We publish a joint statement by Left Voice of the United States, the MTS of Mexico, the LTS of Venezuela, and the OSR of Costa Rica — organizations that are part of the Trotskyist Fraction–Fourth International (FT-CI) — as the new government of Donald Trump prepares to take power.
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Trump has declared war on immigrants, with the threat of mass deportations. The far-right billionaire rose to power with promises of an anti-immigrant offensive, and this has put millions of people living, studying, and working in the United States on edge, worried about threats of mass deportations, repression, and criminalization. From the bully pulpit of the U.S. presidency, Trump amplifies the xenophobic rhetoric of right-wing leaders in Europe. Workers without papers in the United States and those who risk their lives and those of their families migrating from Asia, Africa, and the rest of the American continent, passing through South America, Central America, and Mexico, are fleeing extreme situations created by imperialism itself. The intense imperialist penetration of our countries, and the policies of our governments, cause and worsen the precariousness, exploitation, and oppression of millions of people.
Once in power, Trump will strengthen the Latin American Far Right, which is currently governing several countries. Its most notorious representative is Javier Milei, president of Argentina and personal friend of Trump, who seeks to deepen his country’s subordination to the IMF, increase the exploitation and misery of the working masses, and guarantee the dispossession of the communities in the service of the corporations. In countries like Honduras, Ecuador, and Colombia, the austerity plans imposed by the IMF, with the consent of their governments, have led the people to extreme poverty.
In Venezuela, years of imperialist sanctions, oil embargo, and austerity measures against the working class implemented by President Nicolás Maduro have had terrible consequences for the living conditions of the people and provoked a migrant exodus of millions. In Central America and Mexico — a region heavily militarized by governments of different political stripes — the so-called war on drugs mandated by the White House has generated unprecedented violence that affects, first and foremost, workers and the poor. In the Caribbean, our brothers and sisters in the Dominican Republic and all the islands have suffered greatly from imperialist oppression for decades, while Cuba remains economically prostrated by the U.S. blockade. Our siblings of Puerto Rico suffer direct U.S. colonial domination. In Haiti, the imperialist and interventionist policy of the U.S. has provoked a deepening of the misery of the Haitian people and a massive wave of migration that has resulted in a real humanitarian catastrophe.
Throughout Latin America, U.S. and other imperialist corporations, in alliance with native big capitalists and landowners in each country, plunder our natural commons while our communities lack clean water and suffer the consequences of climate change. Imperialist bosses amass huge fortunes from cheap labor, while workers lack unions and benefits. Migrants, the most vulnerable sector of the international working class, are under attack by an emboldened xenophobic Far Right that seeks to divide the working class. It means to do this by scapegoating migrants for the economic woes of U.S. workers.
These millions of people have names, stories, hopes. Their lives have been shattered by an increasingly violent, brutal system in which human life is worthless. They are young people looking for better living conditions, women and men who travel with their children on their backs or without their children left behind, living with the uncertainty of whether they will see their parents again. These millions of human beings, criminalized and stigmatized as criminals, drug traffickers, or terrorists, are especially vulnerable to abuses by border police, the army, drug traffickers, human traffickers, and border authorities of all countries that collaborate directly or indirectly in persecuting them. Criminalization particularly affects women and LGBTQI+ people who migrate and face aggressions of all kinds and sexual violence along the way.
In the United States there are at least 11 million undocumented migrant workers who pay taxes, pay rent, and work in agriculture, services, domestic labor, construction, remodeling of public services, etc. An estimated 5 percent of the U.S. workforce is undocumented. In New York alone, nearly 400,000 Mexicans work every day without papers in activities of high economic and social impact. They cook, provide care, fix bridges, build houses, study, have dreams, wait tables, farm the land, miss their countries, and many of them have not seen their families in decades. These workers are an essential part of the economic, social, and cultural life of the country. The bosses amass huge profits based on migrant labor, as evidenced by the division within the bourgeoisie on the immigration question. Yet they are treated as second-class workers, without rights or job stability, and now with the sword of Damocles is hanging over their heads in the form ofTrump’s mass deportations.
While the capitalists want to continue using immigration to exploit immigrant labor and keep the economy going, we emphasize migrants’ importance as part of the continental multiracial proletariat. We fight for their full rights to unify the ranks of the working class against the bosses and exploiters.
The new Trump administration promises to deport about 1 million people a year. This will add to the misery imposed by the reactionary policies of state governors, like Greg Abbott in Texas, who placed buoys laced with barbed wire on the Río Grande/Río Bravo and reinforced the border wall, endangering the lives of border crossers.
