Every day in the United States, heavily armed, militarized, and masked immigration agents—often operating without warrants or even the pretense of due process—are seizing workers, students, parents and long-time residents as part of President Donald Trump’s ongoing mass deportation campaign.
Under the guise of combating “terrorism” and “criminal gangs,” the ongoing raids overwhelmingly target workers and their families, many of whom have filed for asylum and completed every legal requirement for seeking residence in the United States.
In the first 100 days of Trump’s second term, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) reported arresting 66,463 people and deporting 65,682. By mid-May, nearly 49,000 individuals were being held in immigration detention centers—most of them privately run, for-profit facilities scattered across the United States.
To meet a White House-imposed quota of 3,000 arrests per day—set by Trump’s fascist-minded senior adviser Stephen Miller—masked immigration agents are appearing at courthouses, worksites, and other public spaces to capture “illegal” immigrants.
If their “target” is not present, the immigration Gestapo is encouraged to carry out “collateral arrests”—detaining anyone they encounter whom they suspect of being “illegal,” regardless of whether that person was the intended target.
In line with these directives, the right-wing New York Post—owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp—reported that “2,200 illegal migrants” were arrested in a single day on Tuesday. This came after a Monday press conference by ICE Acting Director Todd Lyons, who gloated that immigration agents had detained 1,461 people in Massachusetts in May alone as part of “Operation Patriot.”
Trump and his ruling class allies have repeatedly claimed that those being targeted for deportation are the spearhead of an invasion force aimed at destroying America. This lie is disproven every day.
On Wednesday, CNN reported that the Trump administration is reviving its notorious child separation policy and has already taken approximately 500 children into government custody—removing them from previously vetted family sponsors. During Trump’s first term, more than 5,500 children were separated from their parents in a cruel and inhumane effort to deter immigrants and asylum seekers. As of 2024, according to Human Rights Watch, over 1,000 of those children had still not been reunited with their families.
Every day brings new outrages. On Tuesday, KTLA in Los Angeles reported that Martir Gracia Lara, a fourth-grade student at Torrance Elementary School, and his father attended an immigration hearing in Houston, Texas, at which point both were detained and separated by ICE agents.
There is growing popular opposition to the Trump administration’s vicious assault on immigrants and their families. Demonstrations against the administration’s policies are becoming more frequent and militant, reflecting a deepening mood of resistance.
In Chicago on Wednesday, over 100 people attempted to block ICE agents from kidnapping 12 individuals who were detained while appearing for a check-in at immigration court. The presence of the crowd prompted the deployment of dozens of Chicago police officers to the area. At one point, protesters attempted to block the van disappearing the immigrants.
The day before, in Minneapolis, Minnesota, a similar scene unfolded when FBI, Homeland Security Investigations and Drug Enforcement Agency thugs conducted a federal operation at Las Cuatro Milpas, a restaurant on East Lake Street that bears the slogan “Make Tacos, Not Walls.”
The presence of dozens of heavily armed agents—including tactical FBI teams carrying M4 rifles with silencers—provoked widespread anger in the community. Minneapolis police were dispatched to protect the federal agents and arrested two people for allegedly assaulting police.
And in San Diego on May 30, over 100 residents came out to oppose an ICE operation targeting a local Italian restaurant. ICE and HSI agents resorted to flash-bang grenades in an attempt to disperse the crowd, but were instead driven out by residents and restaurant workers.
These protests speak to the growing opposition to the fascistic Trump administration and its assault on democratic rights, with its central target being immigrant families.
This opposition to Trump must be armed with a clear political orientation. The Trump administration is seeking to establish a political dictatorship. The same regime that is carrying out mass deportations is criminalizing opposition to the genocide in Gaza, invoking the 18th-century Alien Enemies Act to imprison and expel political dissidents, defying court rulings, and rapidly militarizing American society.
Far from opposing Trump’s assault on immigrants, the Democratic Party has paved the way for it and continues to collaborate in its implementation. It was Democrat Bill Clinton who, in the 1990s, spearheaded border militarization and the criminalization of undocumented immigrants. Barack Obama deported more people than any other president in US history, while Vice President Kamala Harris infamously told migrants in 2021, “Do not come.”
The Democrats’ response to the return of Trump has been a combination of collaboration and suppression of opposition. In January, Democrats joined Republicans in passing the reactionary “Laken Riley Act,” which mandates the detention of any undocumented immigrant accused of even minor offenses like shoplifting. As for “independent” Senator Bernie Sanders, he told ABC News that Trump had “done right” in attacking immigrants and “making sure our border is stronger.”
In contrast to the Democrats—who are collaborating with the fascist president and his assault on democratic rights—workers and youth resisting today’s deportation operations stand in historic continuity with those who, at great personal and legal risk, resisted efforts to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. The horrors of the Fugitive Slave Act led millions to conclude that there could be no compromise with the slave power, and that the only recourse was mass revolutionary action to guarantee the safety and democratic rights of all.
The defense of immigrants today is, at its core, a class question. The brutal methods now being used against undocumented workers—raids, surveillance, indefinite detention, deportation without trial—will be used against all those who oppose the policies of the corporate and financial oligarchy.
Trump and the entire political establishment promote the poisonous lie that immigrants are responsible for the social crisis in the US—a lie repeated by the ruling elites of every country—even as they are implementing an historic assault on social programs, aimed at financing massive handouts to the rich and an enormous escalation of imperialist war.
The working class must reject all attempts to divide it along national or ethnic lines. The fight to defend immigrant workers can succeed only through the united mobilization of the working class as a whole—black, white, native-born, immigrant, documented and undocumented alike. This means building rank-and-file workplace and neighborhood committees to oppose the deportation operations and prepare collective actions using the immense social power of the working class.
The defense of immigrants and the democratic rights of all is inseparable from the fight to abolish the capitalist system. It requires the building of a mass socialist movement committed to erasing all borders, ending imperialist war, and securing the right of all people to live and work wherever they choose, free from repression, exploitation, or fear.