By Stephen Edwards in Chicago
[The first of a two-part article]
It is the same principle as the GW Bush administration used during the invasion of Iraq – shock and awe, with no regard for anything or anyone that gets broken in the process. Elon Musk’s DOGE team used the slogan “move fast and break things” and that is exactly what is going on.
The human cost is horrifying. Mothers and fathers torn from their families. Children, in some cases, literally left on the sidewalk as their parents have been seized by masked Government agents on “reasonable suspicion” that they weren’t born in the US of A. Kids kept home from school because their parents are living in fear. A mother dragged from a school building while armed thugs restrain her son.
School administrators and teachers’ unions having to make plans to keep their students safe from ICE raids, on top of the “active shooter” drills that US schools already have, because US politicians have handed almost unlimited power to the arms industry to keep pumping out guns.
(As an aside, thousands of those guns are also flowing to arm the drug cartels in Mexico that exist to feed the US drug market, furthering the pressures pushing people to come to the United States).
On the day of his second inauguration, January 20, 2025, Trump signed a dizzying array of executive orders aimed at disrupting institutions, weakening regulations, handing power to unaccountable corporations and supercharging the already draconian border police with the goal of deporting a million people a year.
One of these Presidential orders also aims to end birthright citizenship – the rule that anyone born in the country is automatically a citizen. In the US, winning that right required a civil war, although as author Greg Grandin has pointed out, “Nearly every country in the Western Hemisphere grants citizenship to children born in its territory irrespective of the nationality of their parents. It’s part of the promise of the New World, that… The children of the oppressed and persecuted would be citizens by right.”
The point of abolishing birthright citizenship is to create a permanent class of workers with no legal rights. It would also inflict a huge burden on hospitals, schools and local authorities and it points in the direction of a national ID for citizens – making anyone without one, essentially without rights.
When Federal courts imposed injunctions against this Constitution-wrecking Executive Order, the Supreme Court, without explanation, said that Federal district courts could no longer impose national injunctions against Presidential acts. Removing the ability of lower courts to issue national injunctions against an overreach of the central government has greatly increased Trump’s power to do as he pleases, while allowing the Court to avoid actually taking a position on the issue at hand.
Trump’s specific changes to the ways immigration laws are enforced are too numerous to list here, but all of them are designed to make deportation easier, as far as possible without court hearings. Amongst other things they make about one million previously legal residents, illegal. This was part of an agenda that had been worked out, in great detail, by the racist, nativist lawyers and economists who wrote the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 – and they came into the White House ready to go.
Attacks on migrants
Why is this happening, and why have so many major institutions, from the Supreme Court, and corporate mass media on down, caved in to it?
Despite its enormous wealth and power, US imperialism is in a long term crisis of profitability. Trump’s offer to his billionaire backers is to restore that profitability in the most sweeping way imaginable, by destroying the gains won by the working class over the past hundred and thirty years.
Trump and his backers believe they can return US society to a so-called Gilded Age when unions were outlawed, democratic rights were meaningless for the vast majority and railroad baron Jay Gould could boast that he could “hire one half of the working class to kill the other”.
In a future article we can analyse both this crisis of profitability and the nature of the Trump regime, including its use of the State Department and the Department of Justice to attack its political enemies. But this article will focus on the attacks on immigrants, particularly today’s Ground Zero, Chicago.
Since September 9, masked and militarised Federal police forces – the Department of Homeland Security’s divisions of Customs and Border Control (CBP) and Immigrant and Customs Enforcement, ICE, have invaded communities across the Chicago area, beginning with those where the population is significantly Latine.
Trump’s election campaign conjured up the idea that America’s cities are overrun with “criminal aliens” who needed to be rounded up and deported. What ICE and CPB have actually done bears no relation to this mythical quest.
They have shown up at immigration court, seizing people who are keeping appointments about their status. They’ve seized people who were convicted of crimes decades ago and have served their time, in order to be able to say they’re deporting criminals.
