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Wed, Aug 19th, 2026

Democratic Left posted at 17:49

There is No Affordability Without Healthcare

The health coverage cliff, the budget gaps, the bureaucratic siege on families like mine all have the same fundamental answer: the New York Health Act.

The post There is No Affordability Without Healthcare appeared first on Democratic Left.

Boston DSA posted at 15:16

Dan Koh, Labor’s Candidate in MA-06, took over $180,000 from AIPAC donors

[[{“value”:”

Yard signs for hometown candidate Daniel Koh pepper the gardens of seven-figure homes in Andover, an affluent suburb north of Boston, as the six-way race for the Massachusetts 6th Congressional District enters its final weeks.

Koh is dominating the race in campaign cash and endorsements, from labor unions and establishment politicians alike. A Working Mass review found that $180,000 donated to Koh came from donors who had also donated to the American Israel Political Action Committee, or AIPAC.

Constituents deserve to know: “Who is paying for all these signs?”

Koh’s campaign war chest holds over $4 million according to the most recent FEC filing deadline, more than the rest of the field combined. His campaign is quick to boast that expenditures are largely funded and backed by institutional labor.

The Massachusetts AFL-CIO and nearly half of local unions have endorsed Koh, including AFSCME council 93, the International Association of Machinists, NAGE SEIU Local 5000, SEIU Local 888, Teamsters Local 25, UNITE HERE NEJB, the Massachusetts and the Massachusetts Building Trades Union as well as many of its members including, IBEW Local 103, IBEW Local 104, IBEW Local 2222, IUPAT DC 35, Laborers Local 22, Laborers Local 175, Laborers Local 88, and more.

It is likely that many unions see Koh’s frontrunner status as a deterrent to endorsing other challengers. If labor leaders think Koh’s win is inevitable, the incentive to support different, more progressive candidates diminishes.

Only a handful of unions have declined to genuflect before him. UAW International and SEIU State Council have backed candidate and State Rep. Tram Nguyen (D-Andover), a member of UAW Local 2320 from past work as a legal aide. The National Education Association and the Massachusetts Teachers Association endorsed candidate Mariah Lancaster.

Boston DSA formally recommended against moderate candidates Koh, Nguyen, and financial technology executive John Beccia, but declined to recommend any progressive challenger.

For better or worse, Koh is the labor candidate. Given Koh’s resume, this coalition is disappointing, but not surprising.

He’s a former protege of Boston’s ‘labor mayor’ Marty Walsh, and served as Mayor Walsh’s chief of staff before following him to the U.S. Department of Labor. Koh also served in the Biden White House, where he was deployed to Michigan to negotiate with the Uncommitted Movement during the presidential primary on the administration’s behalf. There, negotiations were described as “tense,” and Koh and the Biden administration left without conceding any ground in their facilitation of the Gaza genocide.

His loyalty earned him the ‘MSNBC trifecta’ endorsements: Former President Joe Biden, Former Vice President Kamala Harris, Former Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg.

Executives & AIPAC Dollars

Labor isn’t the only movement funding Koh.

Koh has received criticism for taking the maximum allowable donations from a Palantir executive and from sports gambling websites, among others.

According to a review of FEC filings conducted by Working Mass, the Committee to Elect Dan Koh has received at least $183,700 from donors who also gave to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC.

Koh has not received funding directly from AIPAC. But at least 68 donors donated to both AIPAC and Dan Koh’s campaign. Their combined donations to AIPAC total $206,395.

These donors include Josh Kraft, of the Kraft family, as well as executives at Apollo Asset Management, Bain Capital, and Goldman Sachs. At least 29 of these donors reside out of state, while only five live in the 6th District.

Because receipts are only available through the June 30 filing deadline, the total Koh has received is likely larger.

The AIPAC-overlapping total is small relative to Koh’s overall haul, but sizable relative to the budgets of his progressive opponents. The $183,700 figure exceeds half of the total campaign funds raised by all of the race’s three progressive challengers, Beth Anders-Beck, Jamie Belsito, and Mariah Lancaster.

The donations are a blaring warning signal for the type of Representative Koh intends to be: business as usual, corporate, bland, and likely to continue the technocratic facilitation of extractive and genocidal American wars abroad.

The unwitting alliance between labor unions and supporters of America’s most vilified lobbying arm is an indictment of the current state of labor’s electoral orientation: a movement on the defensive, with endorsements rarely democratically decided, and inclined to back establishment figures who prioritize incremental worker concessions over progressive candidates who might shift political leverage from capital to labor.

If you’re driving by a yard sign and wondering who paid for it, the answer might be AIPAC-linked donors, a labor union, or both.

Tony A is a contributing writer to Working Mass and a resident of Massachusetts’ 6th Congressional District.

The post Dan Koh, Labor’s Candidate in MA-06, took over $180,000 from AIPAC donors appeared first on Working Mass.

“}]]

Tue, Aug 18th, 2026

Midwestern Socialist -- Chicago DSA posted at 17:49

Realism or Resisting Immersion?

There’s an old Marxist-Leninist tweet from a gadfly who went by the name of Phil Greaves:

“Star Wars is fascist, Harry Potter is fascist neo-feudal dreck, selfie-obsession is fascist, British soap operas are fascist, sci-fi is generally fascist, ironic detachment is fascist, porn is fascist. Masscult under imperialism is inherently fascistic. Sorry to spoil your ‘fun’.”

And the mad lad who has since protected his tweets replied to himself soon after:

“One day people will ask: ‘How did Anglo-Americans not see their own fascism?’ And part of the answer will be: ‘Because they were entertained by it.’”

The point Greaves is getting at is how the current moment attempts to overwhelm you as an individual with spectacle at all times, and to hypnotize you in a way. It is easier for the state to alienate you and keep you locked into regular consumer behavior if you are watching ambivalently, without thinking, allowing yourself to be immersed in something whether it be the new Avatar film, alcohol or drug abuse, or porn addiction. Think about how the so-called algorithm induces schizophrenia in you as a subject. You first see a selfie from your friend back home for the holidays, and next, you see an ad for a political candidate paid by a subsidiary of AIPAC. Then you see from the news account of your choice Palestinian bodies mutilated by either our government’s or Israel’s. Then you see a meme that you have to Google in order to understand. In mere seconds, you have hopped around the world, and your attention has shifted again, again, and again.

The problem here is one of immersion. These media objects, whether we talk about the Marvel Cinematic Universe or virtually-augmented point-of-view porn, like cigarettes, come in regular enough doses to give you your fix, and yet something feels missing. Mark Fisher calls this condition “depressive hedonia.”

Here’s Fisher in chapter 4 of Capitalist Realism:

“Many of the teenage students I encountered seemed to be in a state of what I would call depressive hedonia. Depression is usually characterized as a state of anhedonia, but the condition I’m referring to is constituted not by an inability to get pleasure so much as an inability to do anything else except pursue pleasure. There is a sense that ‘something is missing’ – but no appreciation that this mysterious, missing enjoyment can only be accessed beyond the pleasure principle. In large part this is a consequence of students’ ambiguous structural position, stranded between their old role as subjects of disciplinary institutions and their new status as consumers of services. In his crucial essay ‘Postscript on Societies of Control’, Deleuze distinguishes between the disciplinary societies described by Foucault, which were organized around the enclosed spaces of the factory, the school and the prison, and the new control societies, in which all institutions are embedded in a dispersed corporation.”

