Mutual Aid Working Group Session
Monday, April 13 at 6:30pm PST (Online)
Join DSA Ventura County’s Mutual Aid Working Group for a planning meeting focused on addressing unmet needs in Ventura County. Bring your big ideas, suggestions for coalition partners, and a desire to stand in solidarity with others. We are cookin’ up some ideas, and will post an agenda on our slack.
Sponsored by
From your Editor: Socialist Sounds
April 2026 Newsletter
Music and the Movement: Sharing Songs
Since the start of the leftist movement, songs have been of paramount importance in lifting spirits and sharing stories of bravery, solidarity, and a better world.
Countless people have been moved in spirit and into action by Which Side are you On, Power in a Union, and the UK Labour Party anthem Bread and Roses. These songs can speak to us still. But many new artists are expressing the spirit of the working class.
So it is my privilege and joy to share my current playlist of modern Folk and Americana inspired songs: DSA Playlist - Recent Americana/Folk If you like Carsie Blanton, she will be performing in Earlville and Naples, NY in June and in Syracuse in October!
New songs that inspire with hip-hop vibes include Cure for Paranoia and DAMAG3.
Please share the songs that inspire you!
Send what inspires you to newsletter@syracusedsa.org for inclusion in next month’s Newsletter.
April in Labor History
April 2026 Newsletter
Labor Movement Hero: Mother Jones
by Comrade Alex R
In the midst of a growing nation that was reaching the peak of its industrial development, prosperity, capital gains, and expansion was the projection of American society to the world in the late 19th and early 20th century. Manufacturing, industrialization, and technological advancements characterized the country at this time. However, a vast majority of the country was not benefiting from or living within the prosperity that was advertised. Instead, what was on the forefront of the daily life of workers was the conspicuous wealth inequality, the minimal amount of workers’ rights, unsafe working conditions, and horrid living conditions. In order to be exploited further, many workers were ostracized for organizing, kept largely uneducated, and were purposefully limited in their material possessions to keep them dependent on their employer.
The time was ripe for an awakening of the working class and for someone to fearlessly lead them in their fight. As Mary Jones stated, “[These] were the days of sacrifice for the cause of labor (Jones, pg. 14).” Mary Harris Jones (well known as Mother Jones) took on this challenge and has become renowned for major contributions to the labor movement. Among her accomplishments are massively expanding the United Mine Workers of America, helping to eliminate child labor, and co-founding the Industrial Workers of the World (Jones). This does not even touch on the vast number of strikes and demonstrations she led or the countless number of workers she helped unionize. Beyond her renowned fiery speech and relentless toughness, her ability to draw from her own experience and her dedication to fighting for her class molded her into the labor hero she has become.
Mother Jones’ background is a major factor as to why she was such a prominent figure in the labor movement. The trials she faced throughout her life prior to work in the labor movement hardened and emboldened her. As a first generation immigrant from Ireland, Jones witnessed the toil and struggle of her people who had to work to earn passage to North America. Upon arriving, she experienced discrimination based on her heritage and witnessed the toil of her father who worked on the railroads. Additionally, soon after marrying, her husband (a member of the Iron Moulders’ Union) and four children died of yellow fever in the epidemic of 1867 (Jones, pg. 13). This was one of the first moments that Jones has noted as stirring her to action. A startling observation she made was that the victims of this epidemic were “mainly among the poor and the workers [as] the rich and well-to-do” had the means to leave the disease ridden city (Jones, pg. 12). This experience riled her to action as a nurse for her sickly neighbors. Following this, in her work as a dressmaker, she was appalled by the gross discrepancy in wealth as she saw the “poor, shivering wretches, jobless and hungry” next to the apathetic “tropical comfort” and “luxury and extravagance” of the upper class (Jones, pg. 13). Soon after much of her life was destroyed in the Great Chicago Fire and she found herself in the labor movement as a frustrated, hardworking individual with a rising class consciousness. Mother Jones leaned on the trials and lessons she learned throughout her life and used them to formulate a clear worldview that relied on equity, fairness, and justice for the working class.
