It has been nearly 3 months since Trump’s racist tirade against the Somali community in Minneapolis, most of whom are American citizens, in which he announced plans to flood the city with 2000 ICE (Immigration Enforcement Agency) agents, the biggest operation so far. Since then, residents have described a city under occupation with deserted streets, cars abandoned in the middle of roads, often with windows smashed, the drivers nowhere to be seen. Restaurants are closed, shops keep their doors locked, parents are told last minute to not turn up to school after masked-up agents, armed to the teeth, turn up to ambush parents and their children. We have witnessed scenes of people, including children, being dragged into the back of vans and taken away to unknown locations without warning. ‘Operation Metro Surge’ saw three thousand arrested, with one judge coming out to say that of the hundreds of cases he had overseen, the ‘overwhelming majority’ were individuals legally present in the US.
The people of Minneapolis, experienced in protest after the Black Lives Matter demonstrations which followed the murder of George Floyd in 2020, and in a city with a history of militancy including the 1934 mass strikes, have not taken this reign of terror lying down. ICE agents are treated like an invading army, wherever they go they are harassed by indignant residents, intent on protecting their neighbours. As soon as they turn up people come out into the streets, banging pots and pans, surrounding their vehicles and disrupting their activities.
Everyone is on alert, phone networks have been built that are capable of mobilising large numbers of people at short notice, dedicated activists tail ICE agents to monitor them and raise the alarm when necessary. Groups have organised food and medicine drops for residents that are scared to leave the house. Despite the horror, people talk with pride of how their community has never felt stronger, that they have felt more connected to their neighbours than ever before. The actions of the state have connected working people across the city, creating a network of resistance. The murder of two peaceful protesters, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, by armed agents was the last straw.
ICE offensive
Democratic Party politicians have denounced the actions of ICE and, in Congress, are blocking funding of ICE without reforms, which are totally inadequate. ICE must be abolished and its uniformed thugs dispersed. The Democrats cynical support for the movement is driven by a desire to exploit popular anger for November’s midterm congress elections.
The liberal darling Obama, better known to many activists as the ‘Deporter-in-chief’, deported up to 3.1 million over his two terms, compared to half that number for Biden and even Trump’s first term (1.5 million)! When combined with refusal to grant entry at the border, in a flagrant abandonment of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights to which the US was a founding signatory, Biden stands above the rest with 4.4 million people denied the right to seek asylum or deported. The agents who murdered Good and Pretti were hired and trained under Democratic administrations.
However, it is undeniable that there has been an escalation under Trump. Where Obama and Biden focussed on certain categories and set up limited programmes like DACA to legalise children who arrived illegally, Trump has ripped all this up. His full-spectrum assault on all immigrants has seen many legal citizens caught up in the racist dragnet as ICE invasions terrorise whole cities. Last year over 600,000 were deported and a further 1.9 million people are estimated to have fled. He has more than doubled the number of agents from 10,000 to 22,000, with the ICE budget now larger than the FBI’s at $85 billion (passed with the help of the Democrats), allowing Trump to double the number incarcerated from around 40,000 to 73,000, with plans to build camps to house up to 135,000.
There has been a more or less uninterrupted assault on the right of working people to seek a safe place to live and work in the US, turning it into a gated community in an impoverished world as Trump’s old ‘build the wall’ slogan suggests. This is rooted in the crisis of global capitalism since 2008, driving immigration and in return Trump’s weaponisation of anti-immigrant racism to divide and rule. ICE and its workplace raids are crucial to this, aimed not at criminals but at cowing immigrant workers (17% of the US workforce) who are central to trade unions’ growth. These operations and terror, and the use of National Guard troops to back up ICE, is a dangerous precedent for the entire labor movement.
The Mass Strike
Minneapolis shows the way. After the brutal murder of Renee Good, just a few streets over from where George Floyd was killed, a wave of anger was unleashed. Students walked out of schools and anti-ICE activists called for a general strike. The call fell on fertile ground and on 23 January, the ‘Day of Truth and Freedom’, up to 100,000 marched in the streets in -23C temperatures with many people staying away from work. Tens of thousands more protested across the country in solidarity. Union leaders endorsed the day of action but did not call for strikes in the workplaces they organised. Indeed many sent messages to members warning them against taking action due to the no-strike clauses they themselves had negotiated in contracts! Nevertheless, schools closed, thousands of workers stayed away from work and joined the demonstrations, and hundreds of local businesses closed, no doubt partly under pressure from their workers.
Without the biggest unions or industry shutting down the action fell short of a citywide one-day general strike, but the calls for one were echoed across the country. The Minneapolis action and solidarity mobilisations nationwide combined with mass outrage at the killing of Pretti on the 24th all forced Trump to retreat, ending the official operation, though ICE actions continue on a lower scale in the suburbs. This is aided by the Democratic mayor and governor Walz calling for peace, earning them praise from Trump’s border czar Tom Homan who praised their cooperation in the hunt for immigrants, ‘I’ve gotten agreements in Minnesota I never thought we’d be able to get’. It proves once again that the Democrats ‘plan B’ doesn’t protect immigrants or anyone else from Trump’s constitution-bending power grabs but rather enables him.
Now Minnesota activists are aiming for 1 May, by holding a ‘Workers Assembly’. On 15 February more than 400 rank-and-file workers, union officials, community anti-ICE activists, and leftwing activists met at the United Labor Center in Minneapolis voting unanimously to organise for workplace strikes, school walkouts, and consumer boycotts on 1 May. It also agreed to set up strike committees in 25 workplaces to prepare for May Day. Those should be controlled by the workers themselves and push for wildcat strikes. A nation-wide campaign for ‘May Day Strong’ has held national calls of thousands aiming to pledge millions to commit to not going to work, school or shopping on May Day. Local activists can follow Minneapolis and hold workers’ assemblies aiming for delegates not just from organisations and unions, but committees elected in schools, communities and most importantly workplaces – that’s where the power for a genuine mass strike lies.
A May Day mass strike will not only hit the bosses where it hurts, their profits, it will teach the workers their power and point the way towards a new kind of society. But to be successful it needs to spread nationwide with assemblies, workplace committees and rank and file organisation in the unions, drawing in the millions of union members and unorganised workers and providing a democratic space to debate where the movement is going, giving a voice to the masses and, most importantly, coordinating further action against the state’s armed thugs. The union leaders will not lead that charge, and so the key is to demand action and unity from above and below, ‘with the union leaders when possible, without them when necessary’.
The committees which prepare May Day should remain in existence, to mobilise action in support of workers victimised by their employers and prepare for future action. The UAW’s leader Shawn Fain has called for the unions to mount a general strike on 1 May 2028. The rank and file should push that forward – workers, immigrants, women and transgender people can’t wait that long.
The Workers Assembly rejected a motion for an ‘organized labor break from Democrats and Republicans’. That demand, correct in itself, is likely premature since the priority is to build the assembly with deep roots in the workplaces aiming for a May Day mass strike against ICE. However as a mass movement awakens, it presents the opportunity to raise the great historic question of the American working class: break from the bankrupt Democratic Party, the ‘graveyard of social movements’, and build a new party of labor. That struggle can go hand in hand with a patient struggle to win it to a revolutionary programme. All those who see that need should form caucuses in the unions, labor centrals, and workers’ assemblies, explaining the need and preparing for the moment to raise the issue again, and win.
- All out for a mass strike on May Day!
- Build workers’ assemblies in every town and city!
- Build strike committees in every workplace and rank and file May Day networks in every union!
- For caucuses for a new labor party, in the unions, centrals and assemblies!
- Build for a general strike!
