With the announcement after major defeats in Illinois, Minneapolis and a historic fightback in Los Angeles, that the Trump Administration will no longer be speaking publicly about mass raids going into the midterm elections, the immigrant rights struggle is at an important junction. It’s time to ask some critical questions: How much does this relative lull mean? How do we maintain mobilized as the capitalist system seeks to channel the immigrant rights movement into the Democratic Party? How do we use the lessons we are learning in fighting back against ICE in transforming our communities to eradicate white supremacy and struggle towards socialism.
Minneapolis 2025-26: This Chicago-based author was a participant in the historic struggle against ICE in the dead of winter. Using methods similar to the mass participation and direct democracy seen in workers’ councils in the 1910s, thousands in Minneapolis were mobilized into community defense networks centered on patrolling neighborhoods against ICE raids, mass arrests and repression. Many of these mobilizations, emanating from the working class directly without the interference and mis-leadership of the Democratic Party, might have come out of the pages of Trotsky’s Transitional Program. The author witnessed ICE vehicles at one point being followed by 9-10 community patrol cars critically impairing ICE’s ability to kidnap, harass and carry out acts of institutionalized racism. Meanwhile, masses took to the streets to march, rally and protest ICE presence, usually on a daily basis, multiple times each day. Movement propaganda was also replete with signage, stickers, buttons, patches and placards blanketing neighborhoods and clothing – creating an environment of power through popular propaganda and appropriating local images for use in the defeat of ICE.
The mass march on January 23 in where temperatures were at a brutal minus 9 degrees Fahrenheit for a high, saw well over 50, 000 people take to the streets in a true display of the fire that is already in our hearts: immigrant liberation, arrest of the murderers of Alex Jeffery Pretti, Renee Good and Silverio Villegas-Gonzalez, innocents murdered by ICE, defending LGBTQ rights and ending US militarism. Everything was crying out for the need for socialism – a system that prioritizes human liberation and highlights the incompatibility of capitalism rooted in hierarchy and racism at the altar of corporate profits. Given the tower of power of the mass movement in Minneapolis, with scarcely a politician to be found, it was little surprise that days after the mass ICE mobilization of Minneapolis ended, would-be ICE fuhrer Gregory Bovino, was relieved of his duties and shortly after, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem was fired.
Chicago: Chicago’s community patrols and rapid response networks have also been a vital opponents of ICE’s brutality – epitomized by Trump’s September- December 2025 Operation Midway Blitz. During this time, 3,000 workers were kidnapped by ICE though this mission was made significantly impeded by neighborhood patrols coordinated across the Chicagoland area. These saw close to half of ICE’s operation’s thwarted through protests, community whistle-outs, car horn honking, media blitzes and entire barrios mobilized to take on ICE. The People’s Patrol organized by the Casa DuPage Workers Center stood out, engaging at its height over 500 patrollers in 50 different suburbs including Chicago. The tactics of the People’s Patrol have been defined by chants and political agitation coupled with street mobilizations wherever ICE appeared.
The Democratic Party: Much more so than in Minneapolis, the Chicago movement has come face to face with the forces of the Democratic Party and its operatives in the deeply entrenched Illinois Coalition of Immigrant and Refugee Rights (ICIRR). The ICIRR has sought through its “Rapid Response Networks” to penetrate local community patrols by orienting the struggle away from a movement to Abolish ICE to Democratic Party partisanship for the coming November elections. When we are shouting “Abolish ICE” the “liberal” Democrats aim to lower our sights and principles by countering with chants like, “Today We March, Tomorrow We Vote.” Their age-old playbook, which aimed at demobilizing and mis-orienting the masses in 2006 and 2007 when millions took to the streets to stop the raids and for amnesty, during the Barack Obama presidential campaign, is at play once again. The ruling class has no doubt learned the lessons of the 1960s and ‘70s that independent and democratically-organized mass demonstrations on principled issues like war, racism and poverty, contribute greatly to changes in mass consciousness of working people. Independent mass mobilizations increasingly convince the oppressed masses that they are the real majority, not the elite few who rule with impunity in our name.
Needless we add that Obama’s “movement” not only aimed at demobilizing and demoralizing its supporters, but Obama went on to deport over 3 million immigrant workers, becoming the hated “Deporter-in Chief-in the process?
In point of fact, the “Rapid Response” of ICIRR and similarly-styled top-down ICE-watch networks in Chicagoland, are usually organized and run by Democratic Party elected officials! This constitutes a major form of cooptation on networks of activists, including pressure to not publicize ICE activity in areas where Democratic Party officials hold office so as not to humiliate them. The cowardice and capitalist class interests of the Democratic Party are on full display in this “blue state,” today, including attacks by the Illinois State Police on protesters at Broadview, to billionaire Governor JB Pritzer welcoming ICE in spite of the much touted Trust Act, that purports to ban police from collaborating with ICE.
Abolishing ICE and innate racist white supremacy are at the root of the struggle, which includes the arrest and prosecution of the ICE murderers of Alex Pretti, Renee Good and our local martyr Silverio Villegas Gonzalez – killed in cold blood by ICE on September 12, 2025. The Trump presidency is not just an aberration of an evil, or an Epstein pedophile enabler president in power; white supremacy has its roots in the capitalist system, manifested in its two-party system, which historically colludes to keep Wall Street’s super rich elite white men and their capitalist-imperialist benefactors in control at home and abroad.