Another central tenet of Mother Jones’ work was acknowledging the difference in the experiences of the socioeconomic classes of the time. Rather than turning a blind eye, she embraced these differences and approached the burgeoning labor movement from this lens. Her contempt and vitriol for the wealthy and their government lackeys was inherent to her approach. Speaking largely to groups with limited education and limited social safety nets (including health care, child care, social services, etc.), she was ruthless in calling out career politicians who were clearly bought by the wealthy and passed legislation for their causes. At one demonstration, she expounded about the “prosperity of the rich” being “wrung from the poor and helpless” all while chastising the “legislators [who] in one hour pass three bills the relief of the railways” while bills on labor go untouched (Jones, pg. 80-81). Jones attacked the newspapers who limited coverage of the movement because “mill owners had stock in the papers (Jones, pg. 70).” Intimidation was not an option for Jones and loudly proclaiming her criticisms of the upper class helped to fuel the class solidarity necessary for labor movements to succeed. Beyond this, she confronted many of the top politicians in the country, confronted mine owners, police officials, and every proxy of the upper class without trepidation. All the while, she injected a class consciousness and educated the working class on how to succeed through solidarity.
The principles and beliefs that Mother Jones proclaimed to the masses were essential to her role as a prominent figure in labor history; however, her true impact was not her speeches. It was that she lived her beliefs, fortified the labor movement with more class consciousness, and built solidarity among workers. She engaged in the very labor struggles she spoke passionately about, fought side by side with striking workers, organized all that were willing (and many who were hesitant and reluctant), and wore her label as an “agitator” proudly. The model of Mother Jones is one that teaches us to live our struggle, get our hands dirty, fight in the name of class solidarity, and to stand with our fellow worker in the face of adversity. She reminds us that “there are no limits to which powers of privilege will not go to keep the workers in slavery (Jones, pg. 27)” and to be “not afraid to face any thing if facing it may bring relief to the class that [you] belong to (Jones, pg. 87).”
Jones, Mother. The Autobiography of Mother Jones. Edited by Mary Field Parton, Charles H. Kerr & Company, 1925.
The entirety of Mother Jones’ Autobiography can be read for free here. Thanks Alex!
Send your creative work to newsletter@syracusedsa.org for inclusion in next month’s Newsletter.
Syracuse DSA in the News
April 2026 Newsletter
Socialism in the News
Democratic Socialism has been in the news this year like never before. With the success of the Mamdani campaign national and local news organizations have taken notice of the DSA and our aims. We’re glad to have the attention!
Protest Coverage
Syracuse DSA and allied organizations taking part in protests in Syracuse. Keep showing up and making your voices heard, comrades!
Protesters gather in Syracuse to oppose U.S. strikes and capture of Venezuela’s president Syracuse.com - January 4, 2026
Dozens of protesters gather in downtown Syracuse to condemn U.S. actions against VenezuelaWAER Syracuse Public Media - January 8, 2026
Syracuse citizen groups plan large protest Monday against ICE raids after Minnesota killing WAER Syracuse Public Media - January 11, 2026
Syracuse activists plan anti-ICE protest and march on Monday Syracuse.com - January 11, 2026
More than 1,200 rally in Syracuse against Trump immigration crackdown, killing of Renee Good Syracuse.com - January 12, 2026
Hundreds of people protest ICE and Trump administration immigration policy in Syracuse WAER Syracuse Public Media - January 13, 2026
‘Ice Out of Everywhere’ protest draws crowd in Downtown Syracuse LocalSYR.com - January 30, 2026
Melt the Contracts/Mass Surveillance
Melt the Contracts is an initiative of the Syracuse DSA International Solidarity Committee. It seeks to ban the city from establishing new contracts with vendors that have direct involvement in illegal detainment by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). This issue came to a head when the city switched from Flock to Axon for their license plate reading surveillance software.
