This is the third of six resolutions adopted unanimously by the Ninth National Congress of the Socialist Equality Party (US). The resolution was introduced
by a report to the Congress, given by Eric London.
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1.
The construction of a dictatorship in the United States is centered on
the escalating assault on immigrant workers. ICE, transformed into a
paramilitary force, is carrying out a mass deportation operation. Armed
agents stalk the cities, seizing workers at workplaces, schools,
hospitals and courthouses. More than 10,000 were seized in the first
week of July alone, as the White House ordered stepped-up worksite
raids. Hundreds of thousands have been detained and deported since
Trump’s return to power.
2. A nationwide network of concentration
camps has been constructed across the United States in which men, women
and children are held without charge. A staggering $45 billion has been
appropriated for the camps alone, part of nearly $250 billion committed
to ICE and CBP through the end of Trump’s term. Under the Alien Enemies
Act of 1798, immigrants have been seized without hearing and rendered to
foreign prisons, including hundreds deported to the CECOT concentration
camp in El Salvador. The administration has openly threatened to
suspend habeas corpus—the right to challenge one’s imprisonment before a
court, enshrined in Article I of the Constitution—for immigrants. A
right abolished for immigrants is abolished for all, and its destruction
is the spearhead of the assault on the democratic rights of the entire
working class.
3. The state kills, and no one is held to account.
Fifty-two immigrants died in ICE custody in the first 500 days of the
second Trump administration. In Minneapolis, federal agents gunned down
Renée Nicole Good, a mother of three, and Alex Pretti, a nurse and union
member who stopped to film an arrest, after which Vice President JD
Vance declared the killer “protected by absolute immunity.”
4. On
July 7 in Houston, ICE agents shot down Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a
52-year-old construction worker who had spent 35 years building houses
in the city, as he drove in his work van on the way to a job. The
witnesses to his killing, including his brother, were thrown into
detention, while the government shields the name of the killer and the
FBI investigates the victim. Six days later in Biddeford, Maine, agents
fired seven shots into the car of Joan Sebastián Guerrero, a 26-year-old
Colombian worker with a valid work permit and a pending asylum claim,
then dragged him from the wreckage and handcuffed him as he bled to
death in front of his wife and daughter.
5. The regime’s war on
immigrants has provoked the most significant eruptions of opposition in
decades. The killings of Good and Pretti brought 100,000 people into the
streets of Minneapolis and set off mass protests and high school
walkouts against ICE across the country in January and February 2026. In
city after city, ICE raids have been met by crowds confronting the
agents and neighbors organizing to protect one another. This movement
against ICE fed directly into the “No Kings” demonstrations, among the
largest in American history.
6. The Minneapolis events were a
strategic experience for the entire working class. Out of the mass
protests against the killings came growing calls from below for a
general strike. The trade union apparatus rejected these calls.
Confronted with a movement demanding the mobilization of the full power
of the working class, the union bureaucracies refused to organize even a
single work stoppage. The state’s Democratic governor deployed state
troopers and the National Guard not against the raids but to shield the
agents from the population, hailed a “partnership” with Trump’s border
czar and presented as a “retreat” what was in fact a redeployment of ICE
agents to other cities.
7. In Congress, the Democrats staged
performative “no” votes, dropped every proposed restriction on Trump’s
ICE Gestapo agents, and cleared the way for tens of billions in new
funding for ICE and CBP. The deportation machine Trump wields was built
and expanded under Democratic administrations. Obama, the
“deporter-in-chief,” expelled more than 3 million immigrants, more than
any president before him, while constructing the detention
infrastructure and surveillance systems that ICE now employs. Biden
maintained the camps, used Title 42 to carry out millions of summary
expulsions, unleashed mounted Border Patrol agents against Haitian
refugees at Del Rio, and deported more people in his final year in
office than in any single year of Trump’s first term.
8. The war
on immigrants is the spearhead of the construction of a police state
directed against the entire working class. A force that can murder a
construction worker on his way to work and face no consequences can and
will be turned against strikers, demonstrators, and every form of
popular opposition. In the Prairieland case in Texas, 15 protesters
against ICE were sentenced to a combined 556 years in prison on charges
of “material support for terrorism”—sentences of a length reserved for
serial murder, imposed by the same government that pardoned 1,600
participants in the January 6 coup, including the fascists who assaulted
police. The Prairieland defendants are political prisoners, punished
for their opposition to the attacks on immigrants, not their conduct.
The fascistic incitement against immigrants serves both to divide the
working class against itself and to habituate society to state violence.
The assault on immigrants at home is also inseparable from the eruption
of imperialist violence throughout the hemisphere. Indeed, many of
those targeted for deportation have fled the catastrophic conditions
produced by American imperialism in Latin America and internationally.
9.
The assault on immigrants and refugees is international in scope.
Behind the ramparts of “Fortress Europe,” the European powers have
turned the Mediterranean into a mass grave, in which tens of thousands
of refugees have drowned over the past decade. They finance the Libyan
militias that intercept survivors and return them to torture camps,
imprison asylum-seekers in island camps, and adopt, one after another,
the deportation policies once associated only with the far right. From
the United States to Europe to Australia, the ruling classes answer the
movement of workers with razor wire, detention and death.
