Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
1. Minneapolis resistance grows as ICE occupation intensifies
The World Socialist Web Site will be providing live on-the-ground updates in Minnesota and beyond on the unfolding confrontation between workers and youth and federal forces.
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2. For a general strike against ICE violence and Trump’s dicatatorship!
Today, workers and young people are taking to the streets in Minneapolis and across the US to protest the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) occupation of Minneapolis, the murder of Renée Nicole Good, and the Trump administration’s escalating assault on democratic rights.
There is a powerful and growing sentiment for mass action, expressed in calls for a general strike to demand an end to police violence, repression and attacks on both immigrants and citizens. Today’s protests are an important step forward, but January 23 cannot be seen as an endpoint. Rather, they must become the launching point for a nationwide counter-offensive by the working class against the conspiracy for dictatorship.
It is necessary to ask and to answer the question: What next?
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To develop a counter-offensive, certain fundamental facts must be recognized. First, what is happening in Minneapolis is the spearhead of a broader conspiracy to establish a military‑presidential dictatorship in the United States, developed systematically since Trump’s return to power a year ago.
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Second, Trump is not acting as a rogue individual, but as the political representative of the capitalist oligarchy. In the United States alone, the combined wealth of billionaires increased by $1.5 trillion, about 22 percent, during Trump’s first year back in office, bringing their total holdings to roughly $8.2 trillion. Globally, billionaire wealth surged at three times the rate of the previous five years in 2025, reaching a record $18.3 trillion.
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Third, the assault on democratic rights is inextricably connected to the eruption of American imperialism. In the first weeks of 2026 alone, the Trump administration has overseen an illegal military intervention in Venezuela, including the capture of President Nicolás Maduro, threatened war against Iran, demanded control over Greenland, and issued increasing provocations against the allies of US imperialism in Europe and North America.
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To counter the rampage of the oligarchy, mass action is necessary. The sentiment for a general strike now emerging reflects the growing recognition that appeals to politicians, lawsuits and electoral maneuvers are incapable of countering the violence and criminality of the Trump regime.
A general strike, however, is not a one-day protest or consumer boycott. It is the mobilization of the collective power of the working class—the producers of all wealth in society—to bring the machinery of exploitation and repression to a halt. That power must now be organized and directed against the conspiracy to establish a dictatorship.
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Democrats, including Governor Tim Walz, Senator Bernie Sanders and others advise those outraged over ICE’s murderous actions to direct their attention to the courts and the midterm elections. This is political deception. Trump has already declared his intention to ignore court orders that go against him, and the Supreme Court is controlled by a fascist cabal. As for the elections: there is no guarantee that they will even take place, or that, if they do, they will bear any resemblance to democratic norms.
For its part, the response of the trade union apparatus to the growing support for a general strike has been to suppress and counteract sentiment for mass struggle. The unions that have nominally backed the protest—such as the Teamsters, the CWA, the SEIU, and the nurses’ unions—have told their members that they cannot strike, citing no-strike clauses that the apparatus negotiated and enforces. This under conditions in which the Trump administration is obliterating every legal and constitutional constraint on state violence and refuses to investigate Good’s killer.
To carry forward the struggle, the Socialist Equality Party and the International Youth and Students for Social Equality therefore call for the formation of rank-and-file committees in every workplace, school and neighborhood. Rank-and-file committees must take the initiative out of the hands of the bureaucracies, establish democratic control over the struggle, and begin to coordinate strike action and mass resistance from below.
Resolutions must be adopted calling for open-ended strike action, with clearly articulated demands: the immediate arrest and prosecution of Renée Nicole Good’s killer; the withdrawal of all federal paramilitary forces, including ICE, DHS, and CBP; the abolition of these repressive agencies; and the release of all detainees in ICE custody.
Coordinating committees must be built to unify these rank‑and‑file bodies across industries, cities, and states, and link them with workers internationally. The International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC) provides the framework for this struggle, and we urge all those who want to build a real movement to join it.
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Capitalism has reached a historic dead end. To defend jobs, wages, education, health care, and democratic rights, the working class must build its own independent political movement to challenge the dictatorship of the banks and corporations and fight for socialism. The Socialist Equality Party calls on all those who agree with this perspective to join us, build rank-and-file committees, and take up the fight to mobilize the working class in the United States and internationally for a socialist future.
3. 2026 Academy Award nominations: Sinners and One Battle After Another receive the most nominations
The nominations for the 98th Academy Awards were announced Thursday at the Samuel Goldwyn Theater in Beverly Hills, California. The awards ceremony will be held at the Dolby Theater in Los Angeles on March 15. The event will be televised in the US on ABC and hosted by comedian-talk show host Conan O’Brien. Honors will be handed out in 24 categories for films released in 2025.
