This article first appeared in the spring issue of Washington Socialist. It has been lightly edited.

The imperial hegemons are on the march. As Israel and the United States forge ahead with their (paused, for now) futile war of choice in Iran, the ancient Persian country has retaliated asymmetrically by attacking nearby US bases and launching strikes on Gulf-area fossil fuel infrastructure. Combined with Iran’s conditional closure of the Strait of Hormuz — through which 20% of global oil and gas supplies transit — these events have sent oil and gas prices skyrocketing, portending a possible global recession.

The world is witnessing a world-historic oil shock that could acutely harm the global working class, especially the poorest among us. This is all due to Israel’s unhinged, insane desire to destabilize Iran, a country roughly four times the size of Iraq that boasts more than 90 million people and a military system built to withstand prolonged conflict. Western capitalists are clutching their pearls like we’ve never seen before. As Isabella Weber and Gregor Semieniuk write in The New Statesman, “one thing is certain: there is a blow coming for the global economy through the supply chain, no matter how soon the war ends,” characterized by “inflation, redistribution shocks, shortages, stagflation and global financial instability.” The authors elaborate how “the far right is the likely winner,” as such effects will by and large strengthen capital at workers’ expense.

While oil prices and widespread inflation represent two of the most palpable effects of this conflict, fragile supply chains mean another critical sector will suffer — food. This war is likely to cause almost immediate damage to global agriculture through increasing energy and fertilizer costs as Africa and Asia begin their planting seasons, potentially pushing tens of millions into acute hunger.

The illegal, unprovoked war on Iran has thrown several truths into stark relief in dramatic fashion. First, petrochemicals have become an existential weak link for capitalist civilization. Global society metabolizes fossil fuel as its lifeblood. Petrochemicals go into the production of everything from jet fuel and pharmaceuticals to semiconductors, medical imaging, and industrial manufacturing. Much of Europe could freeze without a steady supply of methane gas. Such over-reliance on fossil fuels leaves societies increasingly vulnerable to disruption; all this despite scientists’ years-long global consensus that we need “rapid and far-reaching transitions across all sectors and systems… to achieve deep and sustained emissions reductions and secure a liveable [sic] and sustainable future for all.”

The Gulf region and Strait of Hormuz represent a single point of failure for the production not just of oil and gas, but many other commodities such as chemicals — the region is exposing deep fragility in the global capitalist system. As Peter McKillop writes, “fossil fuels aren’t a shield against chaos. They are a conduit for it.” Fossil fuels’ unparalleled profitability make them lightning rods for conflict. 

Humans and their societies are utterly dependent on fossil fuels to grow, process, transport, and make food. To the world’s misfortune, 58% of synthetic fertilizer production depends on fossil fuels, namely methane (euphemistically misnamed “natural”) gas. As a result of the imperialist war in the Gulf, methane gas production has taken heavy blows, sending the prices for some fertilizers soaring 30–40%. Alarmingly, because the Strait of Hormuz facilitates 30% of global fertilizer trade, the war could endanger two key ingredients in synthetic fertilizer production, ammonia and urea. Reuters reports that “there are no strategic global stockpiles for fertilizers,” so if we lose them, many national food systems could soon be imperiled.

It is in the interests of no one but capitalists to have such a key food system input entirely reliant on fossil fuels, a volatile class of commodities at the utmost mercy of geopolitical power plays and dangerous price fluctuations. Socialists must organize against fossil capitalism by working to transform our toxic, industrial, and unjust food system into one that empowers workers and communities around the world to feed themselves while regenerating nature.

Mining the Soil, Poisoning Life

How is it that a regional war halfway across the world could have such a disproportionate impact on global food systems? Because of humanity’s reliance on industrial agriculture. Industrial agriculture (IA) was the inevitable creation of capitalism, a social system reliant on unlimited physical expansion and a logic of violence against land and labor. The story of how IA arose in the United States is a complex yet vital one for understanding how we got here.