Local advocates want to ‘melt’ Syracuse’s links to ICE. Will lawmakers listen? Central Current - January 14, 2026
Syracuse looks to a familiar company for replacing controversial license plate readers Syracuse.com - January 21, 2026
Syracuse lawmakers to urge governor, state legislature to enact ‘New York For All’Central Current - January 21, 2026
Activists want Ryan McMahon to stop ‘colluding’ with ICE. What’s that mean? Syracuse.com - January 23, 2026
Syracuse police to pitch lawmakers on switching license plate reader provider Central Current - February 5, 2026
ICE protesters removed from Syracuse council meeting amid vote on license plate readers Syracuse.com - February 9, 2026
Why Syracuse lawmakers’ voting session became a meltdown between activists and lawmakers Central Current - February 9, 2026
Syracuse lawmakers approve contract for Axon license plate readers, plan to block Flock Safety from city streets Central Current - February 9, 2026
Syracuse drivers are under corporate surveillance. Where’s the outrage? (Your Letters) Syracuse.com - February 14, 2026
Syracuse lawmakers ice out Flock Safety in favor of company contracting with ICECentral Current - March 23, 2026
Endorsed Candidates
Syracuse Democratic Socialists of America have endorsed Tammy Honeywell (County Legislative District 8), Maurice Brown (State Assembly District 129), and Jo Bennett (County Legislative District 15) as our Affordability Slate for Syracuse and Onondaga County!
Onondaga County legislator launches primary challenge to longtime state Assemblyman Bill Magnarelli for CNY seat Spectrum News 1 - February 20, 2026
Mo Brown launches primary bid to unseat Bill Magnarelli for NY Assembly seat in Syracuse Syracuse.com - February 20, 2026
Mo Brown launches primary campaign against Bill Magnarelli, a fixture of Syracuse politicsCentral Current - February 9, 2026
Onondaga County Legislature candidate trio launches Affordability Slate The Daily Orange - February 21, 2026
Democratic Socialist to primary ex-lawmaker in race for Mo Brown’s county legislature seat Syracuse.com - February 24, 2026
Other Stories
Syracuse Democratic Socialists say election wins by Mamdani & Ehrenreich can improve public policyWAER Syracuse Public Media - January 14, 2026 (scroll down for the full 25 minute interview)
Africa Initiative, SU’s Young Democratic Socialists denounce Project 2025 The Daily Orange - March 28, 2026
More views of Good Cause Eviction (Your Letters) Syracuse.com - February 18, 2026 (See second letter by Jo Bennett)
Did we miss anything? Please send any additions, corrections or updates to newsletter@syracusedsa.org
April Events
April 2026 Newsletter
April 1st - Wednesday - Mutual Aid Committee meeting at 601 Allen and on Zoom. See #mutual-aid-committee on Slack
April 4th and 5th - Saturday & Sunday - Affordability Slate Canvassing - Sign up here
April 6th - Monday - Organizing Committee meeting on Zoom. See #organizing-committee on Slack
April 8th - Wednesday - International Solidarity Committee meeting at 601 Allen and Zoom. See #international-solidarity-committee on Slack
April 11th and 12th - Saturday & Sunday - Affordability Slate Canvassing - Sign up here
April 12th - Sunday - Syracuse DSA Reading Group - Topic: Municipal Socialism - See details here
April 15th - Wednesday - Mutual Aid Committee meeting at 601 Allen and on Zoom. See #mutual-aid-committee on Slack
April 18th - Allied Event - Building Beloved Community Beyond the Binary Conference
April 18th and 19th - Saturday & Sunday - Affordability Slate Canvassing - Sign up here
April 20th - Monday - Organizing Committee meeting on Zoom. See #organizing-committee on Slack
April 22nd - Wednesday - International Solidarity Committee meeting at 601 Allen and Zoom. See #international-solidarity-committee on Slack
April 25th and 26th - Saturday & Sunday - Affordability Slate Canvassing - Sign up here
April 26th - Sunday - First Socialist Sunday Social at TBD - 6 to 8 PM (Request to RSVP coming soon!)