Regarding that last line, in the new MCU film, Spider-Man: Brand New Day, Zendaya’s character gets offered a good job, but she turns it down because it’s for an evil corporation. Her friend asks if all corporations are evil. She says “Yes.” In the context of the film, this is one of the things Peter Parker loves about her: her ethical moral compass. But in the reality the film exists in, this line is ironic by being a product of Disney, whose name is interestingly missing from both the front and end credits. Zendaya’s character’s refusing to work for a corporation is proven to be hypocritical, as the actress has chosen for the better part of a decade to work almost exclusively for them. And yet, when she kisses Tom Holland, her real-life boyfriend, the audience applauded nonetheless.

The Soviet film theorist Lev Kuleshov wrote in his landmark piece of film theory “The Principles of Montage”:

“The artist’s relationship to his surrounding reality, his view of the world, is not merely expressed in the entire process of shooting, but in the montage as well, in the capacity to see and to present the world around him. A variety of social encounters, a class struggle takes place in reality, and the artist’s existence within a particular social class influences his world-view. Artists with differing world-views each perceive the reality surrounding them differently; they see events differently, discuss them differently, show them, imagine them, and join them to another differently. Thus, film montage, as the entire work of filmmaking, is inextricably linked to the artist’s world-view and his ideological purpose.”

If we take this as true and look at the dominant mode of filmmaking in America and the West in the past 50 years since the end of New Hollywood with the release of Jaws and Star Wars (pick your poison), it’s obvious that the dominant mode of filmmaking has been immersion. When James Cameron’s Avatar was released and pushed forward the trend of 3D and fully digital spaces, the main point of praise was how ‘immersive’ it was. With Avatar: The Way of the Water, this was taken forward with new, technically difficult footage never before possible, both with underwater 3D footage requiring technological advancement allowing each piece of the human face to be recorded in a liquid environment where facial features are distorted.

Some left-wing filmmakers, like the undersung Paul W.S. Anderson, have attempted to work from within the system, creating movies with revolutionary politics like Resident Evil: Retribution, which features images like that of a private military group falling beneath the superstructure of an old Soviet base, being crushed by the very simulacra they used to poison the world. But Anderson, too, like Cameron, was victim to the desire to immerse the audience and give us our dopamine fixes. He even used technology from the state to lull audiences into a kind of stupor, turning shots meant to recall to the viewer the torture at the hands of the fascists in Salò, or 120 Days of Sodom into images meant to entertain the viewer. He used NASA cameras shooting upwards of 10,000 frames per second for very beautiful slow motion photography. There’s surely a joke to be made from the old Maoist Jean-Luc Godard’s line about cinema being the truth at 24 frames per second, updated to 10,000 lies per second through social-democrat Paul W.S. Anderson’s cinema.

There’s a bizarre video that came out in 2012 featuring Marxist filmmaker Michael Haneke and CIA plant John Krasinski in the Hollywood Reporter where Haneke explains how Spielberg’s Schindler’s List is an incredibly manipulative film because of how it turns the Holocaust into entertainment. We, the audience, begin to fear whether the characters will be gassed or not. The gas of Auschwitz is turned from a real historical object into a literary device, another example of Chekov’s gun. Haneke’s films, by contrast, are cold and impersonal. His first theatrical feature, The Seventh Continent, spends ten minutes following a family getting out of bed. We don’t see their faces, instead their feet as they tie their shoes and their hands as they eat. This is a Brechtian approach to filmmaking, meaning Haneke is using the distancing effect. He wants the audience to be at a remove from what he is presenting, and instead the audience thinks about it instead of being immersed in whatever world is being shown.

His films echo the words of the great Soviet filmmaker and film theorist Sergei Eisenstein, who wrote in “A Dialectical Approach to Film Form”:

“Step by step, by a process of comparing each new image with the common denotation, power is accumulated behind a process that can be formally identified with that of logical deduction. The decision to release these ideas, as well as the method used, is already intellectually conceived. The conventional descriptive form for film leads to the formal possibility of a kind of filmic reasoning. While the conventional film directs the emotions, this suggests an opportunity to encourage and direct the whole thought process as well.”

This is a mode of filmmaking that rejects emotional manipulation alone and instead wants the audience to deduce the logic of the material reality being presented. When you go to the movies, you interact with filmed reality. It’s ultimately a kind of materialistic art, when you look towards its essence. But in America, from the big studios down to micro-budget filmmakers here in Chicago, there is a push towards immersion. We filmmakers are entertained by the studios, and so we aspire to work for the studios, just as naïvely as the working man believes that one day he, too, will be a billionaire. Audience members broke box office records recently watching the new, fascist Spider-Man movie. What’s troubling is that there aren’t many alternatives. I Want Your Sex, from Queer New Wave icon Gregg Araki, demands an attention to the roles shown and the characters’ class relations, but its obvious ideology attacking hedonism appears to have been lost on the critical masses who praise it for its explicit sex scenes in a puritanical era. Yet the sex scenes and the context of the characters show that the puritanical approach is more ‘correct’ than the perspective espoused by Olivia Wilde, even though her words appear alluring. She roofies Cooper Hoffman’s character, explicitly grooms him, and abuses him. Somehow this is lost on many viewers.

When talking about contemporary socialist films, not a whole lot of names pop up here in the Americas. Boots Riley comes to mind immediately, but the question quickly arises if his filmmaking is even particularly socialist. His individual opinions are, yes, but the form of it all? Even if his characters in I Love Boosters end up cheering a general strike, the form of his film still relies on immersion. The film form is still capitalistic to the core, from its production model to how the movie moves from shot to shot, even if its main plot device is a dialectical materialism device. This just appropriates left wing language for the sake of corporate profit.

So then, what is to be desired?

We must, as filmmakers, keep the audience at a remove from the world of the film, and we as viewers must leave the film world that we watch at a distance and reject any parasocial emotions that fill inside of us. We must desire to be challenged formally and accept that we might be bored from time to time. Sometimes, we might even desire to be bored.

Later in chapter 4 of Capitalist Realism, Mark Fisher says:

“Ask students to read for more than a couple of sentences and many – and these are A-level students mind you – will protest that they can’t do it. The most frequent complaint teachers hear is that it’s boring. It is not so much the content of the written material that is at issue here; it is the act of reading itself that is deemed to be ‘boring’. What we are facing here is not just time-honored teenage torpor, but the mismatch between a postliterate ‘New Flesh’ that is ‘too wired to concentrate’ and the conning, concentrational logics of decaying disciplinary systems. To be bored simply means to be removed from the communicative sensation-stimulus matrix of texting, YouTube and fast food; to be denied, for a moment, the constant flow of sugary gratification on demand. Some students want Nietzsche in the same way that they want a hamburger; they fail to grasp – and the logic of the consumer system encourages this misapprehension – that the indigestibility, the difficulty is Nietzsche.”