According to Johns Hopkins University, during the 20th century, agriculture “underwent greater change than it had since it was first adopted some 13,000 years ago.” The pillars of this massive change? Specialization, mechanization, chemical inputs, and consolidation and concentration of capital. Before IA gradually dismantled traditional food systems in the US, the typical American farm produced many different products, both animal and plant. But over the last 150 years, farms have become a kind of land factory, with outputs — such as grains, animals, vegetables — and inputs, such as feed, fertilizer, antibiotics, and pesticides. The new logic was actually the same logic capitalists had been using to run factories and exploit workers for decades: maximize efficiency and productivity while minimizing labor and costs. And this new system was inherently dependent on oil for energy and feedstock — it needed coal, oil, and gas to power itself, as well as to create fertilizers and pesticides. Diets changed as emboldened agribusinesses promoted and normalized fake butter substitutes and industrial seed oils to displace traditional fats like coconut oil, lard, suet, and butter.

With IA, the landscape changed dramatically, too. Whereas rural areas once boasted diverse “agro-ecosystems” mixing crop and animal production, pastures, and woodlands, we now had monocultures — large, single-crop farms specializing in just one product. These new monoculture-based economies of scale pressured farmers to consolidate into larger and larger operations, crowding out smaller, more biodiverse farms. Our food system further changed for the worse as capital consolidated animal slaughtering and processing operations, leading to a decline in once-abundant local slaughterhouses.

If farms became factories, farmworkers became factory workers — and they have traditionally been some of the most vulnerable workers in our society. Both the National Labor Relations Act of 1935 and the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, two of the US’s cornerstone labor laws, explicitly excluded farmworkers. This gave owners and capitalists the power to exploit the people who keep us alive by growing our food in all imaginable weather conditions, day in and day out. Even though extreme heat has been increasing since 2015, as of 2026, farmworkers still have no federal heat protections in place.

Monocultures were central to the so-called Green Revolution (GR), the neoliberal, 1960s project to address hunger by focusing on maximizing efficiency and crop yields through chemical fertilizers and mechanization. As agroecology expert Miguel Altieri details, the GR’s intensification of agriculture may have enhanced crop production — but it also “proved to be unsustainable as it damaged the environment, caused dramatic loss of biodiversity and associated traditional knowledge, favored wealthier farmers, and left many poor farmers deeper in debt.” 

In many ways, the world is still reeling from the effects of the Green Revolution. IA’s heavy reliance on fossil fuels continues to worsen climate change. Fertilizer use generates the potent greenhouse gas nitrous oxide (N₂O), and conventional pesticides and herbicides — like neonicotinoids and RoundUp — wreak havoc on human health and decimate bee populations. By organizing food production around monoculture, IA treats land as if it were barren and expendable, when the exact opposite is true. 

Even worse: in their current form, global food systems fail to meet the world’s dietary needs, with 1 billion people hungry and 2 billion people overweight. Widespread hunger and diabetes-obesity are two of the biggest manifestations of malnutrition, and both stem from the fact that food systems exist to maximize profits, not optimize human diets. From corporate consolidation to malnutrition and the chronic disease epidemic, the modern food system fails to provision human and planetary health, driving instead the deterioration of each.

The causes of hunger are complex, including poverty, conflict, and food loss. But there is no excuse for hunger on a planet that produces enough food for 10 billion people. Twenty percent of all food produced goes to waste, amounting to 1 billion meals per day; this equals $1 trillion in total losses to the global economy. 

Clearly, nothing about the industrial food system is sustainable or desirable. By prioritizing size and efficiency over quality and nutrition per acre, modern farms crank out nutrient-poor foods laden with toxins that harm human health and the environment. Consolidation incentivizes the cheapening of food quality at everyone’s expense. By contrast, creating a food system within planetary boundaries to reverse chronic disease and ecosystem destruction would mean relocalizing food production, making it economical, organic, biodiverse, and as free of toxic inputs as possible. Strong state support will be vital to such food systems transformation toward sustainability and agroecology. Effectively transitioning our food systems away from fossil fuels will harden them against oil price shocks, as well as energy and fertilizer shortages we are very likely to witness as a result of the Iranian war. This is what socialists must organize for — for the good of our farms and the life-support ecosystems that keep earth habitable for us.