10. But
the division that the ruling class seeks to impose collides with an
objective fact: globalized production has created a single international
working class. Since 1980, the development of the world’s productive
forces has added more than 2 billion people to its ranks. For the first
time in history, the majority of humanity lives in cities, and the labor
of workers on every continent is bound together in production chains
that span the hemisphere and the world. Every commodity is the product
of this collective international labor. There is no “American” economy
apart from the labor of workers born in Mexico, Central America, the
Caribbean, Asia and Africa, and the immigrant worker in an American
plant, warehouse, or field is the living embodiment of the international
unity of the working class. The nationalism directed against immigrants
is a reactionary revolt against the objective structure of modern
economic life. The unity of the working class is not an aspiration; it
is an objective reality, which the party fights to make conscious.
11.
This Congress reaffirms the resolutions of the party’s 2014 and 2016
congresses on the defense of immigrant workers and the unity of the
workers of the Americas and renews their call under conditions of the
greatest assault on immigrant workers in American history. The workers
of North, Central and South America—exploited by the same transnational
corporations, confronting the same oligarchy—must be united in a common
struggle against imperialism and its border regime.
12. This Congress advances the following demands:
The
immediate and unconditional abolition of ICE, the Border Patrol and the
entire Department of Homeland Security—the police-state apparatus
constructed on a bipartisan basis after 9/11—and the dismantling of the
entire machinery of deportation, surveillance, and detention
The
shutdown of every concentration camp, the immediate and unconditional
release of every detainee, and the return, with full restitution, of all
who have been deported, including those rendered to CECOT
The freedom of the Prairieland prisoners and all those jailed for opposing ICE
The repeal of the Alien Enemies Act and every statute of the police-state framework and the inviolability of habeas corpus
The withdrawal of the National Guard and of ICE from every city
Full
accountability for the killings of Renée Good, Alex Pretti, Lorenzo
Salgado Araujo, Joan Sebastián Guerrero and all those murdered by ICE
and the Border Patrol—from the agents who pulled the triggers to the
officials of both parties who built and direct the machinery they serve
Full
citizenship and democratic rights for all workers, regardless of where
they were born, and the right of all workers to live and work in
whatever country they choose
13. These demands will not be
realized through the courts, nor through the Democratic Party. They will
be realized through the independent mass mobilization of the working
class: the defense of immigrant workers by their coworkers and
neighbors, organized through rank-and-file committees in every workplace
and neighborhood, and the mobilization of the full industrial and
social power of the working class against the police-state buildup. The
defense of immigrants is the defense of the working class as a whole,
and a component of the fight for the unity of the workers of the
Americas in the world socialist revolution.1. Elon Musk becomes the latest Nazi decorated by the Zelensky regime
In
honoring Musk, a committed ideological fascist and the world's leading
promoter of the global far-right movement, the Zelensky regime is once
again exposing the fraud of those who claim that Ukraine is fighting for
"democracy."
The
National Steel Car Rank-and-File Committee (NSC-RFC) was founded by
shop floor workers in June 2023, on the eve of the last strike, after it
became clear to them that the United Steelworkers (USW) bureaucracy
would not wage a genuine fight for workers' demands.
The abject subservience of both sides of the table was summed up by the Financial Times,
which reported that the government made no mention whatsoever of
freeing former president Nicolás Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores from
their US prison cells.
The
growing confrontations between Ukrainian workers and forced
mobilization exposes the lie that Ukrainian society uniformly supports
the disastrous imperialist proxy war.
Trump
will attempt to use the uncertainty surrounding the elections fomented
by his baseless charges of election fraud and compounded by his attack
on mail-in voting to manipulate the elections and possibly suspend them
altogether.
Logistics
workers at the DHL Supply Chain warehouse in Muntinlupa City, Metro
Manila have been on strike for more than a week in a battle for their
jobs.
The
Albanese government is creating a wartime-like atmosphere, directed
against countries deemed to be threats to Australian national security
or foreign relations, particularly China, Russia and Iran.
The
executive board of the Volkswagen Group has begun preparing workers at
the core VW brand for an extension of the cutbacks that began at the end
of 2024. The process could ultimately end in the break-up of one of the
world’s largest car makers.
Tauranga
City Council failed to act on repeated warnings about the risks posed
by the location of the Beachside Holiday Park, where six people were
killed in a landslide in January.
A worker who spoke with the World Socialist Web Site described a disastrous combination of cutting corners, broken equipment and a general high-pressure working environment overseen by the subcontractor Samsic that led to Robayo’s death.
A Montreal Airport worker, who worked alongside Robayo, contacted the World Socialist Web Site to speak out about the fatal incident. He was especially incensed by the attempts of Samsic Assistance, Robayo’s employer and a globally operating provider of “business services,” to place the blame on the victim.
As
public funds bankroll corporate relocation, entertainment unions
enforce the competitive framework and suppress a unified struggle
against job destruction.
Pennsylvania
has confirmed 393 cases across 28 counties, nearly two-thirds of them
in adults, as national kindergarten vaccination falls to its lowest
level on record.
The
right to scrutinize any further deal before strike action is suspended
must be enforced from below. This basic principle of rank-and-file
democracy must be restored.
These events took place under conditions in which negotiations between
Ankara and the imprisoned leader of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK),
Abdullah Öcalan, are continuing, and in which the parliament this month
adopted a law related to those talks.
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.