We must deny immediate satisfaction to contemplate ideas, to depict ideas, and to challenge the viewer to try to understand them. In Angela Schalenec’s Passing Summer, a writer goes up to a publisher who is disappointed at her reliance upon elliptical sentences. He says something like, ‘at some point, I just wanted to read a normal novel. Do you not want to be understood?’ And she says, “I want to be understood.” And yet Schalenec, in each of the films she has made since that 2002 film, has not removed her own elliptical, naturalistic, and difficult narrative decisions. She wants to be understood, but she doesn’t want to do so by leaving her principles at the wayside.

And so, neither must we, as socialists.

The post Realism or Resisting Immersion? appeared first on Midwest Socialist.

Democratic Left posted at 17:17

Election Night Live Blog: Larkin Concedes, “The Fight Continues”

Updated with election night remarks from Larkin and Broward County DSA co-chair and Larkin campaign manager Zach B.

The post Election Night Live Blog: Larkin Concedes, “The Fight Continues” appeared first on Democratic Left.

San Francisco DSA posted at 17:00

Weekly Roundup: August 18, 2026

It’s a big week for the Prop I!

Last week we build a lot of momentum with our kickoff in Dubose Park, and front page story in the Examiner.

This week has a couple opportunies to keep the energy going:

Thursday August 20 from 5:30 PM – 8:00 PM there’s a Phonebank for Prop I – Affordable Housing Guarantee Act at 1916 McAllister St
Friday August 21 from 6:00 PM – 8:00 PM there’s a Yes on Prop I – Letter Writing & Pizza Night at 1916 McAllister St

See you there!

Events & Actions

Tuesday August 18 (5:30 PM – 7:00 PM) Social Housing Working Group (online and in person at 1916 McAllister St)

Wednesday August 19 (6:00 PM – 7:00 PM) What is DSA? (1916 McAllister St)

Thursday August 20 (5:30 PM – 8:00 PM) Phonebank for Prop I – Affordable Housing Guarantee Act (1916 McAllister St)

Thursday August 20 (6:00 PM – 7:00 PM) Education Board Open Meeting (1916 McAllister St)

Thursday August 20 (7:00 PM – 8:00 PM) Immigrant Justice Regular Meeting (online and in person at 1916 McAllister St)

Friday August 21 (6:00 PM – 8:00 PM) Yes on Prop I – Letter Writing & Pizza Night (1916 McAllister St)

Saturday August 22 (11:00 AM – 2:00 PM) Fundamentals of Tenant Organizing [ETOC] (1916 McAllister St)

Saturday August 22 (2:30 PM – 5:00 PM) Picnic in the Park (Mission Dolores Park, picnic area by the playground)

Sunday August 23 (5:00 PM – 6:00 PM) Tenderloin Healing Circle Working Group (online)

Sunday August 23 (5:30 PM – 8:00 PM) Socialists for an Affordable Bay Area: Fundraiser and Social (East Bay Community Space, 507 55th St, Oakland)

Monday August 24 (6:00 PM – 8:00 PM) Tenderloin Healing Circle (Kelly Cullen Community, 220 Golden Gate Ave)

Monday August 24 (7:00 PM – 8:30 PM) SF EWOC Local Meeting (online and in person at 1916 McAllister St)

Tuesday August 25 (6:30 PM – 8:00 PM) Ecosocialist Bi-Weekly Meeting (1916 McAllister St)

Wednesday August 26 (6:45 PM – 8:30 PM) Tenant Organizing Working Group Meeting (online and in person at 1916 McAllister St)

Thursday August 27 (7:00 PM – 9:00 PM) Emergency Planning Training (1916 McAllister St)

Saturday August 29 (11:00 AM – 2:00 PM) Fundamentals of Tenant Organizing [ETOC] (1916 McAllister St)

Saturday August 29 (3:00 PM – 4:30 PM) Decolonization Studies (1916 McAllister St)

Sunday August 30 (1:00 PM – 2:30 PM) What is DSA? (Bayview Branch Library, 5075 3rd Street)

Monday August 31 (6:30 PM – 8:00 PM) Homelessness Working Group Regular Meeting (online and in person at 1916 McAllister St)

Letter Writing & Pizza

Join us Friday night 8/21 at 6pm at the DSA Office (1916 McAllister) for some good old fashion analog letter writing to thank our donors of the Yes on Prop I, the Affordable Housing Guarantee Act campaign, over dinner as we handwrite thank you cards and letters that we will send to donors with campaign buttons or bracelets! RSVP here!

Picnic in the Park!

Join your friendly neighborhood socialists at Dolores Park on August 22 from 2:30 PM to 5:00 PM for an afternoon hanging out in the park. Great for families and new members! Bring snacks to share and a blanket! Meet in picnic area by the playground.

Bay Get Ready: People’s Assembly

As we approach the November election, the possibly of the Trump administration causing chaos to the electoral process and stealing the election is a real possibility. The attacks on our democracy have already started. 2026 is the most expensive election cycle yet for advertising from the worst people on earth. AI, AIPAC, and crypto Super PACs have spent more than $180 MILLION to influence voters this election cycle. We say hands off our election! In the event that the Trump administration tries to hijack the midterm election, it is important that organizations across the Bay Area be prepared for the possibility of ICE at the voting polls and the need for mass action to stop an election steal.

This coming Saturday, August 22nd, at Mission High School in SF, Bay Resistance along with East Bay DSA, SF Rising, SEIU, and AROC are sponsoring an event on how to organize around the plan to defeat MAGA in the midterms and defend democracy through mass noncooperation should an election steal take place. Even if you have attended one of the Bay Resistance mass trainings before, this training will be different and specific.

Doors open from 9-10.
The main training is 10 – 12:30.
RSVP at: https://bit.ly/massassembly

Apartheid-Free Bay Area

Join us on Sunday, August 23rd as we continue to canvass stores in support of Palestine! We will be canvassing the Excelsior and other nearby neighborhoods. We will meet outside the Wells Fargo on Ocean Ave and Mission St, where there will be a brief training before we split into canvassing groups.

Please RSVP here as we’ll need an accurate headcount! Those with cars and/or Spanish skills would be especially welcomed, and we’ll be grabbing lunch afterwards if interested!

Decolonization Studies

Come join your friendly neighborhood socialists for study time! We’re reading from a collection of texts chosen to elevate our understanding of decolonization, reading is done beforehand and participants are invited to the office for a monthly in-person facilitated discussion. Please feel free to come to the session even if you’ve only partially completed the readings!

RSVP here (Decolonization Studies – DSA San Francisco Organization)

Beach Day with Palestine Solidarity Working Group

Join the Palestine Solidarity Working Group at Ocean Beach on August 29 at 2:00 PM as we play some games and enjoy some time on the beach together! We’ll have snacks/drinks and a volleyball net, and of course we will be snagging a bonfire pit for the vibes. Please bring whatever you’d like to roast over the fire and come learn more about our work with Palestine!

RSVP for Beach Day via Partiful

Check out https://dsasf.org/events for more events and updates.

Reportbacks

DSA SF In Print

Our comrades Annie R and Hazel W were featured in Sunday’s issue of the SF examiner in an article about DSA SF and our work on Prop I.

