Against the Raids: Let the Struggles in Los Angeles Spread Across the Country!

Author: Dorian Gonzalez

The anti-immigrant policy promoted by Washington in recent weeks has led to surprise and violent arrests, sparking outrage among the families and friends of the detainees, who gathered at detention centers to demand their release, only to be met with tear gas and beatings by the security forces. This situation triggered massive protests in Los Angeles, where thousands of people expressed their outrage by setting fire to the streets and attacking police patrols. These protests were quickly repressed by the state’s police forces, but Trump decided to send National Guard troops to contain the massive, spontaneous mobilizations.

Months earlier, we had seen Trump deport thousands of migrants to Latin American countries. These latest events make it clear that the foreign policy of the U.S. is nothing but a reflection of the police state being imposed on the working class inside the United States. But this time, it is the Latino workers who have taken to the streets to confront this criminal and repressive wave.

The anti-immigrant policy of the Yankee state is nothing new. However, what distinguished these recent operations was the speed with which they escalated since the beginning of this month. In May, Stephen Miller, a White House official, announced a plan to arrest 3,000 migrants per day. Over 5,000 agents from various federal agencies, led by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), as well as the FBI, DEA, and the Department of Justice, were deployed. This is part of the "Operation At Large" initiative, which also includes 21,000 members of the National Guard.

Protests of this magnitude had not been seen since 2020, following the murder of George Floyd at the hands of Trump’s racist police during his first term. This time, it is the migrant labor force that sustains the country’s big business tycoons and billionaires.

Los Angeles is home to nearly 6 million Latinos, out of over 15 million living in the state of California, and it is their primary workforce. This has made the region one of the main cities where the persecution of these workers takes place, but it has also become the epicenter of the current protests.

This shows that the capitalist dictatorship in the United States has declared war on the working class, and it is not, as they try to make us believe, about arresting criminals. Workplaces have been the main sites where these raids have taken place, and they are now spreading across the other states of the country. For example, Glenn Valley Foods in Nebraska saw its workforce halved due to ICE arrests. Everywhere, arrests were made while migrants were at work, so much so that many U.S. citizens filmed the interventions to denounce the abuse by agents.

The Bourgeois Parties Against Migrants

The American Dream, long praised by many, culminates here, in these mass expulsions. While Trump’s deportation numbers haven’t yet reached those of Obama’s administration, which deported over 5 million migrants, this makes it clear that it doesn’t matter which administration is in the White House—the expulsion machinery remains completely impune. What has increased is the deepening of the bonapartist regime in the United States. During the mass protests over George Floyd’s murder, the National Guard was mobilized by the various states that had the power to do so. In this case, Trump appealed to the so-called "Insurrection Act," which allowed him to federalize the National Guard and send 4,000 soldiers and 700 Marines to Los Angeles to quell the protests.

This offensive has led to confrontations between Trump and California’s Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom. However, these are merely skirmishes within the same dictatorial system that imposes force in the face of workers’ resistance against repressive forces. What they are deciding are the ways in which this uprising will be suppressed.

On the other hand, Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem has accused Mexico’s President Sheinbaum of encouraging these protests. Sheinbaum responded that she called for mobilization over the taxes on remittances sent to Mexico, but she views the fires in Los Angeles as a provocation and believes the migrant issue should be addressed differently. In other words, the Mexican government also supports the "smart" repression of protests proposed by the imperialists of the Democratic Party.

Let’s make it clear: Sheinbaum encourages peace among Latin protests, but sends 10,000 soldiers to the border on Trump’s orders to contain the advance of migrants. In Mexico, under the MORENA government, raids occur every day by immigration agents who arrest and deport Central Americans or send them to prisons where they die. In 2023, there were over 782,000 detentions, and migrant deaths tripled that same year.

Sheinbaum is no pacifist; she is a loyal servant of North American capital and is willing to yield to its pressure. From the first day of her government, the Mexican National Guard was killing migrants at the southern border with Guatemala. Under her rule, migrant workers, peasants, and students continue to be murdered in a country full of clandestine graves that the government hides. Sheinbaum’s policy is openly servile to U.S. transnationals and businessmen but bloodthirsty when it comes to disciplining the working people. Therefore, the accusation made by the Republicans is just another scam to further tighten the oppression that binds the Latin country to the chains of imperialism.