The award nominations were the usual combination of the thoughtful and the confounding, or even disturbing. The record 16 nominations for Ryan Coogler’s Sinners, which our review termed a “racialist horror show,” provides an indication of the continuing hold of such retrograde politics on an unhealthy portion of the approximately 11,000 Academy voters.
Paul Thomas Anderson’s uneven One Battle After Another, inspired by the Thomas Pynchon novel, complete with devastating scenes of attacks on immigrants by paramilitary fascist forces, identical in look and manner to ICE and the other thugs mobilized by the Trump administration, received 13 nominations.
Guillermo del Toro’s new adaptation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Marty Supreme (Josh Safdie) and Sentimental Value (Joachim Trier) each had nine nominations. Bugonia from Yorgos Lanthimos, about the capture and torment of a powerful corporate executive, was nominated in four categories, including Emma Stone as best actress. Stone becomes the youngest actress to have been nominated seven times, and deservedly so for the most part.
Aside from Sinners, One Battle After Another, Frankenstein, Marty Supreme, Sentimental Value and Bugonia, the other films nominated for best picture are the very weak F1, Hamnet (Chloé Zhao), The Secret Agent from Brazil (Kleber Mendonça Filho) and Train Dreams, an effort reminiscent of the more abstract, disoriented works of Terrence Malick.
In the best international feature film category, The Voice of Hind Rajab, written and directed by Tunisian filmmaker Kaouther Ben Hania, received a nomination. The film focuses on the Palestinian Red Crescent response to the desperate cellphone calls of Hind, a 6-year-old Palestinian girl, trapped by Israeli fire in Gaza in January 2024. The girl, along with six members of her family and two Red Crescent paramedics, eventually died in a hail of lethal IDF fire. The film only received distribution in the US in late October, after pressures from pro-Zionist forces prevented its showing for months.
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According to the latest figures, roughly 35 percent of active Academy voters identify as women, an increase from 24 percent in 2014. Approximately 22 to 25 percent identify as coming from “underrepresented racial or ethnic communities,” up from only 6 percent a decade ago. About one-quarter of the Academy membership now resides outside the US.
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The increased ethnic and gender variety has not necessarily done anything to improve the opinions and tastes of the Academy membership. As the WSWS has argued for some time, the “diversity” problem in Hollywood is neither a racial nor a gender one. The US is an immensely complex society of more than 340 million people, the vast majority of whom work for a wage—or would like to. How well represented is the struggling working class represented and depicted in American filmmaking, including the overwhelmingly proletarian African American and Latino population? In general, how thoroughly are the complexities of US society and its people depicted by Hollywood?
In its best scenes, One Battle After Another, with Leonardo DiCaprio and Benicio del Toro doing their best to evade the fascist interlopers in their town, is a far more accurate picture of contemporary life than Coogler’s racialist cartoon. Bugonia, perhaps most of all in the performance of Jesse Plemons, not nominated for best actor, also reveals something about the wretchedness of social and psychological conditions endured by many in the US.
Academy voters do not always get things wrong. Sometimes they get things surprisingly right, and certainly not all of the nominations this time around are mistaken. But the Academy members continue to be strongly distracted by the Democratic Party and the various self-involved, self-pitying race and gender obsessions, directing them back to personal identity problems. In part this is a deliberate diversion, in some cases a deliberate “self-diversion,” to avoid looking at painful realities.
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In the face of the Trump drive toward fascist dictatorship, what does an appeal to racial separatism and cultural nationalism have to offer?
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Hollywood is in turmoil, facing catastrophic job losses, in part due to the introduction of AI as well as mergers and concentration among the handful of conglomerates. Whether Warner Bros. is taken over by the viciously right-wing Ellisons at Paramount or Sarandos and Netflix, it will spell further disaster for workers. Media reports estimate as many as 6,000 more job losses from the Warner Bros. sale alone.
War, the threat of dictatorship, abduction of foreign leaders, piracy on the open seas, murder on the streets of an occupied American city, the threat to seize entire countries, the complicity and cowardice of the official “opposition” and the trade union officialdom—these are the facts of life in 2026, and Hollywood continues to both look at them and look away.
4. The “rupture in the world order”—World Economic Forum dominated by inter-imperialist conflict
Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney painted a stark picture of a global capitalist system roiled by inter-imperialist rivalries and hurtling towards world war in a speech Tuesday to the World Economic Forum.
Speaking before an audience of capitalist politicians, imperialist strategists, global CEOs and billionaire oligarchs, Carney declared the world to be at a “turning point.” This was not a mere transition, he insisted, but “the rupture of the world order” and the beginning of “a brutal reality where geopolitics among the great powers is not subject to any constraints.”
The collapse of the US-led, post-Second World War economic and geopolitical order has ushered in a new era of “great power rivalries,” said Carney, in which “the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.”
