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. 

Further reading

Bacon, David. “Should Labor Defend Undocumented Workers?” Democratic Left, Fall 2009.

Balderrama, Francisco E., and Raymond Rodríguez. Decade of Betrayal: Mexican Repatriation in the 1930s. Revised edition. University of New Mexico Press, 2006.

Chacón, Justin Akers. Radicals in the Barrio: Magonistas, Socialists, Wobblies, and Communists in the Mexican American Working Class (Chicago: Haymarket, 2018)

Fox, Cybelle. Three Worlds of Relief: Race, Immigration, and the American Welfare State from the Progressive Era to the New Deal. Princeton University Press, 2012.

García, Juan Ramon. Operation Wetback: The Mass Deportation of Mexican Undocumented Workers in 1954. Greenwood Press, 1980.

García, Maria C., and Maddalena Marinari, eds. Whose America? U.S. Immigration Policy Since 1980. University of Illinois Press, 2023.

Goodman, Adam. The Deportation Machine: America’s Long History of Expelling Immigrants. Princeton University Press, 2020.

Griswold del Castillo, Richard. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. University of Oklahoma Press, 1992.

Hernández, Kelly L. Migra!: A History of the U.S. Border Patrol. University of California Press, 2010.

Hirota, Hidetaka. Expelling the Poor: Atlantic Seaboard States and the Nineteenth-Century Origins of American Immigration Policy. Oxford University Press, 2017.

Immerwahr, Daniel. How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2019.

Kenny, Kevin. The Problem of Immigration in a Slaveholding Republic: Policing Mobility in the Nineteenth-Century United States. Oxford University Press, 2023.

Kramer, Paul A. The Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States, and the Philippines. The University of North Carolina Press, 2006.

Lew-Williams, Beth. The Chinese Must Go: Violence, Exclusion, and the Making of the Alien in America. Harvard University Press, 2018.

St. John, Rachel. Line in the Sand: A History of the Western U.S.-Mexico Border. Princeton University Press, 2011.

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.

The post ICE: Federal Law Enforcement Criminals first appeared on Salt Lake DSA.

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LAWRENCE, LOWELL, LYNN – As the national co-chair of the DSA’s Puerto Rico Working Group, I often hear the question from other organization members: “Why should a socialist here care about the territorial status of Puerto Rico?” My answer: “As an American citizen, it is your Congress who holds absolute control over the colony of Puerto Rico.”

Massachusetts is not merely a sympathetic bystander to Puerto Rico’s struggle. We are the fifth-largest hub of the Puerto Rican diaspora in the United States. Our Commonwealth is home to over 330,000 Boricuas, and within the jurisdiction of Boston DSA, we hold an immense, concentrated organizing power. Look at Lawrence, Lowell, and Lynn—cities where Puerto Rican flags hang from triple-deckers, where music echoes through the parks, and where the wounds of economic and social neglect are felt just as acutely as they are in San Juan.

These are not just “Latino communities” to be courted during election cycles; they are the frontline outposts of the Puerto Rican nation within the U.S. imperial core. These communities are the result of a colonial system that has displaced millions of Puerto Ricans. For Boston DSA, organizing for independence isn’t an abstract international solidarity gesture—it is local work, with local communities.

The political winds in Puerto Rico are shifting faster than the United States establishment cares to admit. For decades, U.S. policymakers and the archipelago’s colonial elite have tried to hide the imperialist nature of the relationship between the US and Puerto Rico. That narrative is dead. In the aftermath of Hurricane Maria—where 4,645 Puerto Ricans were left to die by their colonial rulers, along with the imposition of a dictatorial financial control board that gutted public education and healthcare—the people of Puerto Rico have radicalized. They have seen the colonial model fail. They watched the colonialist local parties offer loyalty to Washington and receive only austerity in return. Today, a growing number of Boricuas are rejecting both statehood and the commonwealth, embracing independence out of a clear-eyed need for sovereignty and human rights. We see a clear generational shift with independence is the favored status amongst Puerto Ricans born after the Cold War.

This surge aligns perfectly with the organized leftist movements on the island, which have long championed independence as the only path toward a just, sustainable, and self-determined future. It is the generations that survived the violent repression of the independence movement during the Cold War that have passed the torch to a new and awakened youth on the path to freedom. From the organized political parties advocating for national liberation to the labor unions fighting austerity, the left in Puerto Rico understands that begging for rights within an imperial system is no longer an option. True prosperity can only be found in the collective freedom that an independent Republic of Puerto Rico would bring.

