the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
April 4, 2026
The first point to be made is that Trump did not expel more immigrants in 2025 than either Biden or Obama did in comparable periods. In fact, Obama holds the recent record for the total number expelled—two million. It’s why he got the nickname, “Deporter in Chief.” To see the real record holder in expulsions, go back to a still earlier Democratic administration, that of Bill Clinton who deported almost 12 million people during his two terms. Trump, despite all the talk, expelled barely over half a million (540,000) in 2025.
In other words, all three attacked immigrants, but within certain precise limits. What is different with Trump is the highly publicized way in which his administration carried out the expulsions.
Trump put himself forward as being “tough on immigrants.” It supposedly is his “signature” policy, and it certainly was one of his big campaign issues in 2024, allowing him to play up to reactionary attitudes in the population.
Once in office, his anti-immigrant tirades got louder and more demeaning, with talk about grabbing “the worst of the worst,” the people from “shithole countries.”
There were raids out in the open, on city streets—overt, loud raids—and in workplaces during the workday.
There were and are bombastic threats, but also real violence, and the organized gangs of ICE.
There is organized cruelty. Almost five million people who were picked up in such raids were still waiting at the end of 2025 for a hearing in front of an immigration judge, and the wait is getting longer, since Trump’s administration has slashed the number of judges by almost 20%. Right now, the average waiting time for a hearing is estimated to be on the order of four and a half years. Some of those picked up—the ones whose family is able to find them and able to get a lawyer—manage to be released, awaiting the hearing. But with deportation hanging over their heads, their lives are disrupted, often their jobs are lost. More are stuffed into one of the large ICE holding facilities, then shifted to another before their families could find them—or put in local jails, scattered all throughout the country, in rural areas, far from any contact with family, etc.
With flashy names like “the Surge,” the Trump administration pushes to make and distribute made-for-social-media videos—featuring the gangsters of ICE, noted for their lack of identification, for the use of face masks, and their weapons held as if on a patrol in a jungle somewhere.
This is not just Trump’s personality, as vicious as he is. And it’s not just an appeal to his base—which it is.
Most significantly, it is a way to make immigrants cower—not only those deemed illegal, but everyone, including even those recently granted citizenship.
In other words, anyone can be picked up, so shut up, work hard, take lower wages with no complaint! Otherwise, you could be picked up and sent to one of these holding tanks.
Stripped down to its essentials, this is terrorism carried out by the state against the most disadvantaged part of the working class. The spectacle the Trump administration carried out is effectively a threat, a way to control this large part of the working class—both those who are “legal,” and those who are not.
Of course, it’s not the only way to control. Reagan opted for a carrot-and-stick policy: an immigration reform was passed that gave “a road to citizenship” to some of those who were not legal, but it took many years to attain legal status. The promise of gaining status if you kept your head down and followed all the rules was an ax hanging over every immigrant’s head while they were waiting. George H.W. Bush pushed through a similar “reform” in 1990, giving the possibility to more people, but long waits still hung over immigrant heads.
It was a very small carrot and a very large stick. Today, Trump discarded the carrot. But the goal was the same: to keep a large, significant part of the working class—for the most part low-waged—to keep it tightly controlled, and the whole working class weakened.
This is one of the very few countries that was born a country without much of a labor force—or at least the potential of a labor force. There were no peasants who could be driven off the land in the 1700s, for example. The indigenous peoples in the Northern Hemisphere for the most part lived collectively, often as nomads, and were not easily put to work under control.
The lack of a labor force explains slavery, not the vicious way it functioned, but the fact that early capital, searching for a way to produce the first big commercial crops, allowing trade to develop, sought out labor. The answer found was the slave trade. Of course, the slave trade itself also provided the first big accumulation of capital.
Insufficient labor in a territory where land was still relatively free for the taking also explains immigration in the 1800s. A good part of the labor force had to be imported.
Today there are about 52 million people who are foreign born. This total is about 16% of the population, which is its historically highest share. This 16% is younger than the rest of the population, in general, more able to work, with fewer who are too old to work.
It’s obvious that if larger numbers were expelled, the economy itself would suffer. In some cities, particular industries would be seriously limited, or even shut down—hotels, food, landscaping, construction, hospitals. In other areas of country, more than half the workforce is either immigrant without papers, or else with a vaguely “legal status” that says they might be able to apply at some point.