Carney’s remarks were a damning admission by the leader of one of the G7 imperialist powers that an imperialist-led struggle to repartition the world economically and territorially, akin to that which culminated in the imperialist world wars of the last century, is underway.
Carney made no reference to America’s would-be dictator President Donald Trump and mentioned the United States just once. But coming after a year of escalating trade war and belligerence from Washington targeting ostensible allies and foes alike, it was clear to all that Carney was calling on the European powers to join Canada in ruthlessly asserting their own imperialist interests, including against the United States.
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Carney’s attack on a rampaging US imperialism was all the more remarkable in that it was given by the head of the government of Canada, which for the past eight decades has been America’s closest economic, geopolitical and military ally. For more than 50 years, up until 9/11, Ottawa and Washington boasted that they shared the world’s longest “undefended border,” some 5,500 miles (8,800-plus kilometers) long.
However, as part of a drive to consolidate unbridled US domination over the Western Hemisphere in preparation for war with China and other great powers, Trump has hit Canada with a barrage of tariffs, threatened to scuttle the US-Mexico-Canada trade agreement and vowed to use “economic force” to make Canada America’s 51st state.
Carney appealed to Canada’s NATO allies to recognize “reality”: The “rules-based international order,” the euphemism that US imperialism employed to mask its post-World War II global hegemony, and from which Canadian and European imperialism benefited handsomely, has irreversibly collapsed. Citing “a series of crises in finance, health, energy and geopolitics” over the past two decades, Carney stated, “great powers have begun using economic integration as weapons. Tariffs as leverage. Financial infrastructure as coercion. Supply chains as vulnerabilities to be exploited.”
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On Wednesday, Trump pulled back from his Greenland tariff threat, dropping the 10 percent surcharge set to come into force on February 1. He cited a “deal” on Greenland struck at a meeting on the sidelines of the WEF with NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte, in which representatives of Denmark and Greenland took no part. No details of the “deal” have been made public, but reports suggest the US will be ceded bits of the Arctic island for an expanded network of military bases and given unlimited military control over its land mass, airspace and territorial waters.
Trump’s foreign policy threats and sudden shifts resemble nothing so much as those of Adolf Hitler in the late 1930s, just as the sharpening inter-state conflicts recall the jostling between the imperialist powers in the years immediately preceding World War II. If a deal has in fact been reached over Greenland, it is likely to prove as durable as that Hitler struck in September 1938 with Italy’s Mussolini, the British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and his French counterpart, Édouard Daladier, over the fate of Czechoslovakia. Chamberlain infamously claimed he had secured “peace in our time,” but within months Hitler made fresh demands, carved up what remained of the Czechoslovak Republic and set his sights on Poland.
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Carney’s [proposal of an] alliance of “middle powers” would be a partnership first and foremost with French and British imperialism, whose colonial empires bestrided the world until 1945, and with German imperialism, which twice in the last century sought to resolve its crisis by conquering Europe. While their world power is diminished, the imperialist appetites of the European powers are, if anything, greater today.
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Workers on both sides of the Atlantic can only oppose the revival of imperialist barbarism by unifying their struggles against all of the imperialist powers and their political representatives. The looming danger of world war is rooted in crisis-ridden capitalism, which will plunge humanity into the abyss as it did twice in the 20th century, unless it is overthrown by a revolutionary socialist movement of the working class.
The World Socialist Web Site and International Committee of the Fourth International fight to provide the revolutionary leadership required to unite workers’ struggles internationally against war, attacks on democratic and social rights, and the growth of inequality into a mass industrial and political movement for the abolition of capitalism and the socialist transformation of society.
5. Democratic senators visit ICE detention center as House approves more funding
On January 20, 2026, Democratic U.S. Senators Alex Padilla and Adam Schiff carried out a carefully choreographed congressional “oversight” visit to the California City Detention Facility, the newest and largest immigration detention center in California.
Located in the Mojave Desert in Kern County, roughly 100 miles north of Los Angeles, the facility is operated by the private prison contractor CoreCivic under contract with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Reactivated in 2025, it has a capacity of 2,560 beds and was holding more than 1,400 detainees at the time of the visit.
The senators toured the cellblock-style housing units for several hours and spoke with detainees and staff. In public statements afterward, Padilla and Schiff gave disturbing accounts of conditions inside the facility. Schiff claimed he spoke with a detainee with diabetes who said he had not received medical treatment for nearly two months. Detainees also described foul-smelling water and food that appeared spoiled or moldy.
Several detainees told the senators they were taken into custody during routine immigration check-ins rather than criminal arrests, contradicting claims that ICE targets only “dangerous criminals.” Others spoke of separation from family members. One detainee, an Afghan national who said he assisted US forces, told the senators he feared violence or death if deported and had been warned he could be sent to other countries where he has no ties.
