You Can’t Fight Trump with the Democrats –
Mobilize Workers Power to Stop the Deportations!

In Minneapolis and Everywhere:
For Mass Strike Action
to Drive ICE OUT!

FEBRUARY 11 – Some 3,000 Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Border Patrol agents flooded the area in what was billed as “the largest immigration operation ever,” carrying out would-be dictator Donald Trump’s “largest mass deportation program in history.” Then on January 7, Renee Nicole Good, a substitute teacher in Minneapolis schools, was killed in cold blood by an ICE agent as she sat in her car observing the marauding feds. While the White House declared the victim a “domestic terrorist” and fascistic vice president JD Vance declared that the murderer, Jonathan Ross, had “absolute immunity” from prosecution, a wave of shock spread across the country.

After tens of thousands protested in the streets of Minneapolis and more than 1,000 protests were held nationwide on the weekend, a group of Minnesota union, community and religious leaders called a statewide day of “no work, no school, no shopping” on Friday, January 23. In the following days, momentum built as over 1,000 businesses announced they would shut down in solidarity. Several left groups and even some mainstream media proclaimed it a “general strike.” High school students in the Twin Cities staged a walkout while postal workers called a march for “ICE out!” When Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents shot a Venezuelan immigrant in north Minneapolis, angry residents came out. Border Patrol commander-at-large Gregory Bovino, who revels in imitating Hitler’s Gestapo (secret police), lobbed tear gas at the crowd and the paramilitary marauders fled in their SUVs, dropping a loaded rifle ammo clip in the snow.

On the 23rd there was a massive outpouring of the population in the extreme cold. In the morning, 1,000 protesters gathered at the MSP airport with the temperature at -20° Fahrenheit [-28° Celsius], AFL-CIO marshals kept people off the road as 100 clergy members were arrested by the state police. As we headed downtown for the afternoon march, rivers of protesters walked to the starting point: families, neighborhood groups, church groups. Altogether, more than one-tenth of the population of Minneapolis and St. Paul came out. At 75,000+ it was huge, but it wasn’t a general strike. Unions didn’t walk out, and some of those that endorsed the call told their members to stay on the job if they had a “no-strike” clause in their contract, which most do. In a poll of Minnesota voters, 23% responded that they or a loved one participated in the “Day of Truth and Freedom,” but of those, only 38% (or 9% of the total) didn’t go to work.¹ Still, that’s a significant number of workers not working as a political protest. Many called out sick. Sick of ICE.

The next day, the Trump regime gave its answer to this massive outpouring of opposition to its brutal and deadly deportation drive. As a group of residents were alerting neighbors in central Minneapolis to the presence of an ICE snatch squad, federal agents executed Alex Pretti, a nurse at the intensive care unit of the Veterans Administration hospital. Once again, Department of Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem, White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller and Donald Trump immediately labeled Pretti a “domestic terrorist.” But very quickly video footage surfaced showing that when Pretti, who was filming, came to the aid of a woman who was shoved, four Border Patrol agents threw him to the ground, pepper-sprayed him in the face, and then, after an agent removed a pistol from Pretti’s holster, another shot him in the back, then fired three more times while a third agent pumped six more bullets into Pretti’s motionless body.

The execution of Alex Pretti and the grotesque celebration of that crime by the Trump administration in Washington underlined that the murder of Renee Good was not an aberration, not federal agents run amok, but a deliberate policy. The feds were not only acting as modern-day slave catchers.² Using the mass deportations drive as a wedge they are akin to death squads of a Latin American dictatorship from the 1970s, snatching people off the street and gunning down anyone who gets in their way. And while public outrage has focused on the horrendous murders of Good and Pretti, few know the name of Keith Porter Jr, a black education worker in Los Angeles murdered by an off-duty ICE officer on New Year’s eve, or of the 32 immigrants who died in ICE custody last year, or of the at least six so far this year, including Geraldo Lunas Campos, who died in highly suspicious circumstances in an immigration police camp in Texas.

ICE, CBP and the Border Patrol in particular have become a paramilitary militia of a Bonapartist “strong state” regime intent on installing police-state rule. The wanton cruelty is aimed at terrorizing and intimidating immigrants and the population as a whole. But the population was not intimidated – on the contrary, its will to resist hardened. Even among Trump supporters, some said ICE had “gone too far.”

In the lead-up to the January 23 mobilization, the Internationalist Group had a team in the area actively participating in protests and selling hundreds of copies of The Internationalist, calling to “Abort Trump’s Police State,” and of Revolution, the newspaper of the Revolutionary Internationalist Youth, headlined “For Mass Worker/Student Action to Stop Raids and Deportations.”  We put out a four-page leaflet, nearly 1,000 copies of which were distributed in Minneapolis, with a program for action, “Twin Cities: For a Real General Strike to Drive Out ICE Gestapo!” The Democratic Party and the courts wouldn’t stop the mass deportations, we emphasized, it is necessary to “Bring Out Workers Power!” In the aftermath of the massive mobilization, and the fact that the bloodshed continues, across the country the view has become widespread that much more is needed to stop the serial killers and kidnappers of ICE.

