Over the past week, the MAGA fascist Trump regime has rapidly intensified and broadened its attacks on immigrants. This has been a major escalation and requires a major escalation in struggle on this front, and a major effort to link this up with, and make it a powerful driving force in, the overall campaign to make Trump go… NOW! 

“Cleansing” the U.S. of non-white immigrants has always been a linchpin of Trump’s overall agenda. This is not just because it revs up the most reactionary section of his social base and draws a lot of other, more vacillating people into it. It is also because Trump and other leaders genuinely believe that restoring “America’s Greatness” (that is, its ability to plunder and murder in an unchallenged and fully untethered way) requires re-establishing open, unabashed and unchallengeable white Christian American supremacy. 

Keep this in mind, because even what is going on now—which is a horror—is at the same time only a stage in a much more large-scale, NAZI-like campaign of ethnic cleansing and quite possibly genocide.

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On May 21, at a meeting at the headquarters of ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement), Stephen Miller (the main leader of Trump’s mass deportation project) angrily demanded that arrests and detentions of immigrants must rapidly accelerate to 3,000 a day—that is over a million people a year. He was backed by another top figure, Kristi Noem. This is effectively policy now. 

The fascist drive to rip apart the lives of millions of people involves at least these six basic elements:

ONE: Canceling “Parole” Immigration Programs

Joe Biden established what were known as temporary “parole” programs for people from countries where the economic and political crisis was deemed to be so intense that it was unsafe to live there—Venezuela, Cuba,¹ Haiti and Nicaragua. (All four of these are countries that have been utterly ravaged by imperialism over the past 130 years.) These “parole” programs were supposed to be reviewed every two years to see if it was safe for people to return home. Trump however has been trying to cut them all off immediately, in spite of the fact that there have been no improvements.

On May 30, the fascist-dominated U.S. Supreme Court gave Trump the go-ahead to cancel the parole programs—instantly, over half a million people who came here and were living here legally have lost their legal status and are subject to rapid deportation. 

TWO: Targeting People Who Show Up for Court Hearings and Mandatory Check-ins

People who are in the U.S. on a legal but temporary basis are required to go to immigration offices and courts periodically for hearings, interviews, or just to “check in.” But according to ImmigrationImpact.com: “Last week ICE agents began a nationwide operation to arrest non-citizens appearing at their immigration court hearings in several states, including Arizona, California, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, New York, Nevada, North Carolina, Texas and Washington.… Reports indicate that government attorneys, who are employed within ICE, were told to request dismissals of cases from immigration judges. Once a person’s case was dismissed, ICE agents arrested the non-citizen.”

A reporter with THE CITY (a New York City news site) observed two dozen federal agents, masked and in plainclothes, hanging out in the lobby of the Varick Street Immigration Court for hours, studying pictures of people due in court. At least seven were arrested through the course of the day! Another immigrant was terrorized, “his hands shaking,” when these agents interrogated him, though they ended up letting him go. And this came only a week after a New York high school student was arrested under similar circumstances.

There is an even more sinister element behind this method. Not only can ICE easily arrest thousands of people who are doing what they are supposed to be doing, but the message to other immigrants is that it is dangerous to show up for your required hearings, interviews, etc. So it can be expected that large numbers of immigrants trying to go through the established legal process will stop showing up. And then they can arrested and immediately deported for failing to show up at their hearing. This is creating a real “damned if you do and damned if you don’t situation.” As one immigration lawyer put it: “This is an extremely scary time.… We have never had this happen before where the government is seeking to dismiss the case and then picking people up and disappearing them into this detention vacuum.”

THREE: Mobilization of a Large Portion of Law Enforcement—FBI, State Troopers, Local Cops and Sheriffs—in Addition to ICE Agents

In order to carry out these mass-scale arrests, the fascists are increasingly integrating all levels of law enforcement into their operations. FBI agents, U.S. Marshalls and others are now routinely part of immigration raids. In 29 states, there are now agreements that allow “local and state police to interrogate, arrest, detain, and process immigrants for removal proceedings without direction from ICE, with only minimal training on immigration law and procedure.” Under these arrangements, any racist-cop-on-the-beat can challenge someone they hear speaking Spanish in public, or with tattoos, or whatever bogus reason, and demand that they present their birth certificate or immigration papers or face arrest and perhaps even deportation. This is a recipe for rampant racial and ethnic profiling, mistaken deportations, and violence.

Most of these various police operatives are in plainclothes and often masked—meaning that if you see your cousin getting picked up by “La Migra,” you can’t really be sure, and you may have no idea, what agency is holding him, or where. 