Trump has been doubling down on the anti-immigrant politics deployed during his first term, when he promoted the separation of families and established in 2019 the “Stay in Mexico” plan, by which asylum seekers had to remain in Mexican territory. During the Biden administration, the U.S. government advanced agreements to promote voluntary repatriation with El Salvador, Costa Rica, and soon Panama.
Although they use less brutal rhetoric, the Democrats have been collaborating with the Far Right and the Republicans to persecute migrants. In the last decades, the Democratic Party has adopted harsh policies. President Obama, for example, earned the sobriquet “deporter in chief” for his record numbers of deportations. And President Biden tried to implement the “toughest set of border security reforms we’ve ever seen” against the rise of migration at the border, deepening militarization and giving the border police ever more room for maneuver.
To give free rein to his threats, Trump blames migrants for the precarious living and working conditions of U.S. workers who face inflation, rising housing costs, and loss of purchasing power. This is coupled with the loss of jobs under NAFTA; in recent decades, key U.S. manufacturing industries, such as automotive, moved to Mexico — a fact that union leaders like Teamsters leader Sean O’Brien, who seeks to bring U.S. workers closer to the Republican Party through the America First discourse, exploit to stoke chauvinism. But the truth is that the same bosses exploit workers, on both sides of the borders, and all the capitalist states are united in making this happen.
Right now the Laken Riley Act, which aims to further criminalize migrants, has already been passed in the House by Democrats and Republicans alike, and it is now being discussed in the Senate. The law mandates the immediate arrest and possible deportation of undocumented immigrants who are accused of minor crimes — including the “crime” of crossing the border without papers — and will give greater autonomy to the states to strengthen their own anti-immigrant policies.
If mass deportations become a reality, they could create a serious humanitarian crisis on the U.S.-Mexico border. In economic terms, there might be a drop in remittances, or funds that migrants send back home. These funds are vital for the subsistence of large sectors in Central America (where they constitute 25 percent of the GDP), the Caribbean, Mexico, and various countries in South America — especially in the most underprivileged rural areas. But this is not Trump’s only threat.
The designation of the cartels as international terrorist organizations is another grave warning that, if acted on, would enable the incursion of U.S. armed forces — or their remotely operated weapons — south of the Río Grande/Río Bravo, a threat repeatedly made by the new U.S. president. This reeks of cynicism, given that “organized crime” prospered thanks to the encouragement and participation of high-level officials from various Mexican and Central American governments.
Still worse, U.S. imperialism supplies weapons not only to the armed forces of the countries of the region, but also to these so-called organized crime organizations. The weapons are sold primarily out of Arizona, California, New Mexico, and Texas. These dealings have been well known even as far back as the first Obama administration, which oversaw Operation Fast to Furious from 2009 to 2011. Blaming countries in the region for the opioid crisis is part of the xenophobic campaign of the U.S. Far Right; in reality those responsible are the big pharmaceutical corporations, such as Johnson & Johnson, McKesson, Cardinal Health, and AmerisourceBergen. According to a Stanford-Lancet commission report, it is clear that these companies initiated the opioid consumption crisis in the 1990s because the “poor regulation of the pharmaceutical and healthcare industry facilitated a quadrupling of opioid prescribing for profit.” Since then, the so-called war on drugs has been used to justify militarization and militarism in the countries south of the Río Grande/Río Bravo. Meanwhile, its real victims are the great popular majorities.
Trump has also signaled that he means to make Canada and Mexico the 51st and 52nd states of the United States. He has proposed to change the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America. He says the Panama Canal should be the property of imperialism and that Greenland — a colony of Denmark — should be annexed by the U.S. for “national security reasons.” The new Trump administration, with its plethora of bluster, annexationist threats, and xenophobia, represents the doctrine of Manifest Destiny reloaded in the 21st century. In seeking to seize and plunder other territories, it expresses the brutality of U.S. imperialist decadence, and the drive to maintain U.S. hegemony amid its historical decline. This decline has taken place in an international scenario plagued by geopolitical tensions — such as the competition between the United States and China, the genocide in Palestine, and the general instability spurred by the situation in the Middle East and the war in Ukraine.
This is not all: the threat of imposing tariffs of up to 200 percent on Mexican exports to the United States — which is a flagrant violation of the merciless terms of T-MEC, NAFTA’s successor — if fentanyl trafficking and irregular migration do not cease immediately, has put the automotive industry, agribusiness, and the food industry on tenterhooks, given that they all depend on inputs and raw materials supplied by Mexican companies. By taking this new protectionist turn, the world’s leading power aims to reposition itself amid the weakening world economy, triggered by growing competition with China in the economic and technological spheres.