Read the full article here

Yes on I Field Kickoff

On Sunday, over 70 San Franciscans came out to Duboce Park for the Yes on Prop I Field Kickoff! We canvassed over 35 commercial corridors across the city to put up “Yes on I” signs to spread the word about the measure, and put up over a hundred window signs. This was an incredible first day and start to a long field season for the Yes on I campaign, thanks to everyone who joined! Let’s keep the momentum going all the way through the election.

If you didn’t make it out, that’s okay! We have plenty of events coming up, check out the calendar at yesonisf.com/events.

July EWOC Fundamentals of Workplace Organizing: Final Reportback

On August 4th DSA SF had its final Fundamentals of Workplace Organizing course for the summer. A 4 part series, this final course taught a group of 10 people about how to inoculate your colleagues against the boss for the campaign. We learned of the many ways union busting will happen, and how we can protect our colleagues against these fear driven campaigns with solidarity. We also heard from our colleagues in the course on how they themselves have experienced some of these union busting tactics. Check out the EWOC Captive Audience bingo card to see how many union-busting tactics you’ve seen firsthand!

This series was my first time facilitating an EWOC course, and was both inspiring and fruitful to help with. EWOC starts you off with a “teach the teachers” course in how to facilitate, and comrades like Caitlin and Tim to help with the facilitation it made it less stressful. Having two of my own Organizing Committee members attend helped to spread some of my knowledge out and empower them to have their own one on one conversations. I believe anyone who is interested in organizing should attend these courses, as they show you tactics you will need and common pitfalls. Finally, nothing is more beneficial that real human experience which is shared through conversations in person.

If you’d like to get involved with the SF local chapter of EWOC, reach out to the lead coordinator Caitlin S. or email labor@dsasf.org. EWOC is a standing topic at meetings of the Labor Working group, which are held every fourth Monday at 7:00pm, both in-person at 1916 McAllister and over Zoom—the next one will be Monday August 24th! Anyone is welcome to attend, and we’re always looking for people interested in workplace lead canvassing, organizer trainings, and volunteer outreach. If you’re interested in organizing your workplace and would like to be connected with an EWOC organizer, fill out the request form here.

If you’d like to get involved with the SF local chapter of EWOC, reach out to the lead coordinator Caitlin S. or email labor@dsasf.org. EWOC is a standing topic at meetings of the Labor Working group, which are held every fourth Monday at 7:00 PM, both in-person at 1916 McAllister St and over Zoom. Anyone is welcome to attend, and we’re always looking for people interested in workplace lead canvassing, organizer trainings, and volunteer outreach. If you’re interested in organizing your workplace and would like to be connected with an EWOC organizer, fill out the request form here.

Rochester Red Star: News from Rochester DSA posted at 13:16

There is a Blade Over Our Heads

by Queer Solidarity Group

Note: The following remarks were originally published as a zine to accompany ROC DSA’s 2026 Pride Parade float, featuring a “Gay-o-tine.” The Parade was held Saturday, July 18. See more details and pictures in Notes of the Month.

Why a Gay-o-tine?

In response to the ever-increasing threat every trans person faces for simply being alive, ROC DSA has created the Gay-o-tine to cut through the systems and ideologies that rob trans people of their fundamental right to live in peace.

The first Pride Marches were organized to demand civil rights for the LGBTQ+ community and to fight back against brutal police harassment. It is time for Pride to return to its radical roots. We have nothing to lose but our chains.

Trans People Are Under Attack

The Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention is a non-partisan, non-profit NGO that aims to bring immediate action and direct support for communities affected by genocide.

Earlier this year, the Lemkin Institute released their third Red Flag Alert for the USA related to the Trump Administration’s anti-trans initiatives. The Lemkin Institute believes that the United States is in the middle stages of a genocidal process against trans people, with the goal of completely erasing transgender people from public life and from existence in the U.S. and globally.

2025 was the 6th record-breaking year in a row for the number of anti-trans bills across the country, and there was a 45% increase in bills between 2024 and 2025. Kansas Senate Bill 244, which passed in early 2026, invalidated both driver licenses and birth certificates for trans individuals within the state. This essentially leaves trans people with NO valid identification documents.

What does invalidating your IDs mean? You can’t:

Register to vote
Open a bank account
Get a job
Apply for health insurance
Travel (driving or flights)
Obtain new identification like passports

SCOTUS just ruled in West Virginia v. BPJ that states may ban transgender girls from participating in sports at public schools. While this may seem like a limited decision, this sets the precedent to remove transgender individuals from ALL Title IX protections.

Why does this matter? American court decisions are largely determined based on the precedent set by previous court cases. This means that if it is legal for states to ban trans people from one aspect of public life, it is significantly easier to ban trans people from any other public areas, including working certain jobs or accessing public services.

“But the Gay-o-tine Makes Me Uncomfortable”

You may still be wondering why we chose this symbol as our Pride float. “Isn’t a guillotine a symbol for violence?”

Between May 2024 and May 2025 there were over 900 anti-LGBTQ attacks in the US (that’s an average of 2.5 incidents every day), with 52% of them directly targeting trans individuals. Compared to last year, incidents against trans people increased by 14%.

Political violence is already here and trans people are the target. Our float is made to draw public attention to the fact that trans people are under direct legal and physical threat today!

* * *

DSA is proud to be one of the largest organizations fighting to defend transgender people in the nation and unequivocally stands with the trans community, our community, in the fight for liberation for all, for freedom from domination and discrimination.

If you want to join in our work, please reach out to steering@rocdsa.org. You are our friends and neighbors, and we are all stronger when we stand together against hate and violence.

Want to…

Learn more about the Lemkin Institute?
Check out the ROCDSA website?
Find local and national organizations advocating for Trans rights?

Check out our LinkTree: linktr.ee/whythegayotine.

The post There is a Blade Over Our Heads first appeared on Rochester Red Star.

Democratic Left posted at 00:13

Laura Loomer, State Rep. Attempt to Shut Down Florida DSA Rally

The result? A larger crowd and lots of press coverage.

The post Laura Loomer, State Rep. Attempt to Shut Down Florida DSA Rally appeared first on Democratic Left.

Mon, Aug 17th, 2026

Democratic Left posted at 18:54

“We Need a New Political System”

Two DSA members discuss the Workers Deserve More Program on this episode of “Class,” the podcast of the National Political Education Committee

The post “We Need a New Political System” appeared first on Democratic Left.

Sun, Aug 16th, 2026

Socialist Forum posted at 15:52

The Empire Has No Borders

For well over a century, Americans have fiercely debated U.S. immigration policy: its merits, flaws, limits, and implications. In recent decades, it has become a central question in electoral and identity politics, largely responsible for the current state of political discourse. Conservatives have long argued that the nation has “lost control” of its borders and frequently decry what they deem as “open borders.” On the other hand, liberals lament what they perceive as a dysfunctional bureaucracy incapable of reconciling humanitarian obligations with the realities of a globalized economic order. Even critics of mass deportation and anti-immigrant dehumanization campaigns begin from the premise that the system has failed to accomplish what it was designed to do.