Above all, it has been the people’s movement that has taken on ICE via its boldness, creativity independence and democracy. This ever-deepening coalition of resistance, a coalition based on solidarity with the oppressed and exploited, has won more than 70 percent of the U.S. population to hold ICE in contempt. It has significantly frustrated ICE’s repressive efforts.
At one point, White House “Border Czar” Tom Homan stated that he “hated Chicago” due to the movement’s popular education efforts, including urging activists to not speak with ICE agents, mass distribution of “Red Cards” spelling out 4th amendment protections that affirm the right to maintain silent, as well mass posting of “ICE OUT!” stickers placed all over Mexican restaurants and other public places.
These efforts have made it extremely hard for ICE to carry out its business-as-usual kidnappings. Indeed, the original stated ICE goal of kidnapping 3000 people daily was found to be impossible. It was only with importing additional hundreds of ICE’s “gestapo” forces that the 3,000 figure was reached… but only after 4-5 months had elapsed. Meanwhile, increasing public pressure has compelled the release of many of those taken into custody in Chicago and elsewhere.
Donald Trump, and his racist appointees Stephen Miller, Kristi Noem, Tom Homan and Gregory Bovino, stand increasingly discredited. Today, the immigrant rights movement’s internal democracy, mutual aid and socialist sensibility in the great majority of its community patrol networks now operating across the country, include people from all races, religions and ages coming together to protect immigrant workers. It is all too clear that immigrant workers are the victims of a racist capitalist system and not our enemies. It is clear that U.S. capitalism is scapegoating immigrants in a time-tested racist campaign to shift the blame for the miseries forced on working people by the rich and their governmental lackeys. These include major budget cuts of fundamental social services, endless wars abroad, pitifully low wages, growing unemployment, ever-escalating gas and grocery prices, and lives largely devoid of culture and rife with algorithms preying constantly on our fears.
Increasing potential for a general strike
Only a militant mass movement rooted in the working class and its allies among the oppressed and exploited, imbued with a revolutionary spirit, can lead to a repetition on a broader scale of the sterling example set in Minneapolis when 50,000 people responded to a labor-initiated call for general strike. That Minneapolis action temporarily paralyzed part of the capitalist order of an important city. It served as an object lesson as to what a more generalized exercise of working class power can accomplish in the future. Minneapolis frightened the ruling rich, who fear nothing more than the emergence of serious class struggle forces encouraging and leading angry workers to collectively withhold their labor power in strike action that challenges the capitalist state’s the right to murder and repress the innocent, not to mention to profit from our super exploited labor.
The system’s inherent racism and xenophobia
What has become clear from the immigrant rights struggle and more and more evident to fellow patrollers and the mass movement is that racism and the related xenophobia is inherent in capitalism. As the one percent of the U.S. elite gobbles up 31 percent of all household wealth and owns about half of all stocks, we see the corporate super rich Elon Musk and his ilk on track to become trillionaires. French novelist Honoré de Balzac said it well, “Behind every great fortune, there is a great crime.” And how better to cover up these corporate crimes, including the legalized stealing of workers’ labor, than by scapegoating immigrants?
But this tactic is growing less and less useful as Trump, approaching the midterms, advises Republican politicians to not talk about mass deportation anymore – it’s too unpopular! Even in the Republican south, people that the system promotes being looked on with hate and contempt… waitresses taken away and deported, along with construction workers, tamale vendors and roofers… are increasingly finding mass support in the general population.
“If Trump’s goal is to take away criminals,” they ask, “why is he targeting people working their asses off as essential workers?”
Indeed, immigrant workers make up a hyper-exploited work force. The fact that there exists this class of workers facing ICE raids while carrying out the bulk of the work in the food industry, construction, warehouses, factories, often as so-called ‘temp’ workers, deprived of full rights and even a permanent job, is a shame on the U.S. But never has xenophobia and white supremacy met such as formidable foe since the Civil Rights movement.
But the threat of social movements being derailed and disappeared into the Democratic Party is ever-present. The Democrats have been integral to establishing historic levels of funding for ICE, the Palestinian genocide, the military-industrial complex and creating the tax, investment, financial structures and funding conditions that have made the oligarchy/plutocracy the richest on earth.
Joining the revolutionary socialist party
Only the mass movement for immigrant rights with an internationalist socialist program and revolutionary party can defeat the racist capitalist system, secure true rights for immigrants while taking on white supremacy and generalized social inequality. Just as we cannot vote ourselves out of fascism we cannot vote ourselves into revolution or even meaningful gains under the two-party capitalist framework. Only the mass movement for immigrant rights, associated with all other movements of oppressed people in the U.S. and around the world, with a deeply-rooted vanguard, revolutionary party leading the way, can take us to the next level.
Winning immigration reform, is among this movement’s first critical steps along with taking on the rich and powerful at the point of production, unleashing the power of workers, students, women, LGBTQI people, people of color, the havenots, and in time nationalizing even the cuff links on the tuxedos of the ruling rich.
Join us in Socialist Action in building a mass revolutionary party to defeat ICE. Join the fight to construct a society, where for the first time in the modern era, the vast and overwhelming majority own, organize and democratically control production in their own interests, where capitalist profits are forever subordinated to the fulfillment of human needs. Contact: socialistaction.org Donate.