It’s Time to Intensify Mobilization and Combat

The struggle of Latino workers shows that the working class is willing to fight in the heart of imperialism, just as its African American brothers are victims of the same repressive forces of the bourgeois state. For this reason, it is time to unite all our struggles, which are escalating on every continent due to the growing crisis and misery caused by capital. The ruling classes of the world powers are leading us to war; the proletariat declares war on these imperialist parasites, who have done nothing but plunder the semi-colonies. The key to the struggle for peace, bread, and true freedom is found in the unity of the international proletariat.

Reformist leaderships that betray the proletariat always try to separate our struggles by country or claim that we have nothing in common with the most exploited workers in capitalist metropolises. This falsehood only serves the interests of financial capital to better strangle the forces of the global proletariat, which is already opening different fronts of struggle against the exploiters. We must return to our best traditions of combat, under the slogan that workers have no homeland. History has shown that it is only through this international alliance that the greatest victories of oppressed peoples have been achieved; beyond that, there are only petty bourgeois fictions.

Street struggles must unite with mass strikes in workplaces where the boss profits from the super-exploited migrant labor, and in this, he is in agreement with the Republican government. Trump’s retreat comes not due to the protests, but due to pressure from agricultural and hotel magnates who are unwilling to pay more to enrich themselves from the juicy surplus value guaranteed by undocumented Latino workers. Tatum King, an ICE official, has already stated that raids in agricultural companies, meatpacking plants, restaurants, and hotels have been suspended, and Trump announces more raids in other states of the country.

We must tactically demand that the reformist leaders of mass workers’ organizations break with their social-imperialism and put their forces at the service of the struggle, breaking with their submission to the Democrats. Down with the Republicans and Democrats, both executioners of the North American migrant proletariat!

We must encourage strikes in the factories, take the streets, and form new fighting organizations led by the most exploited, with migrants at the forefront, both documented and undocumented. The development of these strikes should propose expropriation without compensation and under workers' control of the large U.S. industries that have employed migrant labor at slave-like levels for decades.

Only fierce combat can stop the repression and the raids. Let neighborhood self-defense methods be organized, as they were in the 60s. If the "Border Czar" Tom Homan seeks to employ fascist groups at the southern U.S. border, it is necessary to respond with properly armed self-defense groups.

This is how the path to the revolutionary uprising of the exploited masses in the U.S. is prepared, to bring down the bourgeois dictatorship of Trump and his Democratic allies. The crisis will deepen, and any U.S. president will intensify the attack on workers. We must prepare for the combat against the fascist hordes, which will be the tool of financial capital to sustain capitalism in the U.S. and around the world. These struggles must be unified with the fight against the murder of African Americans and against Arab migrants who are mobilizing against the Zionist genocide directed by the U.S.

Toward International Struggle

Now that Israel’s bombings have intensified, it is necessary to put an end to the financing of that U.S. military enclave. This will not happen through the naïve bourgeois campaign of boycotts and divestment, but by shutting down U.S. production centers that rely on migrant labor, breaking the imperialist war economy and putting it at the service of the exploited. This is the real way to stop the Palestinian genocide; this is the shared cause that the proletariat in the imperialist metropolis holds with the plundered semi-colonies. The only necessary war is that of the exploited against the exploiters.

It is time to unite the struggle of the proletariat in the capitals of imperialist bourgeoisie with that of the hungry masses in the nations from which resources are extracted. Migrant workers are the key to forging this alliance; only a true traitor to the revolution would fail to see the need to build a common struggle. It is time for new uprisings of the Latin American proletariat, currently lulled by its own political leaderships.

These demonstrations in California, just like those of 2020 across different states, show that U.S. imperialism is not impenetrable or invincible. But the key lies in its own exploited migrant and African-American proletariat. They will be its gravediggers, supported by the uprisings in the oppressed countries. To unify this struggle, the strength of a world party is necessary; only by refounding the Fourth International is it possible to centralize our forces to fight capitalism on all possible fronts.

DOWN WITH THE U.S. BOURGEOIS STATE!

FOR THE SOCIALIST WORLD REVOLUTION!