In reality, the opposite is true. Unauthorized migration is not evidence of a broken immigration system; it is one of its defining features. Undocumented migration has persisted despite massive and sustained investment in walls, surveillance, detention, deportation, and legislation designed to stem the flow of “illegal” immigration and strip migrants of access to even the few basic social safety nets that remain after decades of austerity. These policies tell us less about the state’s inability to enforce immigration laws than about their real purpose.

For socialists to effectively respond to this system, we must first engage in a systemic re-examination of what immigration policy does, its origins, and its implications. The dominant narrative assumes that the state’s role is primarily to stop the flow of “illegal” immigration. Conservatives and liberals largely disagree only about the degree and the mechanisms that should be employed: Should enforcement be harsher or more permissive? Should legal immigration be expanded or reduced? Should asylum be more accessible or further restricted? These are important questions, but they obscure a more fundamental reality: migration has never been something the United States has tried to eliminate. It is instead something that the U.S. and global economies necessarily produce, demand, and manage. The roots of mass (unauthorized) migration lie in the nation’s history of capitalist development, globalization, and imperialism dating back to the nineteenth century—with implications that remain woefully unexamined, let alone resolved.

Undocumented workers occupy a unique position within American capitalism. They harvest crops, process meat, clean hotels, build infrastructure, staff restaurants, care for children and the elderly, and perform essential labor that keeps the economy functioning, consumer prices low, and capital flows stable and predictable. When labor shortages arise, these workers are welcomed. But when economic downturns and crises arise, they are blamed for conditions they neither created nor control. They are, as one journalist put it, “essential but unwanted.”

From this perspective, immigration enforcement is less a failed attempt at exclusion and more a remarkably successful regime for governing and disciplining labor.

We need not imagine some vast, secret conspiracy among employers, politicians, and border agents. This entire process plays out—and has always played out—in broad daylight. Nor does it require ignoring the competing interests involved: employers have always sought unfettered access to cheap, disposable labor; enforcement agencies have demanded (and received) ever-ballooning budgets and terrifying levels of plenary power; politicians have exploited economic and cultural anxieties by treating migrants as scapegoats in order to win elections without addressing structural inequalities and the material conditions of their constituents. Socialists and labor unions have oscillated between exclusion and solidarity. The system that emerges from these tensions nevertheless coalesces and capitulates to capitalist logic, even if immigration policy was never fully planned or perfectly coherent.

At first glance, this logic may appear contradictory. If American employers depend so heavily on immigrant labor, why does the government deploy such a robust immigration enforcement regime and spend billions trying to stop it? The question is reasonable, but embedded in it is the assumption that immigration enforcement exists to shut down unsanctioned migration, to eliminate it altogether. In reality, enforcement serves to regulate flows and to guarantee the presence of a useful but precarious workforce—always available to employers but invariably vulnerable to detention, deportation, and exclusion. This vulnerability suppresses workers’ collective bargaining power while allowing politicians to claim that they are securing the border and preventing some imagined “invasion.” The result is not that migration stops, but that it is carefully managed: providing enough workers to satisfy labor demand and at the same time, enough enforcement to preserve the illusion of border control and the distinction between deserving citizens and “illegal” workers whose status and presence always remains conditional.

The case of Mexico

The U.S.-Mexico border itself is a product of conquest, settler colonialism, and imperial expansion. The “line” separating the United States and Mexico did not emerge from some natural geographic feature, or for that matter, from differing cultures or economies. It was drawn and imposed through war. After its independence, the United States grew rapidly and ferociously at the expense of Black, indigenous, and immigrant populations. By the end of the 19^th century, the nation had expanded across the continent, eventually stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific.

The budding American empire then looked south to Mexico. After Mexico’s independence, Texas in particular posed a dilemma for the new nation: promising but underdeveloped land and few Mexicans to govern it or protect it from constant Indigenous raids, which were common at the time. The solution was to recruit Americans to settle, improve, and invest in the region and its land. Mexican authorities quickly became resentful of its American migrants: hundreds, then thousands of Americans heeded the call but rejected Mexican culture, refused to learn Spanish or embrace the predominant religion, or even migrate through legal channels. The irony, in hindsight, is breathtaking. In time, these arrivals, along with many of the Mexican citizens living there, developed their own sense of identity and in 1836, fought for independence from Mexico. That came to fruition when James K. Polk signed a joint resolution drafted and passed by Congress, officially admitting Texas to the union as its 28^th state in 1845.

Tensions remained, as Mexico continued to claim Texas as part of its legitimate territory. Even when it reluctantly relinquished claims to the state, disagreements regarding the precise boundary of the new border lingered—with the U.S. claiming that Texas extended south to the Rio Grande and Mexico holding claims to the Nueces River further north. On April 25, 1846, Mexican soldiers engaged an American military patrol, killing eleven soldiers, wounding six, and capturing some fifty others. This was the justification Polk needed for an all-out assault, declaring that Mexico had “invaded our territory and shed American blood upon the American soil.” Congress declared war on May 13, 1846.

Using its riches and overwhelming military might, the United States made quick work of the fragile Mexican army. In just two years, the assault left 25,000 Mexicans dead (some 13,000 Americans died during the war) and the Mexican military and political establishment humiliated. In exchange for peace and $15 million, Mexico ceded not only claims to Texas but all of what is now California, Nevada, and Utah, as well as large portions of current-day Arizona, New Mexico, and Colorado, as well as smaller portions of Wyoming, Kansas, and Oklahoma. Notably and critically, it also absorbed some 50,000-100,000 people who lived in those territories. For the United States, it was a windfall: it acquired over half of Mexican territory, which included rich land, natural resources, and economically enticing geography, all while limiting the number of brown people it had to accept into its newly drawn borders since the region remained sparsely populated.

The U.S. conquest of northern Mexico redrew the political map of North America, even as it left intact longstanding economic and social relationships. Communities that had long existed as coherent social spaces suddenly found themselves divided by an international boundary. The border moved over people long before people moved across the border. Promised U.S. citizenship, these new Americans remained second-class citizens: their land claims denied, their culture attacked, their language suppressed, and their rights violated.

While human mobility was restricted, capital crossed the newly created border with minimal friction. Railroads linked Mexican agricultural regions to American markets, U.S. investors acquired vast holdings in Mexican mining, agriculture, and transportation. The border allowed capital unrestricted mobility while creating artificial divisions of previously Mexican territories and communities.

During the regime of Porfirio Diaz (1876-1911), foreign investment in Mexico reached $1.6 billion, a sum overwhelmingly controlled by U.S. interests (much of the rest belonging to Britain and France). The result was that Mexican workers increasingly found their livelihoods shaped by economic forces far removed from their local communities. Industrialization, commercial agriculture, and foreign investment transformed rural life, creating some new opportunities but displacing millions.