What is our duty as socialists residing in the metropolis? It is to understand the responsibility we have as the owners of the colony currently in a struggle for liberation spanning borders, right into our communities in Massachusetts. We must understand that the onus is on us. We must be consistent in our convictions as anti-imperialists and free the colonized people we collectively hold as a nation. Puerto Rico is not a distant issue we can ignore, but a reflection of who we are as an empire.

If we can say “Free Palestine,” we should be able to look inward and say “Vive Puerto Rico Libre.”

Colonialism is not an accident of history; it is the original sin of capitalism. As socialists, we are duty-bound to support the independence of oppressed nations. To do otherwise is to reveal ourselves as mere reformers of the empire, rather than its dismantlers.

This duty manifests in our daily organizing. For Boston DSA, it means deploying our resources to support the diaspora communities in Lawrence, Lowell, and Lynn—not as saviors, but as comrades. That entails broader support for neighborhood organizing in these communities. It means educating our broader membership on how the colonialism of Puerto Rico materially affects its inhabitants and how we can stand in solidarity with a growing national liberation movement, while amplifying the voices of the island’s citizens who fight everyday to survive the cruelties of an imperialist system. It means unequivocally calling for the full cancellation of debt that was created by a system that our country imposed. It means calling for a Puerto Rico that is free, sovereign and independent.

This is not a matter of political differences—anti-colonialism is non-negotiable for socialists and the people of Puerto Rico deserve our solidarity on their path towards freedom. Everyone, Puerto Rican or otherwise, has their own particular part to play. No part is too great or too small, no one is too old or too young to do something. 

Let Boston DSA, and any other DSA chapter that takes up the call, prove that solidarity is a strategy and not a buzzword. The colony is here and the struggle is now. The only acceptable outcome is a free and independent Puerto Rico.

Dom S is a member of Boston DSA and a national co-chair of the Puerto Rico Working Group of the DSA International Committee.

The post OPINION: In Mass, Organizing for Puerto Rican Independence is Local Work appeared first on Working Mass.

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By: Dom S

LAWRENCE, LOWELL, LYNN – As the national co-chair of the DSA’s Puerto Rico Working Group, I often hear the question from other organization members: “Why should a socialist here care about the territorial status of Puerto Rico?” My answer: “As an American citizen, it is your Congress who holds absolute control over the colony of Puerto Rico.”

Massachusetts is not merely a sympathetic bystander to Puerto Rico’s struggle. We are the fifth-largest hub of the Puerto Rican diaspora in the United States. Our Commonwealth is home to over 330,000 Boricuas, and within the jurisdiction of Boston DSA, we hold an immense, concentrated organizing power. Look at Lawrence, Lowell, and Lynn—cities where Puerto Rican flags hang from triple-deckers, where music echoes through the parks, and where the wounds of economic and social neglect are felt just as acutely as they are in San Juan.

These are not just “Latino communities” to be courted during election cycles; they are the frontline outposts of the Puerto Rican nation within the U.S. imperial core. These communities are the result of a colonial system that has displaced millions of Puerto Ricans. For Boston DSA, organizing for independence isn’t an abstract international solidarity gesture—it is local work, with local communities.

The political winds in Puerto Rico are shifting faster than the United States establishment cares to admit. For decades, U.S. policymakers and the archipelago’s colonial elite have tried to hide the imperialist nature of the relationship between the US and Puerto Rico. That narrative is dead. In the aftermath of Hurricane Maria—where 4,645 Puerto Ricans were left to die by their colonial rulers, along with the imposition of a dictatorial financial control board that gutted public education and healthcare—the people of Puerto Rico have radicalized. They have seen the colonial model fail. They watched the colonialist local parties offer loyalty to Washington and receive only austerity in return. Today, a growing number of Boricuas are rejecting both statehood and the commonwealth, embracing independence out of a clear-eyed need for sovereignty and human rights. We see a clear generational shift with independence is the favored status amongst Puerto Ricans born after the Cold War.

This surge aligns perfectly with the organized leftist movements on the island, which have long championed independence as the only path toward a just, sustainable, and self-determined future. It is the generations that survived the violent repression of the independence movement during the Cold War that have passed the torch to a new and awakened youth on the path to freedom. From the organized political parties advocating for national liberation to the labor unions fighting austerity, the left in Puerto Rico understands that begging for rights within an imperial system is no longer an option. True prosperity can only be found in the collective freedom that an independent Republic of Puerto Rico would bring.

What is our duty as socialists residing in the metropolis? It is to understand the responsibility we have as the owners of the colony currently in a struggle for liberation spanning borders, right into our communities in Massachusetts. We must understand that the onus is on us. We must be consistent in our convictions as anti-imperialists and free the colonized people we collectively hold as a nation. Puerto Rico is not a distant issue we can ignore, but a reflection of who we are as an empire.

