundred years of anti-immigrant activity and since then has played a more progressive role. Leftists in the labor movement need to understand that labor’s future will largely be determined by our approach to white supremacy, and today that requires practical and political responses to the immigration crisis like those mentioned above.
Build Black-Brown unity. Separating families has consistently been white supremacist U.S. policy: Native Americans (forcible removal of children to schools designed to “knock the Indian out of them”), African Americans (selling husband, wives, and children separately), Asians (separating Japanese American fathers suspected of being community leaders from their families, by putting them into different internment camps during WWII) and Latin@s as we are now witnessing in horror. Together, the Black and Brown populations in the U.S. represent more than 80 million people in areas of historic concentration in the U.S. South and the U.S. Southwest. A “Sunbelt Strategy” that unites our two social movements could anchor a united front of all oppressed people of color and a significant minority of white working people. A common campaign against the mass incarceration of Black people and the ethnic cleansing of Latin@s could be a major launching point for melding these forces into the foundation, the beating heart, of the United Front that can lead the working class out of capitalist barbarism.
Build unity on the Left. Left and socialist organizations should be finding more ways to unite against the Trump ethnic cleansing anti-immigrant campaign. This is at once a working class, women’s, and oppressed peoples’ issue. The moral outrage and the political strategy behind this campaign should motivate left organizations to meet, to talk, to strategize, and to collaboratively support the growing and massive resistance movement that has developed around these issues. In many communities the Sanctuary movement unites a broad range of people in the name of protecting their neighbors and friends. This takes many forms, from campaigns to pass Sanctuary legislation to civil disobedience at ICE facilities to disruption of raids and establishment of literal sanctuary churches and homes where people at risk of detention or deportation can be protected. This could be an important first step towards building the broader Left unity we need to truly transform this country and achieve socialism.
Build – Block – Broaden: We need a united front NOW against the extremist New-Confederate Right, which is constructing a dangerous path to fascism. They are eliminating the right to vote for tens of millions of people of color; demonizing the media; putting forward falsehoods, praising dictators, gutting trade union rights, women’s rights, and civil rights; mobilizing an openly racist, white nationalist, neoNazi social base, all aimed towards creating an apartheid country. Time is of the essence. We must unite all who can be united in a broad united front that even includes neoliberal Democrats to confront this common enemy and build a new majority committed to justice and self-determination.
Liberation Road is the only major US revolutionary socialist organization that has a developed position on Chicano Liberation, and one of the few that understands and works to build solidarity with the socialist movements and revolutionaries of Mexico. Our “¡Adelante!” pamphlets help explain our strategic perspectives on Chicano Liberation and Mexico Solidarity. Our latest fall issue is out now in both English and Spanish.
Bill Gallegos is a member of Liberation Road and a veteran activist in the Chican@ Liberation Struggle and the Environmental Justice Movement.