By the end of the first decade of the twentieth century, Mexico had become a political pressure cooker. Vast wealth lined the pockets of the Diaz regime and foreign investors, even as peasants lost communal land and workers in factories, railroads, and mines faced increasingly dangerous working conditions, the loss of legal protections, and stagnating wages, leading to peasant revolts and ultimately a full-scale civil war. The Mexican Revolution left one million dead and led hundreds of thousands of survivors to flee the country and seek refuge in the United States. Migrants included ordinary workers, intellectuals, and leftist radicals, like the Magón Brothers—Ricardo, Enrique, and Jesús—who lived in exile in the United States, where they organized an international political movement, published the radical newspaper Regeneración, and worked with labor movements on both sides of the border, aiding the revolutionary effort from places like San Antonio, St. Louis, and Los Angeles, even as they faced severe political repression there themselves. After a decade of civil war, Mexican society was fundamentally transformed, replacing the Porfirian regime with a revolutionary state that claimed legitimacy through social reform, nationalism, and inclusion of workers and peasants in political life. Nevertheless, proximity and the entangled political economies of both countries would continue to complicate Mexico’s revolutionary promise for decades, and outmigration remained a central piece of the puzzle, primarily by serving as an “escape valve” for economic refugees, and an opportunity for capitalist exploitation, corruption, and systemic violence.

Creating the Border

By the 1920s, the U.S. had begun to institutionalize the border apparatus, one recognizable to us today. Nativism was far from new, of course. Earlier waves of nativism had targeted Irish and Chinese immigrants, but by this point, a coalition of eugenicists and anti-communists pushed for broad legal restrictions against foreigners, and after World War I, the U.S. passed a major piece of racist immigration legislation (“Johnson-Reed”) that drastically reduced the flow migrants from Asia as well as southern and eastern Europe. With the exception of the most radical industrial unions, like the IWW, most labor groups sided squarely with restrictionist factions, operating under the assumption that foreign workers diluted wages, weakened labor power, and prevented assimilation of immigrant workers—or worse, imported radical ideologies that would make the movement a target of Red Scare terror.

Mexican migration was not, however, initially a major source of concern. Like the rest of the Hemisphere, Mexico was exempted from the 1924 quotas, not out of benevolence, but because agricultural interests relied on their cheap labor, which was largely circular and seasonal and mostly invisible to most Americans. However, attitudes toward Mexican migrants changed rapidly during the Great Depression as jobs became scarce and relief programs strained, making these workers prime political scapegoats. Governments—at both the federal and state/local levels responded by waging a mass “repatriation” campaign that resulted in the expulsion of some one million ethnic Mexicans, a majority of them U.S. citizens.

The dynamics of Mexican migration evolved again during and after World War II. As the U.S. entered the fight against the Axis Powers, with over sixteen million men eventually fighting overseas, the home front faced a massive labor shortage, especially in agriculture. The solution was a bilateral agreement known as the Bracero Program, which imported hundreds of thousands, eventually millions of men (the program was not available to women) to work in that sector, along with some others (especially railroads). Alongside the Braceros came larger numbers of undocumented, unsanctioned workers representing roughly twice the number of contracted workers. The program, which was initially slated to end at the conclusion of the war, did not in fact end then. Instead, it was formalized when the Korean War began. In time, those who “saved the crops” became the targets of nativist ire. By the early 1950s, some one million Mexican workers, most of them unsanctioned, were thought to be working in the United States. The nativist panic that ensued, driven by the recession of 1953 and by racist fantasies about the perceived dangers of Mexican men, prompted the government to respond, but it did so in ways that revealed in stark terms the true nature and function of immigration policy.

With the backing of restrictionists, white supremacists, and even the leading Mexican American civic groups who viewed Mexican migration as a threat to assimilation and labor organizing, the U.S. launched a mass deportation campaign, dubbed “Operation Wetback.” Officially, the U.S. deported some one million people. But this was starkly different from repatriation in the 1930s: first of all, the entire undertaking was little more than a publicity stunt. As historians Kelly Lyttle Hernández, Ramon Garciá, and others have noted, the vast majority of those expelled were voluntary departures or deportations to border areas where migrants were given a proverbial wink and access to a quick return. Again, illustrating the ways in which migration control served the interests of capital, the 1952 Immigration and Nationality Act had made it a felony to smuggle, transport or harbor unauthorized workers, but thanks to pressure and influence from Texas growers, the “Texas Proviso” loophole inserted into the law shielded employers (nationwide, not just in Texas) from prosecution. It allowed authorities and employers to collaborate in remarkably brazen, corrupt ways: many “illegals” were summarily “paroled” and given Bracero permits, sometimes on the spot. Others, officially deported, were recruited again as Braceros almost immediately. The entire operation, in other words, was designed to give employers near-total control of labor flows while selling a vision of law and order to the American public.

Family Reconciliation: Myth and Reality

The Bracero program finally ended in 1964, after pressure from civil rights leaders, Mexican American intellectuals, and labor organizers who rightly concluded that the use of “semi-slaves” as the leading Mexican American labor organizer Ernesto Galraza called them due to their status as effectively rightless “guest” laborers, made labor organizing impossible. That same year, Congress passed the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1964 (“Hart-Celler” named after its main sponsors, Michigan Senator Philip A. Hart, a Democrat and New York Congressman Emanuel Celler, a Republican). It eliminated the blatantly racist underpinnings of the national origins act of 1924 so as not to embarrass the United States in its alleged crusade for freedom in the Cold War against the Soviet Union. One of its stated goals was family reunification. However, the new immigration regime created massive obstacles for Mexican (and more broadly, Latin American) immigrants, as they now faced limits on legal migration and a tiered “preference” system.

Skilled workers and those with immediate relatives found a relatively easy path to legal status, but millions of ordinary workers without family ties to the United States seeking work in the country had to do so illegally. Backlogs grew consistently throughout the decades, even as the number of undocumented people did too. By the 1970s, some one million unsanctioned laborers were thought to be in the country again, and a new nativist wave dominated the political response, in the process further exposing the flaws and contradictions of capitalist logic.

The Resistance to capitalist illogic

While nativists and restrictionists sought a hardline approach against migration, employers insisted that they were entitled to hire foreign labor, claiming that Americans refused to do the work that immigrants did. Although still taken as gospel among pundits and observers, the cliché that “immigrants do the work Americans won’t do,” was patently false. The reality was that Americans refused to do the work as cheaply and under the same precarious conditions as immigrants. At the same time, left-wing organizers, including many leading Mexican Americans—once fiercely opposed to immigrant labor—were rethinking established assumptions and strategies. Labor activists like Miguel Pendas and Humberto “Bert” Corona, both socialists based in California, argued that playing by capital’s rules could never yield gains for workers. What if, they asked, instead of seeking restriction and criminalization, undocumented workers could be organized? What if the entire logic of border politics was fundamentally flawed and anti-worker? If capital could ignore national boundaries in pursuit of profits, they reasoned, why shouldn’t workers across borders also see themselves as “one people without borders”?

Only trans- and international solidarity could alleviate the problems facing the working class. The most radical immigrant rights activists, like the Chicano restauranter and convicted gun runner Mario Cantú suggested that the system as it existed rewarded capital and punished workers on both sides of the border: Mexican authorities could simply push poverty out of sight and out of mind by encouraging its most impoverished populations to migrate north, even as those workers were used to suppress labor gains in the U.S. For Cantú and other revolutionary thinkers, nothing short of armed rebellion in Mexico could solve the problem.