April 28th - Tuesday - Steering Committee Meeting
Did we miss anything? Please send any additions, corrections or updates to newsletter@syracusedsa.org
Committee Updates
April 2026 Newsletter
International Solidarity (ISC)
The International Solidarity Committee has been busy! We have multiple projects working currently.
We are continuing to put pressure on the Syracuse Common Council to introduce our Melt the Contracts resolution. It is looking very likely that we will have an update this month. We will be putting out calls for members to show solidarity at Council meetings as more details solidify.
We are looking for volunteers for 4th Amendment Workplace trainings, please contact committee co-chairs if you are interested.
A chapter-wide ICE Watch training will be taking place in April. Details will follow but a Know Your Rights training must be completed first along with filling out the SIRDN interest form here.
We are still in the process of getting our CNY-BDS coalition off the ground. We are looking for members willing to initiate conversations with businesses, help with designing materials, and help participating businesses determine products on the BDS list.
Mutual Aid
The Mutual Aid Committee this month reviewed the success of the free store hosted with Muslim Mosaic at the Ramadan Festival. We discussed improvements that can be made to ensure cultural sensitivity and community support.
We are working on a Event/Project proposal form to be utilized for projects so we can better organize and see them through to completion!
We hosted a Marshaling training to educate community members on police abolitionist aligned tactics that ensure safety at protests, demonstrations, and other events. This will help support increased community actions and marshal capacity.
We are also looking to do other skill shares in the future regarding a variety of topics so be on the look-out for those!
Overall, we are set up to continue our outreach and involvement in providing community support and to build the presence of mutual aid in Syracuse and surrounding areas.
Engagement
After a brief hiatus the Engagement Committee is taking shape as a working group until we are ready to launch again as a fully-fledged committee.
Engagement will lean into contributing to the Newsletter and making an audio version of the Newsletter for the Podcast.
New projects include planning more social events and starting a DSA 101 course in May.
Electoral & Labor
Electoral and Labor committees are on a brief hiatus due to membership becoming engaged in the campaigns of our endorsed candidates. These committees will be revamped and relaunched during the Spring as social and networking groups and will reform into committees as participation requires. Please contact Mike P on Slack or labor@syracusedsa.org if you'd like to be a part of this effort.
Did we miss anything? Please send any additions, corrections or updates to newsletter@syracusedsa.org
From DC to Silicon Valley: the DMV's protests against Big Tech’s role in genocide
War, Weapons, the Working Class—and BWXT
Four weeks into Operation Epic Fury, the bombs are still falling, the Strait of Hormuz is closed, and the war on Iran shows no signs of restraint. While pundits debate geopolitics, a simpler, more brutal transaction is taking place. The working class of multiple nations is paying for war with their labor, their safety, and their lives, while a transnational capitalist class collects the dividends.
War doesn’t merely “cost” the working class; it devours us. In the United States, it is the children of working-class communities who are sent to the front lines, young people whose futures are consumed by a conflict that serves interests far removed from their own.
In Iran, the cost is even more pointed. Over 1,500 Iranians have been killed1 in the bombing campaign so far. Their love, labor, and futures have been stolen from their families, their communities. The Iranian working class, already squeezed by years of sanctions, now finds itself ground up in a conflict it neither chose nor can escape.
The financial dimension of war is theft. In the U.S., nearly $900 million per day2 is being extracted from the public treasury and funneled directly into the pockets of defense contractors. The $11.3 billion3 in munitions expended in the first week of Operation Epic Fury represents a staggering transfer of wealth. Each Tomahawk missile is a product of human labor—factory workers, engineers, supply chain workers—whose efforts have been directed not toward housing, healthcare, or climate stability, but toward destruction.
