Feds Ramp Up War Against Immigrants in California

Stop All Deportations!

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (I.C.E.) agents have been on a rampage throughout California, home to some 25 percent of undocumented immigrants in the United States. Hundreds have been rounded up in heavily armed I.C.E. raids on homes and businesses, and deported or sent to detention center hellholes. In the Central Valley, I.C.E. is staking out roads in order to nab immigrant farm workers on their way to work. In Delano, Kern County—where the campaign to organize the United Farm Workers union (UFW) began in the 1960s—I.C.E. agents hounded two farm workers, Santos Hilario García and Marcelina García Profecto, to their deaths in a car crash, leaving six children orphaned. About a week earlier, the UFW had organized protests after I.C.E. seized more than 26 Kern County farm workers. It is vital for the multiracial labor movement to take up the fight to defend all immigrants against this police-state onslaught. No deportations! Full citizenship rights for all immigrants!

Trump rode into the Oval Office by fanning the flames of anti-immigrant reaction, emboldening state forces like the border police and I.C.E. as well as racist vigilantes and outright fascists. Playing to this base, the Trump administration declared war on “sanctuary” cities and states. In January, the acting director of I.C.E., Thomas Homan, took particular aim at California, where a law that placed some limits on cooperation between police (and other state agencies) and I.C.E. had just gone into effect. Promising to unleash “a lot more deportation officers,” Homan threatened that “California better hold on tight.” Between late January and mid February, I.C.E. rounded up more than 200 immigrants in a Los Angeles area sweep and raided nearly 200 workplaces throughout the state. Then, beginning on February 25, a major I.C.E. operation in northern California ripped 232 immigrants from their homes, jobs and families.

On March 7, Trump’s attorney general, the notorious racist and living monument to the Confederacy, Jeff Sessions, came to the state capitol in Sacramento to announce a lawsuit against the state’s sanctuary laws. While Sessions dementedly raved that these laws are the work of “radical extremists” promoting “open borders,” the Democrats used the occasion to cynically posture as the defenders of desperate immigrants. In fact, according to statistics for the month of December, the number of immigrants rounded up by I.C.E. in California had not drastically increased over that recorded for the same month in the waning days of the Obama administration. Trump’s Democratic Party predecessor expelled over 2.5 million immigrants, more than any previous president in U.S. history.

Drawing particular fury and threats of possible prosecution from Trump and Sessions is Oakland mayor Libby Schaaf who last month publicly warned that unspecified I.C.E. raids were imminent in northern California. I.C.E. top cop, Homan, compared the Oakland mayor to a “gang lookout yelling ‘Police!’” On the contrary, Schaaf ran for mayor as the pro-cop candidate of law and order. In short, her “gang” is the police, in this case the notoriously racist killers of the Oakland Police Department. Her pro-immigrant posture was in the service of promoting her prospects for re-election in November and, possibly, for higher office beyond.

California Democratic Party state senator, Kevin de León, also seized on the I.C.E. raids as an opportunity to burnish his credentials as the “progressive” challenger for Dianne Feinstein’s U.S. Senate seat this year. Promoting California’s supposed “diversity and inclusivity,” de León boasted that the state has the “sixth-largest economy in the world thanks to the hard-working immigrants who want to become American citizens.” There is no question that the labor of undocumented immigrants who make up nearly 10 percent of California workers—including roughly half or more of those in agriculture and some one-fifth of those in construction—has generated enormous profits, particularly for the state’s giant agribusiness bosses.

California’s sanctuary laws dovetail with the needs of a major section of the bourgeoisie in the state. To these capitalists, Mexico and Central America are little more than a reservoir of cheap labor—a clear example was the notorious bracero program of 1942-64 under which millions of “temporary” Mexican workers, denied elementary rights, were brought in to slave in the fields. Relying on the brutal exploitation of vulnerable immigrants for their profits, capitalists like the agribusiness bosses view Trump’s ideologically driven anti-immigrant crusade as contrary to their interests.

The three California sanctuary laws targeted by Sessions are overwhelmingly for show. As Democratic Party governor Jerry Brown declared in signing the “California Values” bill in October, it “does not prevent or prohibit” I.C.E. and Homeland Security “from doing their own work in any way.” While barring police and other state agencies from sharing certain information about prisoners with I.C.E., it exempts those who have been convicted of any one of 800 crimes. Moreover, regional police databases, which include data provided by sanctuary cities, are readily available to immigration authorities. At Brown’s insistence, the law also allows I.C.E. to work with state prisons and enter county jails to question immigrants. Another of these laws, purportedly preventing I.C.E. agents from hunting down “illegals” at their work places, merely requires that these anti-immigrant stormtroopers have warrants in order to investigate employee records.

