Of all the promises Trump made to working people if elected, the only one he has consistently pursued has been a campaign of mass deportations of undocumented immigrants, overwhelmingly people of color, as part of his project to “Make America Great Again.”
An end to endless war? He instead gave us Iran. Addressing affordability? $7 diesel. Drain the swamp of corruption and bureaucracy? Billions for the Trump family. A promised health care plan? Nothing. Cut taxes? Unless you’re a billionaire or trillionaire, forget about it.
The fact of the matter is the Trump movement was never about working people but rather totally about his ruling class backers and their long-term agenda (as spelled out in Project 2025) to permanently institutionalize their domination on the basis of white supremacy, misogyny, and rule by oligarchy.
In this three-card monte game, an immigrant witch-hunt is used to distract from Trump’s handoffs in the form of a trillion dollars in tax cuts to the rich and a $2,300 price tag every working family pays to fund Trump’s war against Iran.
At a time when there is an actual national emergency of unaffordability—working people besieged by rising costs of living and ever shrinking wages—Trump spends $70 billion to criminalize and deport undocumented immigrants. Often, many of these immigrants are seeking residency and citizenship in the U.S. as a refuge from home countries ravaged by U.S. foreign policy.
Yes, the immigration system in the U.S. is broken. Its dysfunction is enabled by both parties of capital, but a clear path to citizenship needs to be enacted for all who live here, raise their families, work here, and pay taxes—proportionately higher taxes, it’s worth noting, than many of the president’s billionaire tech bro supporters.
Ours is an immigration system that runs on BOTH witch-hunts of the undocumented and under-the-table super-exploitation of those same workers for the sake of bosses’ profits.
The demonization of immigrants, the unleashing of Gestapo-like ICE thugs, the performative cruelty and murder with impunity, and the evisceration of habeas corpus and other constitutional rights have nothing to do with government regulation of immigrant flows or needed reforms of the immigration system.
They—along with attacks on DEI, affirmative action, and the abolition of the Voting Rights Act—have everything to do with boosting profits, racist profiling, and ethnic cleansing “to make America white again.”
ICE increased its kidnappings and deportations this past summer, aided by the “Big Beautiful Bill’s” $70 funding and a recent $2 billion contract with tech company Palantir, enabling the latest facial recognition and digital data sharing technology to achieve its quotas.
But people are fighting back. No Kings marches have mobilized millions, with growing participation by the mass labor, civil rights, and immigrant rights organizations. The mighty general strike of labor in Minneapolis, combined with labor-community coalitions there under the theme of “No Work! No School! No Shopping!,” drove ICE out and has been an inspiration to many.
May Day Strong, made up of 600 labor and community organizations, on the heels of the most militant May Day in years, has held hundreds of trainings for union and community leaders seeking to build the labor-community coalitions needed. Rapid response networks and Know Your Rights trainings have led to larger neighborhood networks of resistance. In the event of a coup, these regional rapid response networks will need national coordination.
And increasingly, activists are linking the need for immigrant defense to the need for election protection and defense on Nov. 3. If racist gerrymandering doesn’t succeed in retaining a Republican majority in Congress, the stage is set for a naked power grab. Trump is already claiming, with no evidence, that “illegal aliens” are stealing the vote.
“They’re lying because they are losing,” says Hannah Strauss, of Hands Off NYC, “They are crying fraud, rigging the maps, and going after those who disagree. If the Trump administration and billionaires attempt to sabotage elections anywhere in the country, we need to be ready for sustained protests and actions.”
The AFL-CIO, at its recent national convention, committed to mobilizing 50,000 of its members to provide election protection at the polls in battleground states.
The recent National Security Presidential Memorandum, in its “Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence” section, redefines terrorism as: “anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity.” It includes “hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.”
It directs a “comprehensive” approach to “disrupt” entities and individuals redefined as such—a definition that could place not just the left, but most anti-Trump activists, inside the archipelago of detention centers currently being planned.
In the Communist Party, which I’m a member of, we don’t endorse Democrats, but, given the fascist threat, we work within the coalitions we are members of to build the unity that is needed. That means mobilizing to defeat the Republican members of Congress who have collaborated with Trump’s MAGA program and assuring the vote is counted.
What happens after Nov. 3 remains to be determined. A big factor will be whether the massive and resounding vote against Trump and his Republican Party collaborators will make it too costly for them to declare a state of emergency and try nullifying the vote.
If we organize today in the streets and at the ballot box to block a fascist threat, it is so we may have the space to organize for jobs, health care, and a deeper multi-racial democracy tomorrow. The Trump/MAGA program is an attack on the entire working class, citizen as well as non-citizen, white, Black, Latino, and Asian. We need to stand together and fight!
Millions have marched under No Kings banner, in anti-ICE marches, in civil rights demonstrations. In the event of a coup, we will need many millions more pouring into the streets in sustained, determined, and coordinated non-violent resistance.
As with other op-eds published by People’s World, the views expressed here are those of the author.
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