A common theme of the reformist left is for more of the same, to see the Minnesota January 23 “general strike” as a first step and to repeat it nationwide. Students at the University of Minnesota called for a “no work, no school, no shopping” national shutdown on January 30, which in a number of cities brought out thousands of students, often organized by the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL), the Freedom Road Socialist Organization (FRSO) and Socialist Alternative (SAlt). But a general strike, it wasn’t. Labor Notes (30 January), the mouthpiece of the “progressive” wing of the pro-Democratic Party labor bureaucracy, wrote on “How to Spread the General Strike Beyond the Twin Cities,” looking to the May Day Strong coalition formed last year by the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU). It foresaw “No Kings Day protests on March 28, and then May Day 2026 as a possible national day of no work, no shopping, and no school.”

May Day Strong includes the CTU and United Teachers of Los Angeles (both of them locals of the American Federation of Teachers), the National Education Association, National Nurses United, the Association of Flight Attendants (AFA-CWA), SEIU (service workers) Local 26 in Minneapolis and other unions. But it is in reality a “popular front”-style coalition “allying” these workers organizations with Democratic Party front groups such as “50501” and “Indivisible.” At a February 1 Zoom meeting, AFA leader Sarah Nelson (a big booster of Bernie Sanders when he sought the Democratic presidential nomination) called for “preparing for a general strike” on May Day, saying “This is the fundamental check we have on capitalism. The greatest power that we have is our labor.” But a pretend “general strike” along with the Democratic Party of racist repression and imperialist war means keeping workers chained to this pillar of U.S. capitalism.

We need to unchain workers’ power. Different political forces mean different things when they talk of a general strike. Classical anarchists dream of a mythical “great night” when “the people” rise up in unison – a convenient fiction that allows for alliances with liberal bourgeois forces (let’s say the Democratic Farmer-Labor Party in Minnesota). For many labor reformists, particularly in Europe, it is a one-day work stoppage and a parade. For revolutionary Marxists, however, a general strike is the mobilization of the power of the working class against the capitalist class, posing the struggle for state power. Workers must shut down production and transport in key sectors, and keep them shut until the demands are met, while taking on the parties and repressive forces of capital. Today labor must take the lead in defending immigrants in a real general strike to drive out ICE and shut down the deportation machine.

The Battle of Minneapolis – Working People vs. ICE

It was stunning on January 23 the extent to which whole sections of the Twin Cities population came out, about a tenth of the inhabitants of Minneapolis and St. Paul. There were numerous church and community groups, and lots of liberal slogans, like “Love melts ICE.” Also quite a few Minnesota North Star state flags. There was some mention of immigrant rights, but most signs were about “Stop Kidnapping Our Neighbors.” Also “No Secret Police,” “ICE Out of MN” and signs demanding the release of Liam Conejo Ramos, the five-year-old grabbed by the feds in his bunny hat who became a national symbol of the inhumanity of the deportation drive. Some hardy souls braved the frigid wind holding banners on bridges over the freeways saying “ICE Out for Good.” Printed signs declared, “General Strike: The Path to Justice.” At the end of the three-hour march, Somali community groups handed out sambusas.

Supporters of the Internationalist Group and Revolutionary Internationalist Youth carried signs declaring, “For a Mass Strike and Workers Mobilization to Stop ICE Terror,” “George Floyd, Renee Good – Capitalist State: Murder, Inc.,” “For a Real General Strike to Drive Out ICE Gestapo” and “You Can’t Fight Trump with Democrats – For a Revolutionary Workers Party.” They also chanted, “ICE out, shut it down – Minneapolis is a union town!”

The next morning, Saturday, as word spread that another observer had been killed by federal agents, people rushed to the scene. Hundreds stayed all day and well into the night. You could feel the fury, with chants of “Fuck ICE” over and over. A supporter of Class Struggle Education Workers and the Internationalist Group was helped onto a dumpster to speak to the crowd, bringing greetings from New York and saying that the murder of Alex Pretti was the feds’ answer to the many thousands who protested ICE terror the day before. He stressed the need for a real general strike, as in the 1934 Teamsters strike, to completely shut the city down, and pointed out that it was not just the feds but state and city repressive forces, and their bosses in the Democratic Party, ending with a call for a revolutionary workers party.³ That evening several thousand came out to protest in nearby Whittier Park and then marched to the site of the murder.

