Donald Trump centered his reelection campaign on a promise to pursue “the largest deportation in U.S. history.” More than four months into his second presidency, he appears intent on keeping that promise.
Trump is using a vast anti-immigrant infrastructure built up during both Democratic and Republican administrations to engage in his war on immigrants. Under Biden, funding for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) surpassed the levels during Trump’s first term. Contracts with the private immigration enforcement and border surveillance industry also reached historic levels under Biden. Meanwhile, bipartisan support for the war on immigrants and a long history of fearmongering over domestic threats have allowed the administration to quickly erode (or at least seriously challenge) legal protections for immigrant communities.
As José Olivares reports in the Guardian, the Trump administration has set a quota of 3,000 arrests a day and engaged in “collateral” arrests (referring to cases in which agents arrest not only the specific people for whom they have warrants, but also random immigrants they may encounter while apprehending their intended targets). These extreme tactics have in part been made possible by the Laken Riley Act, which was passed with bipartisan support. Recently, the Supreme Court furthered Trump’s war on immigrants by allowing him to revoke temporary protected status for over 500,000 migrants in the United States, primarily Venezuelans, Haitians, Cubans, and Nicaraguans. Trump is also moving forward with a travel ban targeting 12 countries, all of which have been ravaged by U.S. imperialism.
There has been a near-constant stream of headlines about the administration’s mass-deportation agenda. Its tactics include deportations to notorious prisons outside the United States, like Guantánamo Bay and CECOT in El Salvador; attempts to revoke student visas and deport international students; and the deployment of militarized federal agents to arrest people in places once considered off limits, such as schools, hospitals, and courthouses. ICE raids have resulted in hundreds being arrested at a time, as militarized police terrorize whole communities in their attempts to round up undocumented workers. This militarization can also be found at the border, where Trump is increasingly using the military to create a fortress state to keep migrants out, normalizing the role of the U.S. military in domestic law enforcement.
Yet, despite all these horrors, which show Trump’s commitment to furthering the war on immigrants, the far-right administration has faced significant obstacles. These have arisen from structural limits, resistance from sectors of the U.S. regime, and growing popular opposition to the war on immigrants, a resistance that is still in early stages of development. In this sense, the current state of the war on immigrants can best be understood as an ongoing test of the balance of forces: it remains an open question how much space exists for the immigrant rights movement to rally greater support and beat back the anti-immigrant attacks. Understanding the weak points of Trump’s war on immigrants and recognizing the developing resistance is essential for fostering a resistance that is as strong as possible.
Divisions in the Regime
As much as Trump has tried to deliver, he has struggled to achieve the deportation numbers he promised. In fact, Trump is having trouble even matching Biden’s numbers.
Crossings are down at the U.S.-Mexico border, requiring Trump to target immigrant communities that have already established themselves in the United States. Yet many of the immigrants who have already settled in the United States work in key sectors of the U.S. economy that cannot be easily replaced with U.S.-born workers, such as agriculture, construction, and logistics. This dynamic creates contradictions among the masses and within the regime.
While polling shows that many Americans have shifted to the right and support stricter anti-immigrant measures, these sentiments are largely based on the lies propagated by the Right that only “violent criminals” will be targeted in the crackdown. It is unclear how much support Trump really has in his efforts to attack high schoolers, people’s immigrant neighbors, and immigrants who are obviously not violent.
As for opposition from capitalists, immigration policy exists, in large part, to divide workers into tiers of more and less exploitable labor. Industries like agriculture and production can subject immigrant workers to more precarious and grueling working conditions for less pay and fewer benefits by using the fact that immigrants typically have fewer rights than U.S.-born workers. The conditions are even worse for undocumented workers, who endure poorer conditions out of fear that they might be deported if they complain. While these industries benefit from the precarity that deportation threats impose on immigrant workers, they still need those workers, and Trump’s plans threaten greater disruption than these industries are prepared for.
Additionally, engaging in mass deportations requires infrastructure that Trump lacks, even though he inherited Biden’s massive deportation machine. Rounding up and deporting hundreds of thousands of immigrants requires personnel, detention facilities, and obscene spending. The limitations of this infrastructure explain much of Trump’s extreme policies. For example, the lack of available detention space in the U.S. partially explains Trump’s use of prisons like Guantánamo Bay and CECOT, and his attempts to expand this network to over a dozen other nations. The limited capacity of border enforcement agencies such as ICE and CBP also explains Trump’s attempts to use the military and his increasing reliance on local police departments and other federal police forces, such as the FBI and DEA. The private prison industry has also been playing a greater role in carrying out the war on immigrants, particularly in operating detention centers.