A Just Transition Must Center Food Systems Transformation

The war in Iran is exposing the world’s reliance on the fossil fuels destroying our life-support ecosystems — and making clear the urgent need for a just transition to a green economy. What ecosocialists and others on the Left must contend with is that equitably transitioning the food system is just as urgent as quickly phasing out the fossil fuel industry. They go hand in hand. If we do the latter without the former, we are setting up the food system — and society itself — for collapse as extreme weather intensifies.

Remaking our food systems around worker and community control must be core to our project of realizing a socialist society. It is also vital to our work of saving the life-support ecosystems, and earth systems, that our species depends on to survive. Socialists may be unaware that the most important group of climate scientists on Earth, the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), has said that land-based solutions — including agriculture, forestry, and ecosystem management, of which agriculture is a key part — “can not only provide large-scale reductions of emissions but can also remove and store CO₂ at scale,” including benefits to biodiversity and ecosystems. Soil is the largest land-based system that stores carbon — and the most powerful way to enhance soil carbon storage is through agroecology. Agroecology is the holistic, integrated, and Indigenous-informed science of designing and maintaining sustainable food systems. It’s about food production with nature, rather than against it. Current evidence suggests that fully implemented sustainable agriculture could help offset 10–15% of the world’s annual greenhouse gas emissions.

With the Iran war threatening an energy crisis worse than what we saw during COVID-19, and one based on supply rather than demand disruption, the Left has an opportunity to elevate sustainable food systems to their just priority — not as a strategically optional issue, but rather a central tenet of our movement. A survival imperative. (Indeed, the crisis may already be accelerating the global transition to renewables and electrification. Sam Butler-Sloss of the global energy think tank Ember recently opined, “[high] fossil prices drive switching, making already cheap electrotech even more competitive… With electrotech, nations now have the tools to increasingly eliminate imported fuels altogether.”)

We urgently need to bring about a just transition to create a global food system based on food sovereignty and justice, not biopiracy and poor working conditions for farmworkers; biodiversity, not monoculture; one based on climate resilient, small- and medium-scale farming, not industrial farms. The new food system must use integrated pest management and organic principles to maximize human and planetary health, instead of applying toxic pesticides that cause Parkinson’s Disease, cancer, and other maladies. Instead of a highly unequal, corporate-controlled food system dependent on toxic fossil fuel-based inputs, we must seize the means of food production to create a liberatory food system for all. 

Justly transforming the world’s food system would empower global South countries with national sovereignty, including food sovereignty, so they could chart their own developmental course and prioritize feeding their populations first. But while we may aspire to global transformation, we must not neglect our responsibility to change local conditions stateside.

Where the Left Should Go From Here

Internal dynamics on the Left reflect the broader societal tendency to take food systems and food workers for granted. Even on the climate Left, of which I am a part, we have a lamentable tendency to deprioritize — or even dismiss altogether — food systems and rural communities. Yet without them, we couldn’t do socialism. We would starve.

Granted, community gardens are modestly popular among Democratic Socialists of America members and in some DSA chapters. However, while useful for mutual aid and community building, they are an incomplete approach to food systems organizing without rural-urban solidarity work like farmworker organizing. Part of the deprioritization I mention above is understandable; the US population, and thus socialist and leftist capacity, is concentrated in urban areas. Socialists in DSA focus on local-level work in their own or adjacent communities by default — which makes sense — and consequently spend most of their time organizing in cities and neighborhoods. But have we been neglecting rural-urban solidarity work to the detriment of the movement? I believe so.