They’ve claimed that the people they’ve arrested are members of a criminal gang; since criminal gangs don’t keep membership lists, this can be used against almost anyone, but particularly any younger Latino who comes from a working class neighbourhood. The Alien Enemies Act of 1798 was invoked to deport around 250 people, alleged to be members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua, not to Venezuela, but to an exceptionally brutal prison in El Salvador.
Huge expenditure on ICE and border enforcement
As these actions have been met with lawsuits, and growing public disgust, it became clear that ICE did not have the resources to deport the vast numbers that Trump had promised. But on July 4, the Republicans passed a reactionary budget bill, the so-called Big Beautiful Bill, which increased funding for immigration and border enforcement by an enormous $170bn over the next four years.
$70bn goes just to one department, ICE, whose budget is now above all but 12 countries’ armed forces. It is a presidential gendarmerie on a scale that the US has never seen before. Its umbrella agency, Homeland Security, is already huge, with 80,000 employees, but ICE’s new budget is bigger than all other Federal domestic law enforcement agencies put together. It is recruiting its new agents from existing police forces and the military, offering generous salaries and a $50,000 retention bonus, more than most Americans make in a year.
Its recruiters are clearly aiming at people who believe that American culture is under attack, with slogans like “A Heritage to be proud of, a Homeland worth Defending” and “Remember your Homeland’s Heritage” over romanticised and racist images of settlers occupying the American West.
The language of “criminal aliens”, of deporting “the worst of the worst” is inherently racist. But the fact is that the largest percentage increase in the “Big Beautiful Budget” has nothing to do with criminality; in practice it goes to “finding, arresting, detaining, and deporting immigrants already living in the US, most of whom have not committed a crime and many of whom have had lawful status.”
Attacks focus on urban centres
The first round of these large-scale attacks was aimed at Los Angeles, with its enormous Latine population, and Washington DC, a Federal district, not a State, where the laws allow the President to intervene more directly than in the States themselves. Another round is aimed at Portland, Oregon, where Black Lives Matter protests drew Trump’s attention during his previous term in office.
Publicly all these raids are framed around the claim that Democrat-run cities which passed sanctuary laws limiting local cooperation with ICE and CPB are hell-holes where people fear to walk the streets, and from which ordinary residents need to be saved. The threats which Team Trump has invented include “violent criminal alien gangs” and “murder rates comparable to third world countries”, or in the case of Portland, the ridiculous claim that the entire city is burning to the ground.
As a Department of Homeland Security spokesperson told ABC News, “Under President Trump and Secretary Noem, nowhere is a safe haven for criminal illegal aliens. If you come to our country illegally and break our laws, we will hunt you down, arrest you, deport you, and you will never return.”
But “come to this country illegally” implies that there is an alternative, to come to this country legally. Notwithstanding legends about the distant past, for the vast majority of immigrants this is simply rubbish. US immigration law is built around US capitalism’s need for cheap labour, and it has always used racism to justify these laws.
Most current immigration law can be traced to the start of the neoliberal era. Successive changes, beginning under the Reagan administration, have made legal immigration all but impossible for precisely those Latin American populations most harmed by US foreign policy, including financial manipulation by Wall Street and the US-funded IMF and World Bank.
The legal groundwork for today’s ICE raids began with an act of the Clinton administration: the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRAIRA) of 1996, which criminalised re-entry and set the stage for the subsequent deportation of millions of non-citizens.
This was consistent with the rest of Clinton’s neoliberal agenda, including the ending of cash welfare assistance for women and children, the turbocharging of mass incarceration, and the attacks on unionised jobs represented by NAFTA and “most favored nation” status for trade with China.
No legal path to citizenship
Today there is no legal path to immigration for the vast majority. This, coupled with the pressure to emigrate, resulting from societal crises in South and Central America, has provided the ruling class with a population of workers with little to no access to legal protections, and therefore with little choice but to take the lowest paid and most physically demanding jobs.
Capitalism has reaped huge benefits from having this workforce which can be super-exploited because of its lack of legal rights, but despite these disadvantages, immigrants have created strong and vibrant communities and play a huge role in the economy. In every region of the US, workers in labour-intensive jobs: in agriculture, food production, and service industries, are disproportionately immigrants.
