Just a week after his inauguration, Donald Trump has already put into motion an attack against the historic movement of workers, students, and community members of universities across the country who protested the genocide in Gaza and defended fundamental democratic rights, such as free speech and the right to protest.
On Wednesday, the president signed an executive order mandating the Justice Department to investigate, prosecute, and deport students and staff involved in pro-Palestinian protests, specifically targeting international students identified as “Hamas sympathizers.”
The executive order, titled, “Additional Measures to Combat Anti-Semitism,” calls for an inventory and analysis of all court cases involving K-12 schools, colleges and universities, and an inventory of alleged civil rights violations associated with pro-Palestinian campus protests. This order is meant to enable federal agencies to deport “alien students and staff.”
These latest attacks against immigrants come in the context of Trump’s anti-immigrant offensive, which include the criminalization of immigrants, new citizenship restrictions, and attempts at “mass deportations.” Now, this wave of xenophobic attacks includes immigrant students and staff at universities and schools who are among the most precarious sectors of the working class, especially those who are undocumented.
Trump’s attempts to scapegoat and divide the immigrant working class from the nonimmigrant working class comes at a moment where the U.S. regime faces growing social, political, environmental, and geopolitical instability at home and abroad. In particular, the crisis in the Middle East continues despite the recent ceasefire.
As the crisis of capitalism and imperialism deepens, far-right sectors, like the Trump administration, build their appeal on the basis of reactionary attacks. These attacks divert attention away from the capitalist roots of the deteriorating living conditions of the working class and the fact that this system benefits from the super-exploitation of immigrants.
This executive order also represents a continuation of the bipartisan crusade against university activism, targeting the students and workers who rose up in solidarity with Palestine and against the repression of the movement. It’s likely that Trump will also try to withhold federal funds as a way to further discipline universities and curtail academic freedom, as he is currently trying to do through another executive order which targets K-12 schools for their curriculum.
Trump is worried that the broad sectors of U.S. society that began to question the lie that “anti-zionism can be equated with anti-semitism” will rise up again. That’s why, in his own words, he is trying to “aggressively prosecute terroristic threats, arson, vandalism and violence against American Jews which have been infested with radicalism like never before.”
Since the encampment movement on universities, the Biden administration worked hand in hand with university administrators and local authorities to repress students and workers. At CUNY and Columbia, many protesters still face charges. By stoking fear among the sectors that rose up in the movement for Palestine,Trump wants to continue the repression and make it even harder to protest and speak out against U.S. imperialism’s role in perpetuating the oppression of Palestinians.
Against this backdrop, students, workers, and activists need to organize in defense of immigrants as broadly as possible. We know it’s not enough to simply pursue a legal response, do a mutual aid campaign, or wait until the next elections to fight back. We need a coordinated mass movement that unites the struggle in defense of immigrants with the struggle against the neo-McCarthyist tide in our workplaces, schools, and streets. We can already take inspiration from students at universities like UC Berkeley which have begun to organize in defense of immigrants.
In order to prevent co-optation, any campaign in defense of immigrants needs to be organized from below. University administrators have already indicated that they will work alongside the Trump administration, because they are ultimately tied to capital – even if they pretend to be “politically or institutionally neutral.”
Organizing from below means that the rank and file of our unions and movements can have a democratic say, from how we organize and make decisions to the demands we want to fight for. Concretely, we should fight for spaces of self-organization, which promote direct democracy, instead of top-down, bureaucratic decision-making. These kinds of spaces allow us to rally the widest possible support to unite students, workers, and the surrounding community who want to be part of our struggles and have spaces of their own.
Finally, more and more activists in the U.S. are coming to the conclusion that neither of the two capitalist, imperialist parties are on our side. This was expressed in the millions of workers and youth rejected to vote for the Democratic Party in the recent elections due to their role in perpetuating a genocide and kowtowing to Trump’s anti-immigrant fear-mongering. So what is our alternative?
On the one hand, we need to have confidence in the methods of the working class, who can use their power to go on strike for more than just demands related to our wages and working conditions. We’ve seen this recently with the historic strikes at the UC campuses, as well as the sickouts at CUNY and the University of Texas at Austin which were organized in defense of the democratic rights of pro-Palestine students and activists facing repression.
On the other hand, in order for our struggles to be organized independently of the Democratic Party, which is the graveyard of social movements, we also need to fight for a working-class party that fights for socialism to bring together the activists who are politically convinced of fighting against the oppressive and exploitative U.S. bipartisan regime both here and in other countries around the world.