These revelations were presented as evidence of Democratic concern for humane treatment. In reality, the visit was a political stunt aimed at damage control, designed to obscure the Democratic Party’s central role in financing, legitimizing and sustaining the immigration enforcement apparatus.
Days earlier, a 1,059-page bipartisan “minibus” spending bill was presented maintaining $10 billion in funding for ICE. Democrats are requesting a few provisions, such as ICE agents wearing body cameras and undergoing additional training on how to interact with the public.
Two days after the visit, the House of Representatives approved the budget for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which includes ICE, by a 214-213 vote. Every Democrat opposed the bill, in a purely performative vote engineered by House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, who had the DHS funding separated from the main military spending bill with the understanding that no Republicans would vote against it.
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Minority Leader Jeffries reportedly informed a private caucus of Democratic lawmakers that although he personally opposed extending funding for the DHS through the remainder of the fiscal year, the party leadership would not attempt to block or organize opposition to the measure, effectively guaranteeing its approval.
This calculated decision followed the January 7 killing of Renée Nicole Good by an ICE agent in Minneapolis and the ensuing deployment of thousands of federal agents to occupy the Twin Cities.
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Padilla and Schiff’s visit must be understood within the Democrats’ broader strategy. Their objections to Trump’s immigration policies have never challenged the legitimacy of mass detention or deportation. Instead, they have consistently framed their criticism in administrative terms, arguing that enforcement must be better managed to prevent political backlash.
On January 5, Padilla and Schiff joined 28 other Democratic senators in a letter complaining about the administration’s “decision to strip federal law enforcement agencies of thousands of personnel that keep Americans safe and redeploy them to arrest, detain, and deport immigrants.” This refers to the deployment of FBI and other federal cops to join ICE on raids. It was not a denunciation of the treatment of immigrants but a complaint about diverting the FBI from other priorities.
The concern of the Democrats is that Trump’s methods risk provoking widespread opposition and destabilizing existing enforcement priorities. Trump’s openly brutal tactics threaten to discredit the entire political system, something the Democrats fear far more than the repression itself.
The same logic underlies a December 2025 report released by Schiff, Padilla, Elizabeth Warren and Representative John Garamendi criticizing the diversion of funds from the Department of Defense to the DHS to support immigration enforcement. Here, too, the issue was not repression but strategy. Democrats prefer to limit highly visible domestic crackdowns that spark unrest, while channeling resources toward the military in preparation for expanding international conflicts.
This is a difference in foreign policy orientation, not principle. The Democrats oppose Trump’s methods because they inflame opposition at home and interfere with imperialist priorities abroad, not because they reject authoritarian rule.
The fraud of this posture is exposed in California itself. There is no “sanctuary state” when ICE operates massive detention centers, carries out armed raids and now openly fires weapons during operations. On Wednesday morning, an ICE agent opened fire during an immigration operation in Willowbrook, California. Although no one was hit, the incident sparked an immediate response from crowds opposing ICE. Likewise, hospitals and schools are no longer protected spaces, despite repeated assurances from Democratic officials.
To get ahead of the protests, Padilla and Schiff decided to visit CoreCivic, one of the largest private prison corporations in the United States. The company derives over half of its revenue from federal contracts, primarily with ICE, the U.S. Marshals Service and the Bureau of Prisons. It owns or operates more than 70 facilities nationwide and has expanded its ICE detention contracts in recent years, pushing quarterly revenues to $538 million in 2025.
While CoreCivic’s donations skew towards Republicans nationally, it maintains deep ties to the Democrats as well. It has donated tens of thousands of dollars to the California Democratic Party and Democratic candidates, including Governor Gavin Newsom.
Between 2017 and 2018, California Democrats received more combined donations from CoreCivic and GEO Group, another private prison operator, than state Republicans did. The company holds contracts in Democratic-led jurisdictions across the country and lobbies both parties aggressively.
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As Minneapolis workers prepare for a general strike on January 23, 15,000 nurses are on strike in New York, 31,000 Kaiser nurses prepare to strike on January 26 and tens of thousands of UC workers and LAUSD teachers move toward strike authorization votes. The greatest danger is political containment. The Democratic Party and the union bureaucracies are working to isolate and control these struggles.
Workers cannot defend democratic rights or oppose authoritarianism by appealing to the very institutions enforcing repression. The formation of independent rank-and-file committees, democratically controlled and unified across industries and regions, is not optional. Under conditions of escalating state violence, it has become a matter of life and death.
6. Australian unions strike deal with Microsoft to oversee AI transformation
On January 15, the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) and Microsoft announced a new “framework agreement” on the implementation of artificial intelligence (AI) in workplaces across the country.
The ACTU claimed the agreement “sets a new benchmark for workers’ rights in the tech sector.” In reality, it is a thoroughly pro‑corporate arrangement designed to legitimize the widespread replacement of jobs with AI, and a pledge from Australia’s top union bureaucrats to suppress workers’ opposition to the rollout.