FOUR: Raids on Immigrant Communities and Workplaces

In recent decades, all U.S. presidents have carried out mass deportations, as an attempt to deal with the fact that U.S. domination (and capitalist-imperialist domination overall) of the “Third World” has made life there unlivable for hundreds of millions of people, driving huge numbers to flee to rich imperialist countries like the U.S. Obama was known as “the deporter-in-chief” and held the previous “record” of 430,000 deportations in 2013. 

But Miller is insisting on a 250 percent increase over that staggering figure. And the numbers only tell part of the story. Past deportation campaigns were mainly focused on the U.S.-Mexico border, and were aimed at slowing or stopping the influx of new immigrants. But Trump is doing something different—he is unleashing a reign of terror on long-established immigrant communities in cities around the U.S., targeting people walking down the street, at home, or at their jobs. 

In early May, federal agents in full gear “visited” 100 restaurants in Washington, D.C. to demand the owners produce forms showing their workforce is here legally. Two weeks later, at least six federal agencies swept through D.C. again and arrested 189 immigrants. Afterwards, in trying to hold onto the fig leaf that they are targeting “criminals,” the U.S. attorney said that “nearly a dozen” of the 189 arrested had “warrants,” but later admitted that most of the “warrants” were administrative, which refers to things like missing an immigration hearing.

In the Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania area, two working class areas were raided, with at least five people arrested. In Tallahassee, Florida, 100 workers at various construction sites were arrested.

The terror this creates is not just stressful, it can also be deadly. In the Nashville area, a series of raids led to over 200 arrests of immigrants. In the midst of this, a six-month-old baby was found unresponsive—the baby’s caregiver had delayed calling 911 because of fear of arrest. The baby died. The local sheriff said, “We’ll never know if we could have saved that child’s life,” and tried to assure people that sheriffs were not involved in immigration arrests so people could still feel safe calling for help. But in fact, he had to acknowledge that under Tennessee law, it would be a felony for him to have a policy of not aiding ICE’s persecution of immigrants.

FIVE: A Rapidly Expanding Network of Concentration Camps from the U.S. to El Salvador to ???

Another key element of this is that ICE admits that it lacks the holding capacity even for the 49,000 people it claims to be holding. They are trying to solve this by contracting to private prisons and local jails, as well as deporting people to torture prisons in El Salvador and to the war-torn country of South Sudan. The prospect of rapidly increasing ICE prison populations and a shortage of funds and facilities, coupled with the vicious anti-immigrant racism that permeates the Trump regime, add up to a recipe for nightmarish, concentration camp conditions.

SIX: Crushing Any Opposition, from the People, Judges, or from Democratic Political Leaders

The final piece of this is far-reaching political repression, going beyond immigrant communities. When a small crowd of people protested the arrests at New York’s Varick Street immigration court, about two dozen members of NYPD’s Strategic Response Group, a militarized unit of the NYPD originally formed to “fight terrorism,” swarmed and brutalized them, arresting 23. Hundreds of judges who have ruled against Trump on immigration (or other) matters have been doxed and threatened, and a judge in Milwaukee was arrested by the FBI for taking steps to avoid a defendant at trial from being arrested by ICE in her courtroom. When several mayors and other local politicians in the Pittsburgh area expressed opposition to the ICE raids there and sympathy for immigrants, they were threatened with all federal funds being cut off. And when the Mayor of Washington, D.C. indicated that she wanted local police not to play any role in the immigration raids, the top Justice Department official in the city threatened that “home rule” could be ended. (Washington, D.C. is majority Black and Hispanic; ending “home rule” would mean that the local elected officials would be replaced by the authority of the majority fascist and overwhelmingly white Congress.) When Newark Mayor Ras Baraka accompanied several Democratic congresspeople for an inspection and oversight visit to an ICE detention center on May 9, federal agents arrested him outside the facility for “trespassing”—although the charges against Baraka were later dropped, the Trump regime has brought felony charges against Congresswoman LaMonica McIver who was among the crowd around Baraka when he was being arrested.

Note that Trump has repeatedly referred to popular and Democratic opposition to his immigration agenda as “a lawless insurrection.” This raises the specter of him invoking the Insurrection Act. This would allow him to use federal troops to “restore order”—something he has been seriously considering for years.

The Time Is NOW

All this marks a giant leap to a much broader and more vicious attack on the U.S. immigrant population. This is very reminiscent of the early days of Hitler’s rounding up of the Jewish population and there are actually dimensions in which this is worse. 

The time to oppose this with everything we have—and even more, the time to forcefully and in a massive and continuous way raise the demand that the Trump fascist regime must go NOW is… NOW!!!