When the munitions run low, the Pentagon will demand more. Public money flows to private hands; human labor is converted into instruments of death; the defense industry grows fat while communities crumble.
Jonesborough, Tennessee: Pentagon Subcontractor
The supply chain for those weapons passes much closer to home than you may realize. Defense contractor BWXT plans to construct a high-purity depleted uranium (HPDU) manufacturing plant here in Northeast Tennessee.
When operational, BWXT’s plant will produce 300 metric tons of HDPU annually4: enough for more than a million rounds of 30mm armor-piercing incendiary ammunition.
BWXT’s third-quarter 2025 revenue reached $866 million, with government operations accounting for 71% of that total5. This is public money, generated by the labor of American workers, being funneled into corporate profits. The product of that labor? Depleted uranium weapons already being deployed in active war zones.
Contamination Here and Abroad
The munitions made from HPDU do not simply disappear after a conflict ends. They fracture, ignite, and scatter as radioactive and chemically toxic contamination. The fine uranium oxide dust produced when they burn is readily inhaled, retained in the lungs, and deposited in lymph nodes, bones, the brain, and reproductive organs. It travels by wind and rain, settles into soil and waterways, and enters the food chain. The contamination persists across generations.
The same risks come with the production. Processing HPDU generates small, insoluble uranium particulates. Inhaling or ingesting this DU dust causes kidney damage, while long-term exposure may lead to lung cancer or reproductive harm. DU in soil creates contamination that lingers for decades. Waste from processing raises levels of radioactive material in water—particularly for the families who live closest to the facility. The profits from all of this flow to BWXT and its shareholders. The contaminated groundwater, the radioactive emissions, the ever-present possibility of accidents: those stay right in Jonesborough.
Just this week ten out of fifteen members of the Washington County Board of Commissioners voted to rezone agricultural land—surrounded by homes, farms, and schools—to industrial, because BWXT wanted it and because these commissioners, apparently, like to feel good about producing weapons of war, whatever the cost to the community.
Here is what makes that vote especially hard to swallow. BWXT already has industrially zoned property suited for expanding its operations. “Inside the existing M2 industrial zone…we have enough footprint to fit in the expansion,” BWXT’s President of Tennessee Operations Ron Dailey has told WJHL6. The company indicated it would proceed with expansion on that property if the rezoning wasn’t approved. And at the March 23 meeting, we learned that the projected job numbers and tax revenue would be the same wherever they put their facility. Two-thirds of our commissioners gave away use of land that belonged to this community anyway, to a corporation whose product is meant for no other purpose than killing.
Our Fight Isn’t on the Front Lines
The opposition and organization that has arisen here against BWXT represents a refusal to accept that our community should be sacrificed for the profit of the military-industrial complex.
The war on Iran and the expansion in Jonesborough are two sides of the same coin, one that connects the Pentagon to the war machine’s shareholders, the battlefield to the backyard, and the extraction of wealth and health from working communities to the enrichment of the billionaire class.
The American worker has no enemy in the Iranian worker. The enemy is the system that extracts labor, converts it into destruction, and distributes the plunder among the ruling class. The workers who manufacture missiles in Connecticut, or depleted uranium in Tennessee, and the workers who dodge them in Tehran share a class interest in disarmament, in peace, in the redirection of resources to life-sustaining purposes.
The trillions spent on war could fund the transformation to renewable energy, free healthcare and education, dignified housing. That wealth was created by workers. It belongs to us.
The only force capable of ending this cycle is workers themselves, organized across borders, united not by nationality but by class, and determined to build a world where human labor is no longer converted into human death.
The international working class did not start this war. We will, though, as always, pay its bill: in blood, in futures, and in the slow erosion of the public resources that might have built something worth living for.
What is being done to us—in Tennessee, in Tehran—is not a tragedy that fell from the sky. It is a decision made by the powerful. It can be unmade by the many.