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The ACTU-Microsoft deal has been hailed by the Labor government, business groups and the corporate media as a model for how unions and major corporations can jointly impose a massive expansion of AI throughout industry.
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The “framework agreement” is explicitly not legally binding and imposes no limits on the company’s capacity to eliminate jobs.
Instead, it outlines three core objectives:
Information Sharing, under which Microsoft will run training sessions for union leaders and staff through the ACTU institute. In other words, the bureaucracy will be schooled by corporate experts in how to sell the AI transition to workers as inevitable and even beneficial, and in how to divert anger over job losses and intensification of labor into illusions in “upskilling” and “lifelong learning.”
Worker Voice in Technology Development, a euphemism for “consultation” processes, carefully stage-managed by the union bureaucracy and management, aimed at giving sweeping restructuring measures a false imprimatur of worker approval and involvement. Under the pretext of “incorporating worker perspectives into the design, development and deployment of AI systems,” workers will be dragooned into architecting the destruction of their own jobs or those of their colleagues.
Moreover, such mechanisms do not alter the basic fact that the underlying strategic decisions—where and when AI systems will be deployed, what roles will be automated, and which sites will be downsized or closed—remain entirely in the hands of Microsoft’s executives and shareholders.
Collaboration on Public Policy and Skills, a commitment from the ACTU to join Microsoft in lobbying to ensure that any regulation on the use of AI in the workplace is compatible with corporate profit demands. The framework is proudly linked to the Labor government’s union-backed National AI Plan, announced last month, which rejects legal constraints on AI deployment in favor of voluntary principles drafted in close collaboration with industry.
The ACTU is promoting its accord with Microsoft amid a global wave of AI‑linked restructuring, in which the company itself is playing a leading role. Last year, the company slashed more than 15,000 jobs worldwide in multiple rounds, under the vague pretexts of “efficiency,” “business priorities” and workers’ alleged “poor performance.” While Microsoft did not openly admit that these cuts were related to the expansion of AI, industry analysts generally take it as a given. The company invested some $80 billion in AI in 2024–25 and its executives were already bragging last year that almost one-third of software coding at the firm was done by AI.
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All of this has taken place since Microsoft in mid-2022 brokered a “historic neutrality agreement” with the Communications Workers of America (CWA) and established “labor principles” for collaboration with unions more broadly. This was expanded and formalized with the December 2023 announcement that Microsoft had formed a “new AI alliance” with the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO).
In other words, the US deals that were the direct precursors to the ACTU agreement have provided the mechanism through which Microsoft has slashed almost 30,000 jobs in three years.
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While the technology is new, the role of the union apparatus and Labor is not. Their commitment to the pro-business AI transition today is rooted in the ACTU-Labor Accords of the 1980s and 1990s, through which the always nationalist and pro-capitalist program of the unions was taken to its logical conclusion. These increasingly corporatist entities were charged with enforcing sweeping cuts to jobs, wages and conditions, under the guise of making Australian capitalism “internationally competitive.”
Serving as an industrial police force, the unions have over the past four decades presided over the destruction of vast swathes of jobs and even entire industries, suppressing workers’ opposition through the same empty promises as are contained in the new AI agreement: consultation, retraining, upskilling and redeployment. The reality for workers has been the gutting of whole towns and suburbs through long-term unemployment and a massive downturn in wages.
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The issue confronting workers in the AI transition is not the technology itself, but who owns and controls it. AI could be used to eliminate onerous tasks and shorten the work week without any reduction in output—and therefore pay—giving workers more time for family, recreation and cultural activity. But in the hands of the ruling class, AI, as has been the case with every technological breakthrough for over a century, will be used to intensify the exploitation of workers and increase profits.
This poses the need for a political fight against capitalism, under which the progressive content of every technological advance is subordinated to the interests of the financial and corporate elite. The alternative is a socialist program: the expropriation of the tech giants, banks and major corporations, their transformation into publicly owned utilities under democratic workers’ control, and the reorganization of economic life on the basis of human need.
While the ruling class is using the development of AI to intensify the assault on workers’ rights and conditions, they cannot eliminate the fundamentally progressive potential of the technology itself. The working class must make use of this scientific advance to take forward the fight to end capitalism. To arm workers for this struggle, the International Committee of the Fourth International has developed Socialism AI, a chatbot that provides workers with access to a vast trove of Marxist theory, history and strategy to help build the revolutionary socialist movement that is required to defend jobs, wages and conditions through the abolition of the capitalist system.
Following the December 2024 overthrow of the Russian and Iranian-backed regime of President Bashar al-Assad—by Islamist jihadists supported by the US and its regional allies such as Türkiye—Syria reached the brink of a new civil war in 2026.