It is essential that the working class and the oppressed of the United States, Mexico, Central America, and Latin America prepare ourselves for this renewed imperialist offensive.
Government Leaders Respond to Trump’s Bluster
In Mexico, President Claudia Sheinbaum, a leading figure of the region’s “late progressives,” declared: “Mexico is a free, independent and sovereign country. And as I have said: we coordinate, we collaborate, but we never subordinate [ourselves].” Broad sectors of the Mexican population support her position. Yet, while the Mexican government is preparing to receive hundreds of thousands of deportees from Mexico and other countries, the country’s National Guard, its National Migration Institute, and its armed forces are serving as a veritable border patrol. They sustain the militarization of Mexico’s northern and southern borders, and they disband the migrant caravans that enter from the south. They harass those who travel through this region — people who are also exposed to the violence of organized crime — destroying their documentation, including transit and work permits, to impede the advance of migrants who are pursuing a dream: to avoid dying at the hands of organized crime or the repressive forces of any country, and to earn a living in the United States.
The same can be said of the “progressive” Bernardo Arévalo, president of Guatemala, who — while calling immigrants “heroes” for sending money back to Guatemala — limits himself to announcing the “Return Home Plan” to receive immigrants who travel back to the country. But he does so without taking any measures against Trump’s xenophobic policies, preferring instead to contain Central American and Caribbean immigration to the United States.
Xiomara Castro, president of Honduras, stated in early January,
Faced with a hostile attitude of mass expulsion of our brothers, we should consider a change in our cooperation policies with the United States, especially in the military field. Without paying a cent, for decades they maintain military bases in our territory, which in this case would lose all reason to exist in Honduras.
She was referring in particular to the Soto Cano Air Base, where more than 1,000 U.S. soldiers are stationed. Her response to Trump’s threats came as a surprise to all, since she herself has deployed the military after declaring a state of exception in Honduras, which led to many human rights abuses at the hands of the repressive forces. Her response to Trump, however, was harsher than Mexico’s, which is significant coming from the head of the United States’ main enclave in Central America.
These statements show the weakness of U.S. hegemony, and at the same time show the additional weight of U.S. debt and intervention, and the need to maintain domestic peace in defiance of Trump. Their speeches, however, cannot prevent the massive deportations of workers who went in search of a better life, fleeing violence and poverty in their countries of origin.
In the case of Venezuela, Maduro recently began his third presidential term after a scandalous electoral fraud and dictatorial repression. “We may end up seeing some kind of [U.S.] arrangement with [Maduro] if it means the ability to deport more people, for Venezuela to accept deportee flights,” said Ryan Berg, who directs the Future of Venezuela Initiative, which is part of the Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank in Washington, DC As we have previously written, Trump has threatened Venezuela “with a ‘very tough economic policy,’ which cannot be other than tougher sanctions, if the forced deportation flights are not resumed.” If this were to be carried out, it would be a profoundly reactionary negotiation that would use immigrants as a bargaining chip.
We Must Resist Trump’s Imperialist Offensive
The Trumpist threats are not only aimed at weathering the storm of the decline of U.S. hegemony: they are also aimed at keeping the multi-ethnic U.S. working class divided. With the idea of “divide and rule,” the tycoon who will occupy the White House for the second time starting January 20 gained support to win the presidency by promising, once again, to return to a United States before manufacturing was relocated to other countries and by attacking immigrants, seeks to make the working conditions of U.S. workers more precarious. Not only will he attack the conditions of the working class in favor of the super-rich, but he will also attack unions like the United Auto Workers (UAW) — a significant auto industry union representing auto workers as well as workers from other sectors, such as universities, that has been confronting Trump since before his triumph in the November 2024 elections.
Workers organized in the UAW, who staged a powerful strike at the Big Three auto plants in 2023, whose leadership said that Mexican workers were friends of U.S. workers and that their common enemies are the bosses, must move to action and mobilize one of the most powerful unions in the country to protect migrants. From workers who participated in the strike at Amazon — a company that employs many immigrants — who have been fighting for their labor rights, including the right to unionize, to the youth who camped out on university campuses to demand severing relations with the genocidal state of Israel, to immigrant rights advocates, human rights defenders, and all who are facing the crackdown on abortion rights and trans rights, must actively oppose mass deportations. In Mexico, Venezuela, and Central America, there are multiple points of contact between the working class and poor of our countries and immigrant workers in the United States. Public sector workers across the region who face job insecurity and lack of funding are in similar situations to public sector workers in the heart of imperialism. Indigenous peoples and environmental defenders who oppose extractivism and megaprojects also share the same cause. It is time to raise our voices and organize a wave of support for the migrants who live, dream, and work in the U.S., for those who face the difficult journeys through the Darien jungle, who cross the sea, and who undertake a difficult path plagued with dangers through Mexican territory.