References:
- US-Israel attacks on Iran: Death toll and injuries live tracker | Conflict News | Al Jazeera
- How much does the Iran war cost? Here’s what Pentagon estimates show
- Iran war costs US taxpayers over $890 mln per day, think tank finds – CGTN
- Nuclear components maker BWX Technologies awarded $1.6 billion HPDU contract | Reuters
- BWX Technologies Reports Q3 2024 Results: Revenue Exceeds Expectations Amid Strong Government Operations – BWXT News – BeyondSPX
- BWXT leader answers questions on depleted uranium project | WJHL | Tri-Cities News & Weather
Fascism: Finance Capital’s Insurance Policy Against the Working Class
There’s a particular kind of violence that comes dressed as paperwork. It looks like lease renewals, mortgage statements, and subsidized housing wait lists. This is violence wrought by financial capital, and we can see it written all over our region.
In Johnson City, median rents rose 24–35% between 2023 and 20251. The city’s own report admits these hikes “outpace household income growth” and “likely create some affordability challenges for area renters.” No kidding, especially with a 1% vacancy rate that gives landlords virtually unlimited leverage. Meanwhile, the number of mortgages in Northeast Tennessee that are “seriously underwater” jumped 29% last year2. More and more of our neighbors owe the bank more than their home is worth, making it impossible for them to sell or refinance.
This is the squeeze of finance capital. On the rental side, institutional investors and algorithms extract maximum payment from people with no alternatives. On the ownership side, the same financialization inflates prices beyond what wages support, leaving working people in mortgages they can get out of. The renter and the underwater homeowner aren’t in different situations; they’re in different rooms of the same burning house.
This financialization of everything, housing included, creates a society where a tiny minority owns the means of shelter, the resources, and the credit, while the vast majority works merely to service that ownership. Such a society is inherently unstable. It generates contradictions that cannot be resolved within the framework of democratic consent.
The Contradictions That Finance Capital Cannot Resolve
The first contradiction is that financialization extracts value without creating it. A private equity firm that buys apartment complexes, strips maintenance, and raises rents isn’t building anything, it’s siphoning wealth upward, steadily destroying the purchasing power and stability of the working class that the whole system depends on.
The second is that finance capital needs the state desperately—for bailouts, property rights enforcement, contract law, and suppression of labor unrest—while simultaneously needing to convince people that the state is their enemy and the market is freedom. This is why the same political movement that defunds public housing also demands the Federal Reserve protect asset values.
The third is that financialized housing turns a basic human need into a speculative asset class. The conditions that make housing profitable—scarcity, rising prices—are the same conditions that make it inaccessible. The system cannot solve the housing affordability crisis without devaluing the asset that millions of people’s retirement savings are tied up in. It is structurally incapable of fixing the problem it created.
When Reform Is Off the Table
These contradictions don’t stay abstract for long. They show up as evictions, as skipped medications, as payday loans taken out to cover rent. This misery hardens into anger, and anger, when it has nowhere to go, becomes fuel.
When that fuel starts to smoke, the owning class has two options: concede reforms, like with the New Deal, or redirect the anger toward scapegoats—immigrants, trans people, women—while consolidating control.
This second option is fascism. It’s deployed when the ruling class calculates that conceding reforms would cost too much. They capture the state instead, and make sure the machinery of government serves the extractors, not the people.
The post-2008 period essentially foreclosed the reform option: The political center spent fifteen years bailing out banks while telling working people that austerity was responsible governance. That credibility is gone. When the anger finally has nowhere legitimate to go, the scapegoating infrastructure—already built, already funded—is right there waiting.
Fascism isn’t a personality type or a brand of meanness, though it can feel that way. It is a political response to the contradictions that finance capital creates and cannot resolve any other way.
The Ground Is Ours
Here’s what finance capital cannot do: it cannot pick up your neighborhood and move it somewhere more profitable. Capital is stuck here, which means it’s accountable here—if we make it so. That’s where our power lives, and we don’t need to wait for an election to use it. We can organize now, right where we live, starting with the most basic act: talking with our neighbors.