The Damascus regime, led by the al-Qaeda-rooted Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), launched an attack earlier this month on areas controlled by the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), led by Kurdish nationalist groups. Both HTS and the SDF were proxies of US imperialism in the war for regime change.
The Damascus regime first seized the Kurdish neighborhoods in Aleppo, forcing over 100,000 civilians to flee. Then, with Arab tribes within the SDF switching sides, the Damascus regime quickly seized Arab-majority provinces under SDF control, such as Raqqa and Deir ez-Zor. Kurdish forces within the SDF retreated to defensive positions in Kurdish-majority centers such as Hasakah and Qamishli. Damascus forces are reported to have surrounded places such as Kobani.
On January 20, while a four-day ceasefire was in place, the Damascus regime imposed an agreement on the SDF. According to this agreement, dated January 18 and backed by the US and Türkiye, all energy resources under SDF control will fall into Damascus’ hands, while SDF forces and the de facto autonomous administration in the region will be dismantled.
It is anticipated that forces affiliated with the SDF will join the Syrian army individually. SDF leaders will be integrated into the central government in positions such as deputy defense minister. Kurdish forces will form the local police force in Kurdish cities.
The HTS regime received the full support of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s government in its offensive against Kurdish forces. But it was Washington’s green light for the attack and its abandonment of the Kurdish movement once again that isolated the SDF and forced it to retreat. Israel, which had previously declared the Kurds a “natural ally”, also aligned itself with Washington’s position.
US imperialism aims to secure complete control over the resources, energy, and trade routes in the Middle East; to this end, it seeks to eliminate the influence of Russia and China in the region, change the regime in Iran, and bring its allies to their knees. Behind all the aggression, from Israel’s genocide in Gaza to the attacks on Hezbollah in Lebanon and the US-Israel war against Iran, lies this broader plundering ambition
In the meantime, the HTS regime has proven that it is not only an ally of Türkiye but also serves the interests of the US and Israel. While remaining silent on Israel’s expansion of its occupation in southern Syria, it helped launch a war against Iran.
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Erdoğan has shifted towards a foreign policy more aligned with US imperialism following Trump’s return to the White House. He crowned his tacit complicity in the Gaza genocide by playing an active role in imposing Trump’s “Peace Plan” on Hamas. The US wanted to secure the full support of its NATO ally Türkiye in advancing its interests in the Middle East and to prevent the country’s growing rivalry with Israel from escalating into conflict, particularly in Syria. The key to this lies in completing the SDF’s integration process with Damascus.
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Israel, seeking to expand its influence by encouraging autonomy for the Druze, Kurdish, Alawite, and Christian minorities in Syria, was pursuing a policy aimed at counterbalancing Ankara’s influence over the Damascus regime. With the Paris agreement on January 6, it became clear that the US had, for the time being, reconciled the interests of Türkiye and Israel in Syria. Israel remained silent on HTS’s attack, and the SDF leadership did not receive the support it hoped for from Tel Aviv, which is still subjecting Palestinians in Gaza to genocide.
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The agreement imposed on the SDF demonstrates the bankruptcy of the bourgeois nationalist perspective based on maneuvering between imperialist and regional capitalist powers. Despite all the narratives of the “Rojava Revolution,” what was advanced was not a struggle against the US-led imperialist powers that have been destroying the Middle East and ultimately Syria for over 35 years, attempting to re-colonize it, but rather a struggle waged alongside them.
In this war of plunder, just as the Turkish bourgeoisie and other Arab regimes played a pro-imperialist and reactionary role, the Kurdish bourgeois leaderships also voluntarily became imperialism’s proxy forces. Now, as imperialist bandits declare the end of this agreement at the expense of the Kurdish people, the Kurdish nationalist leadership expresses its anger towards the US and its European allies. But it does not change its pro-imperialist line.
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The SDF’s reconciliation with the Al-Qaeda regime in Syria cannot fulfill the democratic and social aspirations of either the Kurdish workers or workers of other nationalities and sects. This fragile agreement will be subject to the ambitions of US imperialism, and particularly its preparations for war against Iran.
In the Middle East and the rest of the world, workers cannot advance their interests without opposing imperialism and its regional and local capitalist proxies. This means fighting to build a socialist movement within the working class in the Middle East and internationally against imperialist war.
8. United States: Whistleblowers expose ICE memo that disregards the 4th Amendment
Two anonymous DHS officials have exposed through Whistleblower Aid a secret memorandum from Acting ICE Director Todd Lyons that authorizes federal immigration police to forcibly enter homes with only “administrative” paperwork, not a search warrant issued by a judge.
9. USPS worker Christopher Montano, 46, dies after collapsing outside Illinois postal annex
For more than a decade, postal workers have faced relentless speedup, mandatory overtime, short-staffing, the elimination of breaks, and a punitive monitoring regime.