Other activists remained more focused on internal and more gradual political solutions, even as they looked abroad for models of transnational solidarity. In Europe, where “irregular” migration had also become a hot-button issue, some of the more militant unions had taken a different approach to migration. Switzerland’s Clothing and Leather Workers Union, France’s General Conference of Labor, and the French Democratic Federation of Labor adopted the then-novel position that migration and its ill effects on workers was the result of “super-exploitation” and argued that immigrants should be approached as “an integral part of the working class” and protected and integrated into the class struggle. The logic of the immigration debate, they contended, had to be flipped on its head: by deliberately taking advantage of the most vulnerable workers—often immigrants—employers found it easier to undermine organizing efforts and to suppress wages and efforts at improved working conditions. Conversely, a united front of workers, foreign and domestic, could produce a meaningful opposition to exploitation and abuse.

In the U.S., most labor unions remained unconvinced that embracing the undocumented was prudent. The United Farm Workers Union, led by the now-disgraced Cesar Chavez, continued through the early 1970s to oppose immigrant rights. Under Chavez’s leadership, the union regularly called for raids, deportations, and restrictions—at one point even creating its own (poorly trained, ineffective) border patrol (the so-called “wet line”) to detain and turn over migrants to immigration authorities. Only after intense criticism and pressure from Chicano leaders and radical organizers, did the union shift its position in 1975, with Chavez passively admitting that “mistakes” had been made “in the heat of the struggle.” Its reversal was less a result of altruism and moral reflection than a recognition of the changing realities in the fields. By that time, undocumented workers made up a huge proportion—in some regions a majority—of the workforce. If the union was to represent anyone, it would have to accept that those workers were unsanctioned.

Other unions, however, remained recalcitrant. The AFL-CIO had begun to soften its anti-immigrant rhetoric, and signs appeared that change was in the air, as when the federation voted, for the first time in 1980, on whether to adopt a more inclusive posture. Immigrant rights activists, however, lost the vote. George Meany and his associates remained unwilling to reverse course for some time. The AFL-CIO only officially took a more explicitly pro-immigrant stance in the year 2000.

The Politics of immigration

Through the 1980s, policymakers responded to mass migration by seeking new reforms that attempted to ease the contradictions of the immigration regime without fundamentally restructuring its foundations. It was under Jimmy Carter that the concept of “compressive immigration reform” first took shape. Carter established the Select Commission on Immigration and Refugee Policy in 1978, tapping Ted Hesburgh (then president of the University of Notre Dame and a universally respected figure) to lead it. The commission studied the issue extensively and presented its recommendations in 1981, suggesting a three-pronged approach to immigration reform: increased enforcement to satisfy restrictionists, the creation of an agricultural guest worker program akin to the Bracero system to appease employers, and amnesty for undocumented people already in the country designed to gain favor with the growing and increasingly pro-immigrant Hispanic lobby. With the bipartisan sponsorship of Alan Simpson, the Republican senator from Wyoming and Romano Mazzoli, the Democratic Congressman from Kentucky, Ronald Reagan endorsed the legislative package. Congress, after several failed attempts, finally passed the law in 1986, with Reagan promising that it would “improve the lives of a class of individuals who now must hide in the shadows, without access to many of the benefits of a free and open society” while also “[increasing] enforcement of the immigration laws.”

However much Reagan depicted the law as a grand solution, it did little to resolve the contradictions embedded in liberal capitalist logic. Migration continued, and so did nativist politics. With huge numbers of undocumented workers arriving in California in particular, restrictionists ferociously attacked immigrant workers and families there. A group of restrictionists, led by state assemblyman Dick Mountjoy, former INS commissioner Alan Nelson, former regional director of the INS Harold Ezell, and Orange County accountant Ron Prince, crafted a harsh and punitive ballot initiative, Proposition 187, that sought to deny undocumented people and their families access to social services, including education and healthcare. Few imagined that the law would prevent migration or do anything about the number of immigrants already in the state. Instead, it embraced the logic of the libertarian economist Milton Friendman, who some decades prior had outlined perhaps the most honest assessment of how free market fundamentalists viewed the function of immigration policies and priorities. Asked in 1978 whether he, as a libertarian, supported more open borders, Friedman had replied that “Mexican immigration . . . is a good thing. It’s a good thing for the illegal immigrants. It’s a good thing for the United States. It’s a good thing for the citizens of the country. But it’s only good as long as it’s illegal.” In other words, the economic contributions of immigrants were invaluable, but only if they did not expect anything in return from the society that extracted their labor.

Proposition 187 was popular and its proponents wildly successful at the ballot box, with voters supporting it by a two-to-one margin. Organizers quickly mobilized to wage legal battles, and within a few years, the law’s provisions were struck down as unconstitutional due to its brazenly discriminatory, racist cornerstones. But anti-immigrant attacks and the paradoxes of immigration control did not fade away. Neither was it purely a right-wing cause; it was broadly bipartisan. If Prop 187 failed to achieve its draconian goals, immigration control continued by other means, with the full and enthusiastic support of the liberal-Democratic political establishment. Under Bill Clinton, Operation Gatekeeper increased the number of border patrol agents from 4,200 in 1994 to almost 10,000 in 2000 and doubled the border budget from $400 million to $800 between 1993 and 1997 (by 2010, it had reached $7.6 billion). Tighter security in busy (urban) crossing areas funneled migrants toward more dangerous crossing paths, resulting in the deaths of several thousand border crossers over the next several years.

At the same time, the United States continued to foster illegal migration through its disastrous imperial foreign policy. “Free trade” initiatives, most notably the North American Free Trade Agreement flooded agricultural Mexico’s markets and displaced Mexican farmers. The lingering effects of military interventions and support for anti-democratic regimes in Central America (among them Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Panama) over the previous decades, and the parallel development of what historian Adam Goodman calls a “deportation machine,” led to political instability, mass poverty, and the growth of gang violence in those countries. Naturally, that motivated ordinary Central Americans to seek an escape from these conditions—ironically but revealingly, into the very country that had caused those conditions. The more migrants the United States produced, the more it fed anti-immigrant sentiment at home, and the more the U.S. government responded with harsh restrictions, thus creating and recreating a vicious and inhumane but entirely predictable cycle.

And if Prop 187 had failed the constitutional test, its architects played the long game. In fact, there is ample evidence that their goals were far more ideological than legal. By positioning aggrieved Americans as the victims of not only migrant populations but also an unresponsive state, they built a robust nativist machine and movement that demonized immigrants and blamed them for economic and social woes. Ron Prince, who financially ruined himself funding Prop 187, suggested in 1996, while the case was still being heard in federal courts, that the entire episode proved “we were right” and promised to be “the ACLU of the 21^st century.” In this reactionary environment, further exacerbated by the post-9/11 “war on terror” and by liberalism’s failure to offer a compelling economic response to globalization’s disastrous effects on workers, the rise of Donald Trump and his reactionary “Make America Great Again” movement in the twenty-first century was as predictable as it was tragic.