So no, the bourgeoisie isn’t interested in getting rid of the immigrants, certainly not of most of the 14 or 15 million people who are without legal status.
What would happen if the state apparatus really tried? Trump’s immigration point man, Stephen Miller, set a goal of deporting two million a year—but even with all the push, they hit just over half a million. This isn’t incompetence, but awareness of what the capitalist class wants.
It needs to be said that all this bombast and violence is aimed not just at immigrants, but at the whole laboring population. In the first place, the attacks on the immigrants weaken the whole working class, especially to the extent that workers do not feel a commonality of interests.
But there is a political aspect, also. Supposedly the constitution says the military can’t be used internally to the country. In fact, it doesn’t really say that. But it’s been interpreted by courts and by legislation to mean that.
By rushing in ICE, a military force if there ever was one, Trump is setting a precedent, not a legal one, but a social one. The attacks may be directed against some of the most disadvantaged parts of the population, but they are aimed at bringing the whole population to accept a precedent that the military will have police functions inside the country.
Armed thugs may drive you off the streets of your city, they may break down your door, grab you off the street for no reason, arrest you because they don’t like the way you look, keep you in a holding facility, ignoring your supposed legal rights. Large parts of the black population may know this kind of reality already, but others don’t. Renee Good’s smiling face, reassuring the ICE thug who is about to kill her, speaks to what people are learning now in the streets where ICE is rampaging.
After Minneapolis, Trump stepped back—not because he wanted to rein in ICE, but because the wrong social precedent was being set.
First of all, we should say, we don’t know exactly how the movement developed in Minneapolis, and not much even about Los Angeles and Chicago, where some of us live.
But based on media accounts, and that’s all that we or most people have, it appears that a massive and citywide mobilization developed in Minneapolis in response to the attempts of ICE to terrorize the population. It almost seems as though the Trump administration, running into some isolated problems in Los Angeles, Boston and Chicago, may have decided to make Minneapolis the show piece of what could happen to people who resist. Certainly ICE brought many more troops into Minneapolis than the numbers in Chicago and L.A., and Minneapolis is a much smaller city.
Based on interviews with people who were active, it seems that the first people involved in Minneapolis, confronted by the massive attack by ICE, went back to the organizations they already knew to get help. They went to their neighborhood club, or the women’s circle they belonged to, or their garden club. In church on Sunday morning they stood up and asked for people to join them. Or at work, they talked to fellow workers, or they went to their union meeting—even their writing class: Renee Good was in the poetry club.
The increasing size of the demonstrations, even their growing determination, seemed to rest on people, very ordinary people bringing out the people they knew. It wasn’t a typical “leftist” demonstration. Did they communicate on social media? Of course, but they also used whistles, and they worked face-to-face, pleading with others in the networks of people they knew.
It’s not just that it took courage to stand up to ICE and the Border Patrol thugs who had weapons held at the ready—although it did. But it seemed to develop in a way that allowed it to become almost citywide. And ICE saw itself overwhelmed by the numbers who came out.
Comrades in Chicago and Los Angeles had seen people in their city react and move to protect their neighbors. Yes, many places where there were open raids in the street, something like that developed.
We weren’t trying to establish a ranking, or which city did more, which one was better. Rather, we wanted to discuss something which maybe lets us understand our own work better
How long did it take to build the response in Minneapolis? A week or two? For many of the people who spoke about what they did, it seemed overnight. That’s because many of them brought out all the people they already knew. Their confrontations with ICE rested on all the things they had done before with the people they already knew.
We don’t know why it became so big and important there, more or less citywide, so rapidly. But we can know a little about how it happened. It rested on the work, on the lives already lived of all these people, the ones who found the way to pull so many other people with them.
There was another issue. Remember, George Floyd was murdered in Minneapolis. There had been many demonstrations there, five years before, running up to the trial. Loose organizations had gotten set up as the issue dragged on. Many of the people interviewed about the current struggle said that when ICE came in, they contacted the people they knew from the George Floyd demonstrations. Some of them talked about resurrecting the organizations that had developed in 2020, but had seemed to disappear.
In other words, the things you do are not necessarily lost when a movement dies. The networks of people you build don’t necessarily disappear.
Sixteen people were charged in Fort Worth, six were brought to plead to lesser charges, one had all charges dropped, and nine were convicted of multiple charges, the most important of which, in political terms, was “providing material support to terrorists.” One was also convicted of attempted murder.
