By Dave Stockton
One year on from his election, Donald Trump’s most consistent actions are not his tariff wars, his ‘peace’ attempts with Putin or Netanyahu, or his threats to attack Venezuela or Nigeria, but the war he is waging against his internal enemies.
These fall into two main categories: an estimated 11 million immigrants living in the US without papers, and state employees, especially those responsible for environmental and consumer protection, public education and health.
Trump’s proclaimed target is to deport half a million people per year. The Department of Homeland Security has ‘created’ illegals by abolishing the status of the humanitarian parole pathway for Latinx people, ordering them to ‘self-deport’ immediately. As for federal employees, even before the government shutdown in October, 200,000 federal workers had left their jobs with 55,000 formally sacked. By the year end the exodus is expected to reach 300,000.
ICE
Despite Trump’s racist rhetoric against those crossing the border, mass deportation has long been a bipartisan issue. While Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) was formed by George W Bush, Barack Obama holds the record of any president for deportations—over 3 million. And in his final year Joe Biden managed the highest deportation rate in 10 years.
Today 20,000 ICE agents are busy kidnapping people on the streets and from workplaces, immigration offices, churches, and hospitals, without arrest warrants. In districts with high immigrant populations, dozens of agents arrive in unmarked cars, bulletproof vests, and toting assault rifles. They wear ski masks, do not display badges and refuse requests to identify themselves. Their victims are handcuffed, thrown into rented vans and taken to holding centres. As a result, many, including those with legal status, are afraid to go to work, school or university.
One of the most notorious con-centration camps is the South Florida Detention Facility, dubbed the ‘Alligator Alcatraz’, whose capacity is set to increase to 5,000. Trump’s ‘One Big Beautiful Bill’ nearly tripled ICE’s budget in July, leading to a recruitment drive among local police officers. In addition, ICE has been gaining access to police surveillance databases to track down ‘wanted’ people. For the millions of ‘illegals’ ICE has become a veritable Gestapo. Trump has also targeted international students and academics involved in the Gaza protests for deportation. By mid-May, nearly 2,000 student visas had been cancelled, though the courts have restored some.
White House lawyers have argued immigration agents cannot enforce federal law without the help of the military, ordering National Guards to take over at state and city level on the pretext of to ‘protecting’ ICE against local people’s protests in San Francisco, Chicago and Portland, Oregon where he claims crime is rife or an insurrection is taking place. His particular target is ‘sanctuary cities’ that refuse cooperation between their local law enforcement and ICE to protect immigrants from deportation.
The ICE raids and deportations have a double purpose: pandering to Trump’s white supremacist MAGA base, and intimidating his political opponents. This also applies to the other big ‘enemies within’: federal employees working in departments dealing, however minimally, with welfare, public health, and racially discriminatory and environmental problems.
Government agencies that face closure or mass dismissals include the Centres of Medicare and Medicaid Services, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the Department of Education, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and, beyond its borders, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).
Also Trump is openly eliminating federal diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives, boosting fossil fuel production and slashing funding for renewable energy and climate change programmes. He is controlling the hiring and firing of federal employees based on support for Trump’s MAGA ideology.
Targeting antifascists
After the assassination of far right activist Charlie Kirk in September, Trump signed an executive order designating ‘Antifa’ a terrorist organisation. Trump used Kirk’s funeral to call for a 1950s McCarthy style witch-hunt against left and liberal organisations. Since then, however, law enforcement officials have not identified any Antifa members for criminal charges.
Antifa is not a national or centralised single organisation, rather groups of people dedicated to confronting right-wing paramilitary outfits, like those attending the Unite the Right march in in Charlottesville, Virginia in August 2017, and those who spearheaded the mobs that stormed Capitol on 6 January 2021.
After James Alex Fields Jr deliberately drove his car into a peaceful crowd of antifascists in Charlottesville, murdering antifascist Heather Heyer, Trump claimed there was ‘blame on both sides’. And he notoriously pardoned his fascist supporters among the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, etc., involved in his attempt to stop the ratification of Joe Biden’s election victory.
The millions who attended the ‘No Kings’ demonstrations in June and October testify to the huge numbers willing to resist the billionaire would-be dictator. They are correct to point to his attacks on constitutional rights and social reforms won by hard struggle.
While Trump is not actually a Nazi, he is trying to grab dictatorial powers so that appeals to the courts and the constitution are fruitless. With majorities in the House, the Senate and the Supreme Court, he has his eye on an (illegal) third term. MAGA Republicans in ‘red states’ are busy gerrymandering electoral districts ahead of the mid-term elections that could threaten their hold on Congress.
The problem is union leaders, like Teamsters International president, Sean O’Brien, are either standing aside or actually supporting Trump. Even left-talking United Autoworkers president Shawn Fain supports Trump’s tariffs as ‘pro-worker’.
But if Trump’s executive orders are to be defied or rendered impotent, and beyond that if any ‘palace coup’ from the White House is launched to override electoral setbacks, it will take industrial action on a massive scale to paralyse his use of the troops, whose oath of allegiance he might possibly transfer from congress to the presidency.
To prepare for this eventuality, as well as to defend the reforms and rights under attack, socialists and social movement activists must break with the do-nothing Democrats and create a mass workers’ party in the factories, ports, offices, first and foremost to coordinate mass direct action—strikes, a general strike—not primarily to run in elections.