In response, immigrant rights activists have continued to wage a courageous fight over the years: in the streets, in courtrooms, and notably, in workplaces. Most labor unions have reversed their historical aversion to organizing undocumented workers: the United Farm Workers Union, though a shell of its former self, often downplays its anti-immigrant history. The now weakened AFL-CIO fully embraces “immigration reform.” And unions representing economic sectors with a high concentration of immigrant workers, like the Service Employees International Union, have taken a decidedly pro-immigrant stance. Still, too often, these groups fall into the trap of framing the immigration system as broken, as a national problem, and as something that can be understood and addressed apart from its bloody imperial history. Mere pro-immigrant rhetoric that insists the system must be “reformed” offers little chance of addressing, let alone countering, the true function of immigration control, which is worker discipline and the dismantling of transnational, multi-ethnic worker solidarity.

ICE: Federal Law Enforcement Criminals

This is an opinion piece written by an individual member and was not voted on by membership. Opinion pieces from members do not reflect the opinions of other members and are not chapter approved statements.

A Contemporary of the Patriot Act and the War on Terror

ICE is formally called the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. With their current budget at $8 billion, their stated purpose is to enforce federal laws concerning immigration and customs, including illegal imports such as narcotics, laundered money, and sex exploitation materials. At the time of this writing, ICE has more than 20,000 agents in more than 400 offices in the United States and elsewhere. Although agencies and legislation predating ICE performed many of its current functions, the period succeeding the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon marked the beginning of a more centralized approach to immigration control. Its authority comes principally from the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) and later amendments enacted from the 1980s onward. The history of ICE is therefore best understood as the history of U.S. immigration enforcement gradually moving from a relatively centralized immigration bureaucracy into a large national-security and law-enforcement system involving federal, state, and local governments.

President George Walker (George W.) Bush signed the Homeland Security Act on November 25, 2002. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS), of which ICE is a constituent part, began operations on March 1, 2003. The United States federal government immigration machinery is divided into three parts: the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), which handles immigration benefits, citizenship, green cards, asylum applications and petitions; Customs and Border Patrol (CBP), which handles borders, ports of entry, border patrol and customs inspection; and ICE, which handles interior immigration enforcement, detention/removal and major criminal investigations. ICE is therefore not the only federal government agency which handles immigration-related matters, but is rather an aliquot part of immigration and customs law enforcement infrastructure whose operations are internal relative to the services focused on enforcing international boundaries, and coercive relative to documentation and application related services.

Under the George W. Bush administration, ICE would perform massive workplace raids and detainment procedures often including hundreds of people at a time. ICE’s early activity involved arresting individuals who already had final removal orders, seeking out persons who had likely probable cause for arrest and detainment, and issuing deportation flights. The Barack Obama administration would de-emphasize mass workplace arrests in favor of prioritizing individuals perceived to be criminal and national-security hazards. The first Donald Trump administration would follow the Bush model, the Joseph Biden administration would follow the Obama model, and the second Trump administration would follow the Bush model, creating a firm line of demarcation between Republican and Democrat regarding this matter. As an organization also involved in customs, ICE would also engage in investigations concerning money laundering, export violations, commercial fraud, and international criminal organizations. Given the corrupt state of the US federal government, it is easy to imagine the potential for fraudulent behavior on ICE’s part with the combined immigration and customs law enforcement powers.

What ICE Actually Does

Although the corporate media mainly focuses on the enforcement and removal aspect of ICE to sensationalize violence for the purpose of profiting from domestic bloodshed, that is not the only purpose allocated to ICE by the federal government. As a core constituent of the DHS, ICE has a deep and highly involved organizational infrastructure that provides it with wide immigration and customs related powers. The coercive law enforcement powers of ICE depend on a comprehensive intelligence apparatus which allows them to collect migrant-related data and direct violent action against individuals they determine to be in violation of federal law as it relates to immigration and customs. There are officially four departments within the ICE organizational structure: Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), which is the intelligence apparatus involved in criminal investigations related to immigration and customs; Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO), which is the coercive apparatus which is involved in the physical arrest, detainment, and deportation procedures; Office of the Principal Legal Advisor (OPLA), which ensures legal reconciliation and compliance within the overall ICE structure; and Management and Administration (M&A), the supervisory directorate which orchestrates the operation of the other three departments to ensure their mutual cooperation. Only the ERO and HSI will be discussed.

The ICE that you actually witness on corporate media committing unwarranted acts of violence against innocent people within United States borders are under the directive control of the ERO. This section of ICE agents concerns itself with immigration arrests, detention, removal proceedings, deportation logistics, fugitive operations and coordination with jails. It includes the armed federal police that physically enforce federal government authority within its specifically defined role. They’re involved in the 287(g) related federal-state cooperation procedures that allow state governments to perform immigration and customs related law enforcement operations on their behalf. What separates ICE from a simple police force, however, is its intelligence apparatus.

The HIS deals with criminal investigations involving trafficking, smuggling, narcotics, money laundering, customs violations, child exploitation, export controls, cybercrime and other transnational offenses. They’re the ones who decide which migrants in the US are involved in affairs sufficiently sordid to justify coercive measures seeking their detainment and/or removal from the country. They also investigate private employers and property managers to verify the presence of undocumented or otherwise illegal individuals so that probable cause for arrest can be procured. Although agents associated with the ELO are the ones who define the typical mental image of ICE, the agency would be much less effective at violating human rights in America were it not for HIS.

How ICE Impacts Humanity

Although many of its proponents’ claims are exaggerated, ICE has incidentally performed some social functions. Very few people would fault ICE for capturing foreigners involved in narcotics, human trafficking, or child predation. There is, however, fault in attempting to justify the entire operation of ICE on account of this alone. As is common practice in America, these actual, real-life problems have been used as a justification for far more broadly encompassing control measures on people living in the country while certain non-foreign individuals outside ICE’s authority are allowed to continue those exact same involvements.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has identified numerous violations committed by ICE in the name of law enforcement. Human rights abuses including but not limited to racial profiling, breaches of due process, excessive use of force, and operation in sensitive locations such as schools, courthouses, and places of religious worship have been committed by ICE. Many in ICE custody are denied medical care for chronic conditions. Its facilities provide squalid, crowded living conditions where detainees are often subjected to physical and sexual abuse by protective staff. Prolonged and improper use of restraints and solitary confinement are leveled against vulnerable detainees, often those who suffer from mental illness. Numerous deaths have been reported in ICE detainment camps which have been investigated by separate government entities.

Let’s not mince words here. ICE has been directly responsible for innocent bloodshed across the country. It’s been heavily documented, and news of it has been widely broadcast by the corporate news media. Perfectly decent hard-working people have been forcibly removed from their communities and places of employment for the sake of domestic peacekeeping. Families have been torn apart, lives have been destroyed, and the American taxpayer has been the one to cover the bill. This is nothing but a heinous affront to the working class of the world. The lie that ICE is needed to keep local communities safe from violent crime and illegal narcotics has been costly to the entire human race. This relic of post-9/11 hysteria and government duplicity needs to be abolished. The call to action is this: within the confines of the law, demoralize ICE agents wherever you find them, protest any legislation which involves state or local cooperation with ICE of any description, and provide any vulnerable members of the community with the necessary support to avoid violent ICE reprisal. This is the work that any decent member of society should do to combat ICE and fetter the constant oppression of the common laborer by the capitalist establishment.

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