Trump’s agenda and court rulings
In 2006, a particularly vicious anti-immigrant bill sparked massive protests which, among other things, put May Day back on the calendar in the US, thanks to the socialist traditions brought by Latin American workers. The Bush administration, unable to get that law passed, took revenge with a brutal round of workplace raids using the laws already passed under Clinton.
This was followed up by mass deportations under Obama, who to this day still holds the record for the greatest number of deportations carried out by any US President. The Democrats funded ICE and steadfastly refused to provide a path to legalisation, keeping millions of undocumented immigrants in legal limbo, unable to vote on the policies that affect them and unable to access most of the welfare and medical benefits that their taxes were contributing to.
As recently as the beginning of this year, the Democrats supported passage of the Laken Riley Act, which mandates the detention without bail of noncitizens arrested or charged, as opposed to actually convicted, of a list of crimes, some as minor as shoplifting. All of these measures laid the groundwork for the present attacks. Trump 2.0 expanded the policy of expedited removal, but the biggest difference between Team Trump and their predecessors is the massively ramped up enforcement – which they can justify as “we’re just enforcing the laws” – and the massive increase in funding and hiring for ICE.
The increased enforcement, however, is only possible because ICE no longer bothers with getting arrest warrants, and is using expedited removal, based on one of a series of Executive Orders that effectively do away with due process. Trump and his appointees, particularly his Deputy Chief of Staff, Stephen Miller, Homeland Security Secretary, Kristi Noem, and ICE boss, Tom Homan, argue that due process – the right to a hearing in court – does not apply to people who are in the US without documentation.
This puts the burden on the individual to prove that they are a citizen or legal resident. ICE is blatantly using racial profiling, literally driving around in unmarked, rented vehicles, looking for people who “look Hispanic”, particularly if they are engaged in occupations that are disproportionately held by Latine immigrants such as landscaping, construction, food vending, working in restaurant kitchens or in the field.
This racial profiling was banned by a Federal judge, but that ban was struck down by the Supreme Court using the so-called “Shadow docket”, meaning it was done without a hearing or any explanation, although two Justices did post their opinions after the fact. This is consistent with what the Court has done repeatedly – not fully committing itself to Trump’s positions but consistently striking down injunctions which stop him from acting on them.
Racial profiling
Trump’s renewed attack on immigrant communities began on inauguration day with the deluge of executive orders mentioned above, using exaggerated language like “Protecting the American People Against Invasion”. The way, the policy was carried out sent a message, that the administration was going to do this in the most brutal manner possible, without warning, using racial profiling, using racist tropes and targeting political enemies.
One of the earliest cases to come to public attention is that of Maryland construction worker, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who was sent, in defiance of a judge’s order, to a concentration camp in El Salvador. Team Trump brazenly admitted that he had been taken in error, but insisted that he would not be coming back.
The legal battle around Mr Abrego Garcia was in the headlines for weeks; after months of unjust imprisonment he was brought back to the US in August but was immediately arrested on trumped-up charges and threatened with being deported again, this time to Ghana, a country with which he has no connection.
When the Ghanaian government said they were not accepting random deportees from the US, the State Department said they’d send him to some other country in Africa, either Eswatini (formerly Swaziland), Uganda or, most recently, Ghana, all of them countries with a record of human rights abuses.
The rendition of detainees to countries they’ve never been to, some of which have active civil wars going on, was done under the GW Bush administration during the Iraq war ,and has never been outlawed by subsequent Democratic administrations. Abrego Garcia’s hearings are still going on, clearly the government’s intent is to make an example of him, sending a warning that anyone else who resists will not be left alone.
But they have been vastly overshadowed by the attacks on major cities like Chicago, and the mad rhetoric of the Trump administration’s allegations – in court, no less – that Chicago, Portland and LA are in a state of rebellion.
Part 2 will be ‘communities fight back’
From the blog Solidarity Now (free subscription required) here
[Feature picture of Donald Trump from Wikimedia Commons, here]