The financiers count on us feeling powerless. But they need our neighborhoods, our towns, and our labor. They cannot extract wealth from a place if the people of that place refuse to be extracted from.
The road back from fascism runs through our home. When we take back control of where and how we live, we starve the beast. The rentier class knows this. It’s time we all did too.
References:
Centrists Out of Step: Abolish ICE Is the Majority Position
Since the mass deportation surge began last year, ICE’s record of brutality and criminality have driven millions of people into the streets, the largest sustained anti-ICE mobilization this country has seen. The murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, and the victory of Minneapolis over ICE that followed, poured fuel on a fire that was already burning.
The public’s verdict on the Trump regime’s mask-off turn has been swift and unambiguous. According to the Economist/YouGov poll conducted February 27–March 2, 2026, half of all Americans now support abolishing ICE, among them a majority of independents (52 percent) and nearly a quarter of Republicans (23 percent)1.A clear majority of Americans say ICE uses excessive force. Nearly half say they have no confidence in the agency at all.
This is what we mean when we say the morning after is already here. The new world struggles to be born, and the centrists line up to kill it in the cradle.
Centrists Intend to Kill the Movement
The Democratic Party’s centrist establishment has not been subtle about its intentions. Third Way, the corporate-funded outfit that exists largely to police the party’s left flank, put out a memo in January warning that abolishing ICE risks “squandering one of the clearest opportunities in years to secure meaningful reform” while “handing Republicans exactly the fight they want.”2 Third Way speaks for the people whose money funds it, the same financial and corporate interests that benefit from a workforce kept precarious, deportable, and afraid to organize. The public’s anger, in their telling, is a resource to be managed rather than something that might determine policy. That is not a strategic assessment. It is a class position.
This is the familiar playbook. Reform the rhetoric. Keep the structure. Buy enough time for the anger to fade. The centrists positioning themselves for 2028 are not neutral managers of a difficult moment. They are representatives of a class that has always found ICE useful. They are already working to transform majority support for abolition into a years-long negotiation about body cameras, training, and supervisory chains of command.
This is not a disagreement about tactics. It is a disagreement about whose interests the Democratic Party exists to serve and what role the state should play in the class struggle. The centrists have answered that question consistently for fifty years. There is no reason to expect a different answer now.
There Is No Southern Exception
The South is not exempt from these national trends. The January 2026 NPR/PBS News/Marist poll tells a story that defies efforts to set the lowest expectations. Fifty-eight percent of Southerners say ICE is making Americans less safe. Sixty percent say ICE has gone too far in enforcing immigration laws. A majority view the anti-ICE demonstrations as mostly legitimate protests.3 “Abolish ICE” does not stop at the Mason-Dixon Line, no matter what our politicians pretend.
And we sure have some pretenders here in Northeast Tennessee. Some even wear their accommodation with ICE as a pragmatic virtue, noting warm relationships with local sheriffs, describing their votes for ICE collaboration as unavoidable, consoling themselves with the thought that a “no” vote would not have changed the outcome anyway. They express something like regret and ultimately conclude that the right response to facilitating a harmful system is to seek a humane working relationship with those who run it.
287(g) Helps ICE and Hurts Us, No Matter How You Spin It
The fight to abolish ICE must begin in our cities and in our counties, and we must reject local accommodation, no matter how much our centrists wish to give it the appearance of “reasonable” policy-making. 287(g) agreements are a prime example. The program deputizes local law enforcement to carry out federal immigration enforcement, and serves as a force multiplier for ICE’s masked men.
Our county sheriffs, constables, and commissioners have been all too willing to sign on. Sullivan County operates under both the Warrant Service Officer model and the Task Force Model, the latter of which authorizes deputies to stop, question, and detain people on suspicion of “illegal” status during ordinary patrol duties—traffic stops, calls for service, encounters on the street. It’s a warrant for racial profiling and terror, and Sheriff Cassidy is all aboard. Washington County operates under the WSO model alone, which Sheriff Sexton sold to commissioners as purely administrative, confined to the jail. Nothing changes, he said. Just paperwork. And every single Washington County Commissioner backed him up.