A number of supporters rallied on Monday, Martin Luther King Day, in Denver, Colorado, calling for an end to the illegal detention of a mother and her five children, ages 5 to 18. The family continues to be held at an ICE detention facility in Dilley, Texas after the children’s father, Mohamed Soliman, was accused of throwing Molotov cocktails at a pro-Israel march in Colorado Springs on June 1 last year, more than seven months ago.
Speaking at Monday’s rally, Elizabeth Reinhold, who had previously taught several of the siblings, noted that “in the years I have known them [the Soliman children], I have never heard them say an unkind word to or about anyone or show any signs of aggression, anger or hatred.” Reinhold continued through tears, “the [5-year-old] twins were stripped of their opportunity to start kindergarten with their siblings. Habiba [the eldest] was stripped of her freshman year in college and the two other children were stripped of a year of education and friendship as well, all for a crime that they did not commit.”
A friend of the family, Alisha Oliveras, told rally goers, “We condemn the June 1 terrorist attack in Boulder and offer condolences to the victim’s family. And we want to state clearly, we support the release of Hayam El-Gamal and her five children, ages five to 18.”
As the World Socialist Web Site wrote at the time of the arrests, these events make clear that the Trump administration is reviving the medieval and fascist practice of “kin punishment,” a type of collective punishment illegal under both international law and the US Constitution, which forbids violations of due process and the imposition of cruel and unusual punishments.
The family had been taken into custody around the same time as Mohamed Soliman’s arrest shortly after the Colorado Springs attack. The children and their mother were lied to by ICE agents who promised them they were being moved to a hotel for their safety only to find themselves actually locked away in the Texas detention center shortly thereafter.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem claimed at the time that the family’s arrest was relevant to the overall investigation. “We are investigating to what extent this family knew about this heinous attack,” she said, “if they had knowledge of it, or if they provided support to it.”
Celebrating the illegal detention of Soliman’s family members last June, the White House itself released social media postings boasting of their arrest and planned deportation. “Wife and Kids of Illegal Alien Behind Antisemitic Firebombing COULD DEPORT AS EARLY AS TONIGHT.”
In a later court case against Mohamed Soliman, however, an investigating FBI agent testified that the family was not “in any sense aware of what their father was planning,” but the family still remains imprisoned regardless.
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While initial attempts to deport the family may have been unsuccessful due to court challenges, the family’s prolonged detention also serves much the same political function, i.e., to put workers on notice that should they dare to oppose the crimes of the ruling elite, they put not only themselves but their friends and family at risk, especially very young children.
This was made abundantly clear in a recent press conference with DHS Secretary Kristi Noem. At the January 8 event to discuss the ICE killing of Minneapolis mother of three Renée Nicole Good, Noem appeared behind a podium emblazoned with the slogan “One of Ours, All of Yours.”
The slogan was a fascist rallying cry in Franco’s Spain and Hitler’s Germany and was the justification for the 1942 Lidice Massacre, after Czech partisans assassinated SS Obergruppenfuhrer Reinhard Heydrich, one of the most brutal Nazi leaders under Hitler and a key architect of the Holocaust. One hundred seventy-three men and boys, aged 15 years and older in the village were murdered, with many of the remaining women and children placed in concentration camps.
Habiba Soliman, the eldest of the five children, and one of the top students in her high school graduating class in Colorado Springs last year, wrote a public letter on January 6 protesting her family’s imprisonment. “We are six innocent people,” she wrote, “including 5-year-old twins—trapped in a nightmare we didn’t create and punished for our father’s actions.” She continued, “They [DHS] chose to ignore the results of the FBI investigation that shows we did not know anything.”
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While the family and its supporters continue to fight against their unjust incarceration, the Trump administration has accelerated its open war against the working class, both immigrant and native-born alike. The massive deployment of troops and ICE agents to cities across the country, especially Minnesota, has been accompanied by an unannounced campaign of child kidnapping.
At Valley View Elementary in Columbia Heights, Minnesota, four minor children were taken away by ICE agents Tuesday. These included a 5-year-old boy, a 10-year-old girl and a 17-year-old who was taken without her parents present.
The 10-year-old had been allowed to call her father telling him that the agents were bringing her and her mother to school, only for her father to find both his wife and daughter not present when he arrived. As he later found out, the agents had used the call as a diversionary tactic while they moved both mother and daughter to a detention center in Texas.
One of the more notorious of these ICE child arrest rampages was a military-style assault on a residential Chicago apartment building in November.
Such actions are not novel to the Trump administration either. Trump himself is only building upon the framework of Obama and Biden beforehand, who both initiated widespread crackdowns on immigrants along with family separation practices and the arrests of children.
To cite only one example, the Deportation Data Project found that in the state of Alabama alone, which ranks 25th in the country in population, 70 children were arrested by ICE agents between September 2023 and September 2025.