It is essential to fight against the militarization of borders, for full democratic and social rights for migrants, and against all criminalization. We need to fight for the abolition of immigration agencies, such as Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in the United States and the National Institute of Migration in Mexico, whose main function is to terrorize people who leave their native countries in search of a better life and leave them in a situation of greater vulnerability so that companies can exploit them further. We fight for the full rights to healthcare, education, work, food, and housing for immigrants, for equal wages for both U.S. and immigrant workers irrespective of gender, the right to automatic residence in the country of their choice, as well as all political, civil and social rights.
The trade unions that spoke out against the genocide of the Palestinian people, such as the National Coordinating Committee of Education Workers and the Union of Workers of the UNAM in Mexico, have a duty of honor towards immigrants, and need to put themselves at the forefront of the struggle against mass deportations, demanding free transit through all the countries of the region and the set of rights that we raised above, as well as denouncing the complicit and collaborationist policy promoted by the governments of our countries.
It is workers who face the greatest danger from the threat of tariffs against Mexico and CanadaTrade tensions are an opportunity for businessmen and corporations to cut labor rights, wages, and advance the precariousness of the working class. Likewise, the imposition of tariffs leads to higher prices, affecting the price of goods and services purchased by working people.
Labor organizations south and north of the Río Bravo/Río Grande must take a stand against the tariff war. Far from any discourse of national unity with those who defend the interests of Big Capital, it is necessary to raise a clearly anti-capitalist perspective. It is fundamental that in each country we fight against the ruling classes that oppress and plunder us. They are the real enemies who profit from our exploitation and promote xenophobia and racism. Rather, it is necessary to defend the unity of the working class and the oppressed, with the perspective of creating workers’ governments that are bastions of struggle against imperialism on a continental and global scale. Only if the working class and the oppressed take power and destroy the imperialist borders that keep us divided, can we advance an integrated perspective towards the planning of the regional economy for the benefit of the masses, and for the political, social, economic, and cultural integration of the population of the region in a Federation of United Socialist States of North America, Central America, and the Caribbean.
As Leon Trotsky argued in his article, “If America Should Go Communist,”a triumphant insurrection of the exploited and oppressed would be an enormous weapon for the anti-imperialist struggle throughout Latin America and the Caribbean, and for the rest of the world. It would be the roughest of poetic performances, an instrument laden with a promising future for the whole of humanity, where council democracy, put into practice by the working class, leading the urban poor and all the oppressed sectors of society, could decide what, how much, when, and where to produce. It is a possibility that far exceeds the timidity of participatory democracy that only allows decisions on tiny budgets while the corporate dictatorship persists in factories and service industries such as telecommunications, electricity, and water supply.
From this perspective, we could fight for the reconversion of the gigantic North American value chain. We could fight for the integration between Canada, the United States, and Mexico to be deepened. Not for the profits of CEOs and corporations, but to produce the goods and services necessary to satisfy the needs of the masses – water, healthy food, housing, clothing, health, education, telecommunications, and recreation. We could fight for all people of working age to do so in dignified conditions, with a reduced working day in order to be able to dedicate time to physical activity, leisure, and education.
The economic plundering of Central America by the United States also links the destinies of the Central American states to the value chains of North America. To be truly independent, the Central American states must break with this economic dependence, expropriating land from landowners and those in the hands of large corporations that destroy nature and human beings, impoverish communities and gentrify cities.
On this basis, it is possible, with the power and capacity of the working class, to plan industrial and energy production in such a way as to preserve the environment and contribute to the recovery of ecosystems damaged by extractivism and industrial accidents, including oil spills, for future generations. In agricultural production, the use of agrochemicals would no longer be necessary, and the incredibly precarious work of millions of day laborers could be abolished. Agricultural production could leave behind the model of overcrowding and industrial-scale production that creates the ecological conditions conducive to the passage of viruses from animals to humans, and can adopt models that minimize environmental disruption. Children and young people throughout the region could have access to basic, intermediate, and higher education.
This horizon demands, in the first place, the development of anti-imperialism and internationalism, particularly in the United States and among the working class, since, as Karl Marx said, no people can be free if it oppresses another. This is also the case in Mexico and in every country of Central and South America, where the Right and the Far Right are promoting xenophobia and racism.
On this basis, we can build a society in which every human being can choose where to live, be educated, work, and thus contribute to the development of a society of free associated producers — or socialism. This is the only society that can put an end to the miseries of capitalism and make possible the full development of humanity.