Defend Immigrant Rights! No Human Being is Illegal
by Jeff Mackler
The Los Angeles and national immigration rights protests began in early June when ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) agents with no legal authority stormed sections of Los Angeles’s largely Latino and Central American communities, banging on and smashing doors of local homes demanding that residents open with the intention of arresting those they deemed illegal. The stated goal was to circumvent via terrorist tactics and presidential decrees fundamental democratic rights to privacy and other constitutional protections that historically ban the deployment of US troops against civilians. The Trump administration’s stated goal was to arrest 3,000 “illegal” immigrants in Los Angeles daily, a figure that ICE officials claim they have largely met. In the days that followed, the brutal and coordinated raids were countered by community and politically organized groups that mobilized multiple thousands in coordinated mass protests that challenged the government’s brutal fascist-like tactics. These included mass arrests and deployment of tear gas grenades, rubber bullets, clubs, unarmed robot-like police vehicles and flash-bang ammunition.
The niceties employed by Democrats, insisting that today’s immigrant rights protests are legal and peaceful cannot be taken as good coin. Yesterday’s Biden/Harris immigrant legislation exceeded Trump’s in the number and ferocity of deportations, not to mention Genocide Joe and Kamala’s mass slaughter of 55,000 Palestinians. Ralph Nader put the figure murdered at 100,000!
Rhetoric aside, including “Great Deporter” Barak Obama’s record deportation, the growing fightback movement has no lessons in “peace” to be learned from today’s or yesterday’s Democrats or Republicans. “No Human Being Is Illegal!” must be our starting point! “End All Deportations!!”
Democratically and independently organized, united front mass actions aimed at winning the vast majority to humanity’s cause is the first critical step for today’s freedom movement. The vast majority of deportees, the 99 percent, are working people, our natural allies, brought here by the capitalist class as a cheap or the cheapest form of non-union, super-exploited labor, to be imported or deported as needed by the super-rich. Immigrants come to the US because their native economies and resources are plundered by the same super rich corporations that exploit them in the US.
President Trump was at the center of the government’s violent hate campaign, pillorying the Latino community and their allies with multiple racist epithets and characterizing the protestors as “violent terrorists” tantamount to an organized “insurrection” that posed an immediate threat to US “national security.” The latter term is no accident; it is the ruling class’s standard term aimed at circumventing any legal obstacles that defend basic democratic rights.
Literally every “national security” agency of the government is now moving to combine its resources to collect the names and identities of millions of people across the country for future prosecution and deportation. The government’s new App would “eventually allow for the “centralized management of all interior enforcement priorities.” This would also include data from the Housing and Urban Development Department, the Labor Department, the Health and Human Services Department and the Internal Revenue Service,
In short, Trump, today, a self-declared “King,” in his own words, plans to fulfill his election promises with deeds that run rough shod over fundamental democratic rights that have been taken for granted for centuries.
In response, a wide range of human rights groups, including posturing Democrats, declared June 14 “No Kings Day,’ with 2,000 protest actions organized in 50 states. An estimated six million participated, making the mobilization among the largest coordinated actions in US history, and insuring that the wonton government violence of the previous week was kept to a minimum, at least for “No Kings Day.”
Indeed, frightened Trump officials were ordered by Trump’s ICE enforcers to abruptly change policy, limiting deportations in key sectors of the economy. Senior ICE official, Tatum King, sent an email to regional ICE leaders ordering them to “hold on all worksite enforcement investigations – operations on agriculture (including aquaculture and meatpacking), restaurants and operating hotels).” With millions in the streets walking off their jobs, and sections of the ruling class demanding business as usual, that is, uninterrupted profits from exploiting the nation’s lowest paid workers, Trump backed off.
His Democratic Party “opponents” have insisted that their own protests were peaceful and legal, implying that if they were not – if the protestors chose to defend themselves against institutional police violence – they would be guilty of a crime. To enforce their threat they have called on the LAPD to daily maintain “law and order.” Democrats, led by Governor Gavin Newsome and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, have also taken to the courts to argue their case, with no serious expectation that a “legal interpretation” will be found to challenge King Trump’s use of the National Guard to quell domestic protestors.
But while National Guard troops mostly stood around outside federal buildings, it was the Los Angeles Police Department whose members brutalized protesters with batons, tear gas, and so-called “less-lethal” munitions, drawing blood and bruising people who turned out to protest U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids.
Reprinted from Socialist Action USA