If we can say “Free Palestine,” we should be able to look inward and say “Vive Puerto Rico Libre.”

Colonialism is not an accident of history; it is the original sin of capitalism. As socialists, we are duty-bound to support the independence of oppressed nations. To do otherwise is to reveal ourselves as mere reformers of the empire, rather than its dismantlers.

This duty manifests in our daily organizing. For Boston DSA, it means deploying our resources to support the diaspora communities in Lawrence, Lowell, and Lynn—not as saviors, but as comrades. That entails broader support for neighborhood organizing in these communities. It means educating our broader membership on how the colonialism of Puerto Rico materially affects its inhabitants and how we can stand in solidarity with a growing national liberation movement, while amplifying the voices of the island’s citizens who fight everyday to survive the cruelties of an imperialist system. It means unequivocally calling for the full cancellation of debt that was created by a system that our country imposed. It means calling for a Puerto Rico that is free, sovereign and independent.

This is not a matter of political differences—anti-colonialism is non-negotiable for socialists and the people of Puerto Rico deserve our solidarity on their path towards freedom. Everyone, Puerto Rican or otherwise, has their own particular part to play. No part is too great or too small, no one is too old or too young to do something. 

Let Boston DSA, and any other DSA chapter that takes up the call, prove that solidarity is a strategy and not a buzzword. The colony is here and the struggle is now. The only acceptable outcome is a free and independent Puerto Rico.

Dom S is a member of Boston DSA and a national co-chair of the Puerto Rico Working Group of the DSA International Committee.

The post OPINION: Fighting for Puerto Rican Independence is Local Work, Especially in Massachusetts appeared first on Working Mass.

Date: Saturday, August 15 from 10 AM until 2 PM

Location: Kellogg Park• 33 Kellog st, Ventura, CA 93001 US

The Mutual Aid Working Group of DSA Ventura County is engaged in base-building and community organizing by exchanging goods and services with those who want to see a world beyond capitalist profiteering.

A free meal is served to attendees. Come get a free meal, or even bring your favorite potluck item or beverages, or non-perishable food to donate.

If you would like to help our mutual aid efforts but are not able to attend, DONATE HERE:

Monthly Working Session Meeting

Tuesday, August 25 at 6 PM PDT

The Political Education Working Group is the place to bring your ideas for workshops, educational material, agitprop, and more. Our goal is to bring socialist ideas, DSA messaging and campaigns, and class consciousness to the people of Ventura County. All levels of organizing experience welcome.

Join DSA Ventura County’s Labor Working Group on zoom to discuss recent labor struggles in our communities, from Starbucks Workers United’s indefinite strike, to the new contract our County employees won by threatening to strike, to the movement for an arms embargo by Labor for Palestine, and the calls for a general strike by May Day 2028. Please, bring other ideas, campaigns, and your own workplace experiences. An agenda will be posted on slack soon. You will receive the zoom link shortly after completing RSVP.

Now with three VC Locations!

Newbury Park

Date: Saturday, August 22 from 9:30 AM until 11 AM

Location: Ragamuffin Coffee Roasters • 111 N Reino Rd, Newbury Park

Simi Valley

Date: Tuesday, August 25 from 6:30PM until 8PM

Location: 85C Bakery Cafe• 3013 Cochran st, Suite A, Simi Valley, CA

Oxnard

Date: Sunday, September 13 from 9:30 AM until 11 AM

Location: Ragamuffin Coffee Roasters • 550 Collection Blvd Suite 130, Oxnard, CA 93036, USA

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Come join like-minded comrades for a cup of your favorite morning beverage. These gatherings offer a relaxed space to meet members and find out how to get involved, decompress, talk about the issues we face, and stay connected as we close out the year.

No RSVPs needed!

Many hands make light work.

Please reference our Slack’s events channel, or general, for the Agenda.

Zoom Meeting link will appear upon RSVP.

By Alissa B., Anthony D., Elijah N., James M., and Jill R.

One year into an experimental electoral project to organize alongside our Socialists in Office, DSA is setting down real roots in western Wayne County.

Below is an approximate transcript of comments made by members at the June 2026 General Meeting detailing progress on Metro Detroit DSA’s organizing in western Wayne County.