In the weeks since January 23, Trump appeared to backtrack, talking of “deescalating” the situation in Minnesota and announcing the withdrawal of 700 federal agents, but the ICE, CBP and Border Patrol have continued kidnapping immigrants. Signal chat groups blanketing south Minneapolis reported no change on the ground, and the “People Over Papers” map regularly reported 80-100 ICE sightings a day in the Twin Cities area. Many of those groups arose after the May 2020 racist police murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis cop. Today “hundreds of parents are standing watch for federal agents outside schools during bus drop-off and pick-up times, organizing grocery deliveries for families in hiding, transporting others to critical medical appointments and rallying to help with rent payments” (“The Unexpected Resistance to ICE in Minnesota: The Soccer Moms of Signal,” Minnesota Star Tribune, 11 February).

Much of the resistance to the federal occupation has been focused on schools, where attendance has fallen sharply due to students’ and families’ fears of being seized by ICE, whose agents prowl the area looking for easy prey. Almost everywhere in the Twin Cities, teachers, staff, parents and school authorities have organized patrolling at the start and the end of the school day. Some schools whose students are overwhelmingly from immigrant families have gone over entirely to remote instruction while educators and community members have organized to get food and educational materials to families that are afraid to leave their homes. Gymnasiums and local businesses have become distribution centers, and thousands of residents are operating a supply chain under the noses of the feds, who are tracking them (“Hungry Families, ICE and Secret Grocery Networks in Minneapolis,” New York Times, 11 February).

The federal agents act as an occupying army. The wanton violence of paramilitary ICE and Border Patrol officers reflects the fact that, faced with overwhelming opposition, they treat the population as a whole as “hostiles.” This is what Trump meant when he told the Pentagon brass last September that they would soon be waging war against the “enemy within.” The population has reciprocated with organized resistance. In a state where it is proverbially a Commandment that “thou shalt show up on the doorstep of a new family moving in nearby bearing a casserole of hot dish to welcome them,” the war on their immigrant neighbors is a slap in the face of the Minnesota ethos. But while mass rejection by the population has been an obstacle for ICE, it has not stopped them from seizing 4,000 Minnesotans to be deported. To defeat the occupation force, we need to bring out a superior force, that of the working class championing all of the oppressed.

For Militant Mass Action by Labor to Stop the Deportations

On January 26, as Trump talked of “deescalation,” it was reported that the feds’ operations commander Gregory Bovino and some of his agents would be leaving Minnesota. The fascistic violence freak Bovino would be sent back to his old post as head of the El Centro district on the California-Mexico border. He would be replaced by White House “border czar” Tom Homan, a no less sinister figure, who would begin to “draw down” federal forces in the state. Today, February 11, Homan announced that the “surge” of immigration agents in Minnesota would be ending. Democratic governor Tim Walz immediately posted on social media, “Thank you, Minnesota.” The president of the Minneapolis City Council said skeptically, “I’ll believe it when I see it,” and vowed to keep patrolling. If true, it’s Trump’s typical bully boy modus operandi: faced with significant opposition, cut the losses, declare “mission accomplished,” and move on.

Ending the “surge” would certainly be a political setback for Trump, and quite possibly demoralizing for his shock troops, backing down in the face of mass popular opposition. To a degree, the Minnesota operation, like its predecessors in Chicago and Los Angeles, represented a miscalculation by the White House deputy chief of staff and “homeland security advisor” Stephen Miller, who demanded a body count of one million deportees by December 31, seizing 3,000 people a day by whatever means. (He didn’t even come close.) But surge or no surge, even if the optics change with less spectacular fireworks, the drive for mass deportations will continue, as Homan vowed. Look at the famous 2007 “surge” of U.S. forces in Iraq. It officially ended in mid-2008, but around 2,000 U.S. troops still remain “in country,” and thousands more in bases and on ships around the Persian Gulf. And in any case, we’ll believe it when we see it.

The issue remains of how to defeat the program of mass deportations that is spearheading the drive for police-state rule and aims to radically transform U.S. society by excising its vital immigrant component. In the long run, Trump is on weak ground: not only is there mass opposition in “Democrat-run” large cities, it is beginning to dawn on people in many rural areas that if the immigrants are gone, depopulation will set in. There will be no services, motels, gas station attendants, local grocery stores, and forget about nursing homes for aging parents. Or steaks and fresh vegetables. Ditto for new home construction in the suburbs. And with abortion clinics shut, the Trump regime wants to force white women to become baby factories. Not a popular program once reality hits, but to sink it requires a working-class offensive taking on both capitalist parties, the enemies of black people, Latinos, immigrants and all working people.