While capitalists and their representatives in both parties increasingly support escalating the war on immigration, they do not necessarily agree on how to do so. For example, even some of the most right-wing Democrats, like those on the House Armed Services Committee, have questioned the use of the military or federal agencies. Of course, their criticisms are not really pro-immigrant. Rather, they express concerns that these repressive forces are being used for the war on immigrants at the expense of other responsibilities, such as preparing for military confrontation with Russia and China (in the case of the military) or addressing non-immigration-related crimes (in the case of federal agencies).
Then there are judges who keep partially blocking some of Trump’s attacks. For example, in a recent ruling in the case of Mahmoud Khalil, a federal judge said Trump’s effort to deport Khalil was “likely unconstitutional” but stopped short of releasing Khalil from detention. Similarly, a federal judge recently dismissed trespassing charges against immigrants who crossed onto land under the jurisdiction of the army in New Mexico, challenging Trump’s use of the military to restrict immigration. But while these rulings slow down Trump’s attacks, they don’t directly challenge Trump’s overall agenda, in part because such a move would risk creating a full-blown constitutional crisis. In this way, the courts are maneuvering just enough to appear as opposition, without going far enough to erode people’s trust in the institutions of the U.S. regime.
While most institutional challenges have come from the courts, the Democratic Party has managed to challenge Trump a few times, either through specific politicians or Democratic-affiliated NGOs. Most notable is the case of Delaney Hall, a detention facility in New Jersey where Newark mayor Ras Baraka and three members of Congress engaged in a high-profile confrontation with ICE. Meanwhile, newly formed NGOs, such as Hands Off and 50501, have organized national days of action against Trump’s attacks, including his attacks on immigrants.
But Democrats also avoid challenging Trump to the extent that doing so could fuel distrust in the institutions of the U.S. regime. For example, Baraka’s combative opposition to ICE in Newark has remained entirely within the framework of whether ICE is operating according to the law. For all the stink the mayor made about Delaney Hall, he recently announced that concerns about the facility were “addressed.” The NGOs have also sought to keep the movement for immigrant rights confined to an electoral strategy that positions the Democrats as an opposition to Trump’s anti-immigrant agenda, despite everything the Democrats have done to further that agenda.
Resistance in the Streets and Workplace
Even with their limits, the divisions in the U.S. regime over Trump’s deportation agenda create space for the working class to respond more combatively from below. That opposition has been growing since day one of Trump’s return to office. This was evident in immigrant youth-led protests across the country, most intensely in Los Angeles. That initial opposition intensified as Trump ramped up his attacks. Cases like those of Khalil and Abrego Garcia have galvanized masses of people, and the demand to abolish ICE, which largely disappeared under Biden, is beginning to reemerge. High school students have staged walkouts from Massachusetts to Texas, and coalitions of activists are emerging in cities like Detroit and Newark.
There are also signs that sectors of the labor movement are prepared to fight for immigrant rights. Teachers in Chicago and New York City have organized to defend their immigrant students. Other signs of resistance from labor include the Amazon Labor Union’s statement in defense of immigrant workers and SEIU’s support for their member Rumeysa Ozturk and other targets of Trump’s attacks on pro-Palestine students. Similarly, the Sheet Metal Workers International Association has been mobilizing in support of Abrego Garcia, who is a member of the union.
It is this resistance that has already succeeded in rolling back parts of Trump’s agenda, leading him to reinstate thousands of student visas and release specific targeted activists from detention, including Ozturk, Badar Khan Suri, and Mohsen Mahdawi. So far, Trump has been able to advance in some of his attacks, but this has come at the cost of fueling opposition to the war on immigrants. In fact, there have recently been examples of communities confronting militarized federal agents to defend immigrants. Such cases have emerged in San Diego and Minneapolis.
Clearly, the resistance to the war on immigrants is a national phenomenon. Much of it is spontaneous. There is promise in its potential to beat back the attacks of the Far Right. To be as strong as possible, this emerging opposition will need to remain independent of and avoid co-optation by the Democratic Party, which remains anti-immigrant to its core.
Rather than looking to the courts, NGOs, or more left-wing Democrats to deliver for the demands of the immigrant rights movement, workers and students need to unite their ranks and develop a mass movement for immigrant rights, organizing in our streets, schools, and workplaces. This means embracing uncompromising demands to abolish ICE, shut down all detention centers, immediately demilitarize the border, tear down the border wall, and open the borders. Demands must also address the precarity of both immigrant workers and U.S.-born workers as a way to unite the ranks of the working class against the capitalists who divide and exploit us. This means calling for full protections and rights for all immigrants, regardless of their immigration status, as well as quality jobs and services for all. Additionally, such a movement must embrace internationalism, uniting with our class siblings across borders against the various national governments that pit workers of different nationalities against one another and uphold the imperialist system, which forces people to migrate in the first place.
With the limits of Trump’s attacks in mind, and a vision for international resistance to the Far Right, workers, students, and communities committed to defending immigrants can be a powerful force against Trump’s attempts to escalate the bipartisan war on immigrants.