Anthony D., engineer, Royal Oak, 2025–2026 SOWW chair:

At our 2025 Convention, members passed an amendment to the Socialists in Office (SIO) Committee consensus resolution, authored by Anthony D. and Frances R., that created a unique and experimental ‘Geographic Working Group’. It was designed as a space for rank-and-file DSA members living in State Representative Dylan Wegela’s and Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib’s overlapping districts, to regularly meet with and organize alongside them. Our SIOs are surrounded daily by politicians ranging from corporate Democrats to fascist Republicans who serve the same ruling class, so we imagined this group as the socialist antidote and support system. The idea was to experiment with a new concept of how DSA and our SIOs should use elected office and carve a path towards our political independence. The amendment included the clause below.

The Geographic Working Group will issue a report at both the six-month (December 2025) and twelve-month (June 2026) mark to:

• provide an update on progress towards our goals and explain any roadblocks to accomplishing them
• offer an analysis and critique to consider whether it should be replicated by future similar bodies or other SIO Committees around the country
• normalize open reporting on the progress of this and other unique experiments in the chapter — all of which can be expected to have misses and fails, which are acceptable so long as the lessons learned are defined and shared with membership similar to past electoral campaigns

We conducted the first report-back at our December 2025 GM six months ago and wrote an article for the Detroit Socialist. We are doing so again today at the one-year mark. As of June 1, I am now the former chair of the group after having led it for a year, and have since handed off duties to our newly elected co-chairs, Jill and Kathy.

Jill R., stay-at-home mom, Westland, 2026–2027 SOWW co-chair:

As of June 1st, I’m one of the new co-chairs of Socialists Organizing Western Wayne (SOWW). I had first heard of DSA from Dylan when he knocked on my door during a canvass for his election a few years ago. Though it sounded interesting, I told him I didn’t want to drive out to Detroit for events. That didn’t stop him from trying to get me to join every time I saw him after that initial meeting. Then, last summer, I went to an event that Dylan and Mike McDermott had hosted just three minutes from my house. Dylan once again brought up DSA, where I once again told him I didn’t want to drive to Detroit.

That’s when he told me that a new group was forming and would be meeting in Westland. I told him to let me know the details as that was definitely something I would be willing to attend. I finally attended my first SOWW meeting at the end of October 2025 and joined DSA the following week. I’m now willing to drive to Detroit for General Meetings and other DSA events, but if it wasn’t for SOWW existing in the first place, I wouldn’t be here.

One of the projects I’ve worked on was having SOWW co-host the March No Kings event with UAW Local 900 in Wayne. I know a lot of us have mixed feelings about the No Kings events and the mobilization versus organization aspect to them, but attending the October No Kings gave me the little bit of hope I was missing that allowed my ADHD brain to finally contact Dylan for information about SOWW, which led me to DSA. And I wanted to use the March No Kings event as a chance to find some folks who may have been needing a little bit of hope, too.

After seeing the Wayne event pop up on the No Kings map and realizing that hosting one in Westland wasn’t going to be an option, I contacted Tonya, the Wayne host, to see if we could support in any way. Tonya is a UAW retiree who had talked her leadership into letting her have the No Kings event at their local union hall. She was able to convince leadership to let us co-host because so many DSA folks had joined the Local 900 members on the picket line during the 2023 UAW auto workers strike. Tonya and her leadership remembered the strong strike support and solidarity that DSA provided during those weeks.

During the event, we had a table where we talked to folks about DSA and SOWW and we had members, including newbies, crowd-canvassing to get signatures for the Mop Up Michigan petition. We provided medics and wrote up a safety plan, and Mike and Dylan both gave speeches to the 100+ people that attended. It was one of the smaller No Kings events due to it being a first-time location, but overall it went well and we’re looking forward to working with Tonya and Local 900 again. Tonya and I are still in contact and let each other know about any potential chances to organize together, and her husband Paul, who is a State Field Director at Voters Not Politicians, has attended SOWW meetings and shown interest in joining DSA.

Alissa B., retiree union staffer, Romulus, SOWW member:

I joined DSA in late July 2025 as a relatively new resident in Michigan. I got a call from Anthony not long after joining and he told me about this experimental Geographic Working Group that we now call SOWW, and invited me to a meeting. I was excited about the chance to connect with my community and like-minded people in the area. Ever since, I’ve been a regular attendee and have been able to observe the growth of this group.

SOWW meetings are intentionally structured to foster membership growth and leadership development. This is a space for new folks who don’t know much about DSA but are socialist-curious. It’s easy for non-members to show up to something local and feel comfortable getting to know DSA before joining. They get a chance to “dip their toes in,” and we build political reading and discussion on current issues and socialist theory into every agenda.