Those who pled out apparently had to say something or did say something in their court appearance about the political inclinations of the others.
A few apparently called them Antifa, whatever they meant by that, and however that piece of information was pried out of them.
The trial was presented as a “bringing to justice” of the “North Texas Antifa Cell.”
Maybe the seven who got off didn’t know the nine put on trial. Maybe even some of the nine didn’t know each other before the July 4th when they demonstrated against ICE.
Did all of the nine call themselves Antifa? Or some of them? Or none? We don’t know.
Maybe some did the things they were accused of—throwing firecrackers or deflating a tire on an ICE vehicle or painting graffiti on an ICE jail. But if that were the basis of terrorism, every kid in the country would stand charged with terrorism!
Some seemed to have owned guns—in Texas, if you can imagine that, in a country where there are said to be—what is it?—three times as many weapons as there are adults?
Some may have organized a “Socialist Gun Club”—supposedly legal in Texas, even though it was brought into the trial as some kind of proof of who knows what.
Some apparently talked to each other on the phone about how they would make a “noise demonstration” on July 4 at the ICE jail—and were recorded saying such a dastardly thing.
But none of that explains the terrorism charge. And we shouldn’t believe that if they hadn’t done X, Y or Z, they would have been acquitted. The feds wanted to make a political example of what could happen to people who stand out in opposition to government policies. None of the nine had been sentenced (as of April 3), but they face terms as high as 10 years to life imprisonment.
This is not just Trump, not just Texas. We need to reckon with the fact we’ve been moving along a long, steadily worsening, increasingly reactionary path, going back to 1975. Trump, as avaricious for gold as he is, is only a logical dot along that path.
Antifa—if such a thing did exist in Texas—is also a logical product of such a period, but with or without Antifa, there is no individual answer to the situation we are going to face.
Our possibilities will rest with the organizations the working class sets up, and with the roots that our organization and ourselves have been able to put down in the working class.
The U.S. war in the Middle East is defining everything today, the problems workers here face, the money not spent on education, cuts in medical plans, the price paid for gasoline or computer chips … but war is also defining the future we will live in. We will not escape what is happening through the world.
This war, World War III, is our generation’s war. What happens to us, what work we will do, all of it will be conditioned by it.
We are going to face what organizations before us had to respond to: that is, to say exactly what this war is, whose class it serves and what is the answer to it, that is, revolution.
The organizations that wanted to avoid the consequences of saying that, ended up defending the previous world wars as “wars for democracy.” Organizations trying to avoid that found a way to be “neutral” when the wars in Korea and Viet Nam broke out—wars they called wars between competing imperialisms, that is, between the giant U.S. superpower and what they called the puppet of Soviet imperialism in Korea.
Today it is still easy here to be opposed to a U.S. war, to stand up out in the open and say we stand opposed to the criminal U.S. war against Iran.
Today.
But at some point, it won’t be easy. And maybe sooner than we think. Maybe the Texas trial shows us that things could be changing, we don’t know how rapidly.
The atmosphere will not remain so free and easy as it has been.
In any case, right now, and for as long as we push to use it, we have two main ways to express our opinion—in the workplaces through our bulletins, our newspaper, our journals, and we cannot let the pressure coming from our work in the unions keep us from doing that.
But also, and this year especially, we will have our election campaigns.
Workers cannot stop war by voting against it—and we will not say that. But by voting for candidates for Working Class Party, voters will be able to show to other parts of the working class that there is a fraction of our class unwilling to be imperialism’s foot soldiers, nor its supporters, a fraction that wants their class to fight for all the things they need, including an end to imperialism’s wars.
We also have to denounce all the ways we are being herded into support for this looming world war. We have to point them out, not let them slide.
Beyond that, we have to do the work now with all the people around us who may be candidates with us, or who will help in our campaigns. We have to work with them now, when it may not be so obvious to some of them, we have to get them to see why this issue is so vital.
OK, that’s a very general statement, and we have to work out carefully what we say in the next few weeks: Los Angeles’ campaign was already seven weeks of gathering signatures and now two months of a primary electoral campaign.
But we will make the question of the war our focus, its impact on working people, and the possibilities the working class has to respond to it. This has to be central to our campaign this year, in all the cities. We need to carry out the very same campaign in all our cities.