The Democrats will not wage a real fight to stop the raids, because from Clinton to Obama to Biden, they, too, are a party of mass deportations. Currently they are engaged in a charade in Washington, threatening to refuse funding for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) unless certain cosmetic changes are made to ICE operations, such as requiring body cameras and identification tags, no masks, ending indiscriminate arrests, protecting sensitive locations (schools, churches, hospitals) and stopping racial profiling. Trump knows that if he hardlines it, the feckless Democrats will cave (one senator already did). Moreover, most of the demands are vague enough to get around or have no mechanism to enforce them. In any case, ICE won’t shut down. Of the whopping $170 billion slated for immigration enforcement in Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill,” tens of billions have already been turned over to the DHS, more than enough to carry it through the end of the year.

The battle of Minneapolis underscores that to defeat the mass deportations will take a mobilization of labor’s power on the ground wherever the immigrant hunters show up. The Friday, January 23 shutdown and mass mobilization against ICE in Minneapolis inspired defenders of immigrant rights across the country. From Portland, Maine to Portland, Oregon there were solidarity rallies. In New York City, a supporter of Class Struggle Education Workers put forward a resolution in the Delegate Assembly of the United Federation of Teachers (UFT) calling for an emergency demonstration in solidarity with fellow unionists, students, faculty, staff and immigrant communities in Minnesota. For the first time in a long time, the UFT actually mobilized, bringing perhaps a thousand teachers to NYC’s Union Square. Altogether some 5,000+ people came out as other unions joined in the rally and march. Of course, the labor tops sought endorsements from the Hands Off NYC popular front to get some bourgeois cover.

Elsewhere in the U.S., there was a labor march for “ICE Out” in Portland, Oregon on January 31 that brought out thousands of union members and supporters. However, when federal agents at the ICE facility tear-gassed the crowd, as they have regularly done, the union tops kept on marching, leaving the rest of the marchers to fend for themselves. The same day there were three union-backed “ICE Out” demonstrations in Seattle, Washington. Unions across the country, from the CWA (Communications Workers of America) and SEIU (Service Employees International Union) to the ILWU (International Longshore and Warehouse Union) issued statements condemning the killing of Renee Good (a member of the Minneapolis Federation of Educators) and of Alex Pretti (a member of the American Federation of Government Employees Local 3669). But what is crucial is to mobilize union power to stop the deportations.

While Trump’s stormtroopers have enraged the public, the Minnesota state police under DFL governor Walz Minneapolis city police under DFL mayor Jacob Frey (who was the boss of the Minneapolis Police Department when a MPD cop choked George Floyd to death in May 2020), have shielded the ICE immigrant snatchers from angry protesters in the name of “public safety.” The latest case was on February 7 when State Patrol troopers, at the request of the Minneapolis sheriff, arrested at least 50 protesters at the Whipple Federal Building that has been the staging ground for the immigration raids. The arrests came after a fascistic provocateur, Jake Lang, drove past screaming racist epithets against Somalis and chanting, “This is our country. Muslims go home.” Whether under Trump or the Democrats, the city and state police, ICE and other federal agencies, the military are all part of a repressive apparatus that defends the interests of the capitalist exploiters against those they exploit and oppress.

So, too, are the courts. Some judges have written powerful and eloquent orders calling to free a number of the thousands of residents who have been kidnapped from the streets, hauled out of their cars and dragged from their homes by federal agents over the last year, including Liam Conejo Ramos who was grabbed as he returned home from pre-school with his father. But even that court order, which unlike many others was carried out, will not stop Liam’s deportation, as the judge admitted. Nor will the Democrats’ performative shenanigans in Congress, or calls to “abolish ICE” along with more demonstrations. The courageous actions of the residents of Los Angeles, Chicago, Minneapolis, Memphis, New Orleans, Washington, D.C., who have stood by their immigrant neighbors and coworkers are truly inspiring, and have doubtless played a role in the Trump regime’s shift in strategy. But to actually stop the deportation machine will take a showdown with both capitalist parties of mass deportations, racist repression and imperialist war.

Only a militant, class-conscious working class can do that, at the head of a mass mobilization of all those who would oppose the ravages of capital. The key in the battle over immigration and against the mushrooming police state, as in the fight against black oppression, for women’s rights and trans rights and so much else, is the need to forge a revolutionary leadership that acts as a champion of all the oppressed. The Internationalist Group and Revolutionary Internationalist Youth are fighting to build the nucleus of such a vanguard, a continuation of the revolutionary Trotskyists who won the 1934 battle of Minneapolis leading the militant Teamsters strike to victory. The key is to fight for working-class independence from the capitalists, their government and parties, and to build a revolutionary workers party on a program of international socialist revolution.

For militant workers strike action to drive out ICE and stop the deportations!

Full citizenship rights for all immigrants!

To contact the Internationalist Group and the League for the Fourth International, send e-mail to: internationalistgroup@msn.com

Return to THE INTERNATIONALIST GROUP Home Page