These productive discussions help expose us to a variety of perspectives. We can gradually ease people into organizing and socialism in a way that isn’t overwhelming, so people can learn about democratic processes and how to be active participants in organizing out in the world. In organizing alongside our SIO’s, you can see the direct benefits of organizing. Another aspect of the membership growth and leadership development model is task rotation. Each meeting, we rotate the standard tasks: facilitators, notetakers, food coordinators, space reservers, political reading and discussion developers, etc., so everyone has an opportunity to try different roles.

Lastly is the growth in numbers. In less than a year, we’ve doubled our membership from 30 members in December 2025 with an average of 12–13 meeting attendees to now having 60 members and 20–25 meeting attendees. Seventy different people have attended at least one SOWW meeting, and nine have joined DSA through their participation in SOWW.

Number of meeting attendees, SOWW members that have joined DSA, and first time attendees since the group’s inception a year ago.

James M., engineer, Westland, Dylan Wegela re-election campaign co-chair:

I joined DSA nearly a year ago after I was spotted at a No Kings Rally by my coworker and DSA member, Dan W. After attending a couple of General Meetings, I was struggling to find a group to get involved with because of the long distances to attend DSA meetings and I did not find Zoom meetings appealing. That’s when I got a call from Anthony about this Geographic Working Group to organize alongside our local SIOs. Fast-forward to today, and I am now one of the co-chairs for Dylan’s re-election campaign.

Dylan’s campaign isn’t your typical campaign, as he represents a fairly blue district and is running unopposed in the primary on the Democratic Party ballot line. Dylan having no opponent is surprising given how he has fought the mainstream Democratic Party and corporate interests by voting ‘No’ on every corporate handout brought to a vote and is continuing the fight against corporate handouts and AI data centers in Michigan.

Because Dylan is running unopposed, we have a unique opportunity to get creative with our campaign. Not just using it to get people to vote for Dylan, but to get Dylan’s constituents to work alongside him on tackling many of the issues plaguing our district, such as AI data centers, ICE occupation and detention facilities, tenants’ rights, and Flock.

So far, we have held some traditional events like a campaign launch party with a turnout of over 200 people. We’ve also held campaign fundraisers and canvasses which we have used to engage with the community about the myriad of issues in our district.

At the moment, we are planning to host some social events to bring the community out so that Dylan and SOWW can engage with them, with the goal to recruit more people into SOWW and DSA. We are also working on holding joint canvasses with Rashida’s team and other DSA-endorsed candidates.

Elijah, engineer, Livonia, SOWW Flock campaign chair

I joined DSA three months ago through my brother and through SOWW. SOWW has started a subcommittee to address Flock and AI-surveillance more broadly. I have been given the privilege of leading this group and bottom-lining our tasks. Our goal is to replicate the success of our sibling group in Ferndale. They were successfully able to push their city to cancel their Flock contract, proving that it is possible in southeast Michigan.

In Westland, we are taking two parallel approaches. The first is to build broad public support. Our group has canvassed homes and created literature to spread. The second is to build connections with the city council and ensure we can make a persuasive case against the technology. To achieve both aims, we informed, motivated, and organized many new members who had been attending SOWW meetings.

We set up weekly meetings to support each other. With the assistance of Ferndale and other knowledgeable members, we educated otherwise uninformed members about Flock and how best to go about the above goals. We have been successful in leveraging everyone’s unique skills and experience. Members who have never attended a city council meeting before are now showing up and speaking their minds. Other members are helping with creating literature, media, and petitions. Ensuring that we maintain pressure and consistent communication with Westland City Council has been possible thanks to the dedication of all members.

With all the above efforts, we are confident in our chances. We look forward to reporting back in July when the contract is canceled [Westland City Council announced on July 9 that they would not be renewing the contract]. Further, we are eager to expand our efforts so that ALL people in southeast Michigan have their privacy rights protected.

I would like to take a moment to talk about SOWW itself. SOWW presents a unique opportunity for this kind of work. First, local residents have the greatest impact on electeds in local communities, and second, SOWW is what gave me the opportunity to be a contributing, active socialist. I am grateful to this chapter for backing this initiative and bringing DSA closer to my home. Further, the opportunity to learn how to be a leader and how to organize from experienced members, such as Anthony, is also a privilege I am grateful for.

The Next Six Months

We plan to continue our recruitment of western Wayne County residents into SOWW and develop them into socialist organizers, through a cycle in which each new cohort is taught by the last. We will report back to membership again in six months at the December 2026 General Meeting. Through both our verbal and written debriefs we hope to continue normalizing open reporting on the successes and failures of our organizing work so we can all learn from it together.

Socialists are Organizing in Western Wayne County was originally published in The Detroit Socialist on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.