But there is no version of 287(g) that is just paperwork. Every model serves to bolster an agency the majority of Americans want abolished, and to enable the real and devastating deportation of community members–farmworkers, kitchen workers, parents of children in our schools–picked up for something as trivial as a speeding ticket.
Sullivan County: The People Said No, The Commission Said Yes
In February, ICE conducted a sweep in Sullivan County in close coordination with Sheriff Cassidy’s office. Twenty-nine people were taken.4 The operation bore the hallmarks of ICE at its most inhumane—not “paperwork,” but community raids that left people feeling unsafe in their own neighborhoods.
Just days later, the Sullivan County Commission met to consider accepting $215,000 from the Department of Homeland Security and the Tennessee Department of Safety and Homeland Security to formally expand and equip Sheriff Cassidy’s 287(g) Task Force operation. The commission chambers were packed. Speaker after speaker rose in opposition. “This is where we get to decide what side of history we’re going to be on,” one attendee told the commission.5
The commission placed both resolutions on the consent agenda and passed them unanimously, without permitting the full public comment the packed room had come to deliver. And is it any wonder? This is the same commission that voted to make the still-unfinished Sullivan County jail the most expensive construction project in the county’s history. They chose concrete and cages over the affordable housing, healthcare, and education. Cages for immigrants and cages for the poor are two expressions of the same politics, and the Sullivan County Commission has enthusiastically endorsed both. At least they didn’t bother with the performative hand-wringing we’ve seen in Washington County.
What Is To Be Done
The people who packed that Sullivan County commission chamber knew exactly what they were there for. They came because they oppose ICE, because they oppose their county’s collaboration with ICE, and because they understand that the morning-after fight is happening now, in these rooms, on these agendas. That room full of people is the proof that abolition has a home in Northeast Tennessee, whatever our commissioners and sheriffs pretend.
Our immediate demands follow directly from that reality:
No to any new funding from ICE for any purpose in any county in our region.
No to any commissioner approving any increase in the sheriff’s budget until 287(g) agreements are cancelled.
Our long-term position is that of today’s majority: abolish ICE, plain and simple.
We are not naïve about the terrain. The right dominates the Sullivan County Commission and most of the offices in Northeast Tennessee. Their position on ICE is an honest one: they support it, and they say so.
For us, the first task is to win the battle against the centrists intent on giving ICE collaboration an appearance of reasonableness while castigating the majority as extremists. Break that false consensus and more people will see the right’s position for what it actually is: a minority opinion in defiance of the public will.
If a new world is to be born, it will be people like those who packed the Sullivan County Commission chambers who will ensure it happens. Sustained, organized working-class power, rooted in communities and built through relationships, is what turns a majority position into a political reality.
That is what the morning after looks like when it is built from below. If this is your fight too, it is time to get involved. Join us at northeasttndsa.org.
References:
- Economist/YouGov Poll, Feb. 27–Mar. 2, 2026. https://yougov.com/en-us/articles/54225-support-for-abolishing-ice-reaches-50-percent-february-27-march-2-2026-economist-yougov-poll
- Third Way memo, January 2026. https://www.thirdway.org/memo/democrats-abolish-ice-abuses-not-ice
- NPR/PBS News/Marist Poll, Jan. 27–30, 2026.
https://maristpoll.marist.edu/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/NPR_PBS-News_Marist-Poll_USA-NOS-and-Tables_202602021147.pdf - WJHL News. https://www.wjhl.com/news/local/29-illegal-immigrant-located-during-local-ice-operation-sheriffs-office-says/
- WJHL News. https://www.wjhl.com/news/local/sullivan-co-commission-approves-immigration-funding-resolutions-during-contentious-meeting/