The third “sanctuary” law bars California jails from securing any new contracts with I.C.E. to detain immigrants and allows the state government to conduct inspections of I.C.E. detention centers. The idea that the state of California—whose prisons have numbered among the worst of the worst in a country known as “incarceration nation”—is going to conduct investigations to ensure the health and well-being of immigrants is beyond a sick joke. Like others locked up in California’s prison dungeons, immigrants held in I.C.E. detention centers suffer from inadequate and rotting food, lack of medical care, forced labor and assault.

At the privately run Adelanto detention center in the desert northeast of Los Angeles, three inmates died within four months last year. A hunger strike by Central American immigrants was met with pepper spray, beatings and scalding hot showers. In Richmond, a jail on contract with I.C.E. has been exposed by immigrant rights activists for its rampant abuse of women, denial of medical care and grossly unsanitary conditions. The response of the Contra Costa sheriff was to ban CIVIC, the immigrant support group that had publicized these atrocities, from visiting the jail. And that was after the implementation of California’s sanctuary laws.

We welcome any measure that may impede the immigration cops. But we warn: counting on a “sanctuary” designation to protect immigrants is a dangerous illusion. The racist, trigger-happy cops who daily gun down black and Latino youth on the streets are not about to stop harassing immigrants or colluding with I.C.E. “Sanctuary” did not stop San Francisco police from blowing away 19-year-old Jesus Adolfo Delgado Duarte, a Mexican immigrant hiding in the trunk of a car, in a hail of 99 bullets on March 6. Nor did sanctuary policies get in the way of the Los Angeles Police Department when its cops killed a black homeless man from Cameroon in 2015. In fact, many police chiefs support sanctuary policies in order to build immigrants’ “trust” in the cops as they go about terrorizing black and Latino youth.

Echoing the pro-sanctuary police chiefs, the International Socialist Organization (ISO) denounces I.C.E. raids because “they don’t protect communities from dangerous criminals, but are designed to instill fear and send a message that immigrants should live in the shadows” (Socialist Worker online, 14 March). The ISO’s call for protests “to make sure law enforcement officials adhere to sanctuary policies” was realized in a protest by the Democratic Socialists of America last July. The rally demanded that the L.A. sheriff support the sanctuary state bill, chanting, “You work for us.” As any revolutionary Marxist understands, the cops work for the capitalist class, not “us.” The job of the police, together with the courts, prisons and military, is to enforce the rule of the capitalist class enemy against the working class, black people, immigrants and all the oppressed.

The bosses have long whipped up anti-black racism and anti-immigrant chauvinism in order to set white worker against black and native-born against immigrant. The purpose is to divide and rule their wage slaves in order to degrade wages, benefits and working conditions and further the exploitation of all workers. Yet just as black workers remain a militant backbone of the unions, immigrant workers are far from helpless victims of the viciously racist system of American capitalism. From supermarket workers and janitors to drywalleros, immigrant workers have been central to many of the small number of union victories won in California in the last few decades.

The situation cries out for mobilizing the power of the multiracial working class in the fight for full citizenship rights for all immigrants. Taking up this struggle is vital for the unions themselves. Many, such as the UFCW grocery workers and SEIU service workers, have a large immigrant membership. Working-class unity, embodied in labor actions, can be a crucial force to push back the racist anti-immigrant campaign, and to revive the labor movement itself. A vivid example of the importance of unity in struggle was shown by the union organizing victory at Smithfield meatpacking in Tar Heel, North Carolina, in 2008. During that 15-year battle, the heavily black and immigrant workforce mobilized in action to beat back union-busting attacks, including attempts by la migra to round up immigrant union activists.

A central obstacle to marshaling labor’s power in defense of immigrants is a union misleadership that is committed to the defense of American capitalism. The protectionist cry for “American jobs for American workers” pushed by the AFL-CIO bureaucracy fans the flames of anti-immigrant bigotry. At the same time, the bureaucrats’ support for the Democratic Party serves to shackle working people, including union activists fighting against the deportations, to the other party of racist American capitalism.

Our aim is to forge a revolutionary workers party—one that is 70 percent black, Latino and other minorities—that can lead the fight for the class rule of the workers. Only by seizing the productive wealth of society can a new social order be built, one where the material abundance now monopolized by the tiny minority of capitalists will be used to meet the needs of the many and lay the basis for creating a socialist egalitarian society.