11. Peaceful asylum seekers’ protests smashed by UK security officers
The Labour government’s brutal anti-immigration program, centered on attacking asylum seekers, is being ramped up as it seeks to outcompete the far-right Reform UK.
The trade union apparatus in New York has worked to systematically isolate the strike. The NYNSA sought to prevent a strike altogether and then reached last-minute deals with 11 out of 15 hospitals.
Democratic Party officials have also appeared on the picket lines in recent days, with the aim of bringing the strike to a conclusion.
This is the significance of the intervention of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who called for a swift conclusion earlier this week. While mouthing words of support for nurses, Mamdani is closely allied with New York Governor Kathy Hochul, whose administration intervened in the dispute by authorizing hospitals to bring in out-of-state nurses to replace strikers.
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In general, nurses emphasized that the strike is driven by longstanding safety concerns that remain unresolved as negotiations resume.
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Nurses at Genesys hospitals in Michigan have also expressed solidarity with the striking New York nurses, pointing to growing national attention on contract battles across the healthcare system.
The WSWS urges nurses to form rank-and-file strike committees to assert control over the strike, including by establishing a list of non-negotiable demands before any return to work. They should also oppose any end to the strike before an agreement is voted on. The NYNSA indicated in a statement this week that it could conclude a strike based only on a tentative agreement.
The real allies of nurses are the millions of workers who are also facing the consequences of a system that subordinates healthcare and other basic rights to private profit.
A strategy to win the strike requires the rank and file organizing independently to link up with and advance the developing strike movement, including the broad mobilization in Minneapolis, among nurses in California, and across the many sections of workers in New York City who are preparing for contract struggles.
13. Striking Genesys nurses join New York City nurses’ call for a general strike
The World Socialist Web Site (WSWS) will host an online meeting in support of the 15,000 striking New York nurses at 3 p.m. EST [12 p.m. PST] on Sunday, January 25. Click here to register for the meeting.
As of this writing, 700 Henry Ford Health’s Genesys Hospital nurses and caseworkers in Grand Blanc, Michigan, have been on strike for five months. Despite threats of permanent replacement by strikebreakers and isolation imposed by the Teamsters bureaucracy, workers have expressed their determination to continue the strike. Workers are demanding safe nurse-to-patient ratios, protection against victimization and wage increases beyond inflation.
The World Socialist Web Site spoke to striking Genesys workers about calls by New York City and Minneapolis healthcare workers for a general strike. A senior nurse said, “You’re in the county of the famous sit-down strikes. For New York, it’s time! You told me I was essential (in 2020). Now I’m here for everyone—not just my fellow nurses, but everybody.”
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With continued rank-and-file opposition, management has brought in scab nurses for more than $100 per hour, encouraging striking workers to break the picket line. The Teamsters bureaucracy has refused to mobilize other Teamsters and healthcare workers from other hospitals in opposition to the strikebreaking. Instead, they allowed the escalation of Henry Ford’s offensive by dismantling pickets at the hospital entrance. According to striking nurses, a contract is to be presented with no definite timeline or details.
The answer to management’s attack on nurses is to expand the struggle to other hospitals. A strike of 31,000 nurses and healthcare professionals in California has been announced, involving 20 hospitals and clinics. This includes the ongoing New York City strike and the upcoming Michigan Medicine contract struggle involving more than 6,000 nurses. The struggle at Genesys pits nurses and caseworkers against the corporate healthcare system, which prioritizes profits over patient safety. While the Teamsters isolate the strike, claiming legal constraints, the situation demands an independent perspective.
14. Connecticut: Prospect Medical Holdings bankruptcy devastates care at 3 safety-net hospitals
Prospect filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in January 2025, leaving a trail of broken equipment, more than $100 million in unpaid state taxes, and devastating patient care, leaving safety-net institutions like Manchester Memorial, Rockville General and Waterbury Hospital reeling from long-term neglect and infrastructure gaps.
15. Workers Struggles: Africa & Europe
Africa
Liberia:
Nigeria:
South Africa:
Europe
Germany:
Thousands of motorway and road infrastructure workers strike for pay increases
Greece:
Taxi drivers strike against requirements for newly registered taxis to be fully electric
Spain:
Public teachers strike against subsidies for private education in Aragon
United Kingdom:
Week-long strike by hospital ancillary staff at Airedale hospital, England over pension inequality
Bus workers in Cambridge, UK to hold further stoppages over payWalkout by sports textile workers in Gloucestershire, England over pay
16. Free Ukrainian socialist and anti-war activist, Bogdan Syrotiuk!
Bogdan Syrotiuk and Leon Trotsky
The fight for the Ukrainian socialist and anti-war activist's freedom is an essential component of the struggle against imperialist war, genocide, dictatorship and fascism.