I am not the first person on the Left to acknowledge this. I strongly agree with AJ Kohler, who writes, “…in order to form a movement that can beat the capitalist class, socialists and DSA must develop a dedicated rural organizing strategy… Census data indicates that about 20% of the entire population lives in ‘rural’ areas…” 

At least some socialists have been concerned about this for some time. Several years ago, a Rural, Suburban, and Small City DSA caucus formed to advocate for priorities that benefited smaller chapters at the 2019 DSA National Convention in Atlanta. To my knowledge, that caucus has since dissolved — but the sentiments behind it have not, because DSA has many rural chapters. Ongoing advocacy has resulted in promising developments for smaller and rural chapters. Dues-sharing, wherein chapters receive a cut of the dues payments their members make, has facilitated fairer resourcing for DSA’s urban and rural chapters alike. Recently, the DSA National Political Committee passed a resolution to increase dues shares to chapters significantly through DSA’s 2027 fiscal year, a promising move to create even more equity across less resourced chapters.

For my chapter, Metro DC DSA, a strong first step for farmworker organizing would be to get the lay of the land by reaching out to organizations such as the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition, Virginia Farmworker Advocacy Network, Farmworker Justice, and the legendary United Farm Workers union. These organizations may be well-positioned to consult us on how and where to connect with local farmworkers, in addition to understanding the extent of unionization in local agriculture. From there, DSA members could connect directly with farmworkers in the DMV, learn about their issues and concerns, and solicit ways or potential campaigns for advancing their causes. 

We can also build stronger urban-rural relationships within DSA. Several years ago, I organized a Regional Solidarity Conference in Northern California to build connections between urban and rural chapters. At the time, I was active in DSA’s East Bay chapter, and Fresno DSA was kind enough to host the conference. The concept was simple: each chapter gave a presentation on its activities, strengths, challenges, and help needed. We were treated to a tour of Fresno, a city in the heart of California’s vast, heavily rural, and agricultural Central Valley — and a city that coastal California routinely dismisses. It was very rewarding to learn from our rural comrades, dance cumbia, and socialize with them. I’m proud to say that that effort led to the strengthening of ties among Central Valley chapters. This is just one example of what is possible when urban chapters intentionally set out to foster ties with their smaller, more rural counterparts.

The Democratic Socialists of America has matured and grown tremendously in the past seven years, through several fraught national leadership cohorts and dramatic political crises. Yet we have a long way to go to strengthen rural-urban solidarity on the one hand, and build an effective campaign for sustainable food systems on the other. Socialists should demand a climate-resilient, worker-controlled, planned, and decentralized food system that is not reliant on single points of failure. We should organize for a food system whose core principles are food sovereignty, carbon negativity, ecological regeneration, and food justice. Without food, the global working class would starve, and societies everywhere would collapse in short order. 

We should no longer take food system workers and the complex ecosystems that allow food to happen for granted. Through farmworker organizing, forging urban-rural solidarity, and advocating for sustainable agriculture policy, we can help evolve the food system from one based on waging war against nature to a system based on food sovereignty, economic justice, climate resilience, and healing the “metabolic rift.” The socialist movement’s success depends on it.

Cape Coral, Florida. Lincoln, Nebraska. Toledo, Ohio. Decatur, Georgia. Minneapolis, Minnesota. These are just a handful of the municipalities in which vigilantes have taken action to cut down, unplug, set fire to, or otherwise disable the automated license plate reader (ALPR) cameras installed by Flock along roadsides across the US.

The spontaneous vandalism of Flock cameras serves as anecdotal evidence of the widespread disdain for this fast-growing network of AI-enabled surveillance technology. But, what exactly do these cameras do?

Flock cameras are marketed to local governments as a tool for public safety. But, what they really do is create a powerful surveillance network capable of recording where and when vehicles travel, with the goal being to build detailed records of people’s movements. That raises serious questions about the ability of law enforcement to track eople without meaningful oversight. It’s also left communities across the country to grapple with the rapid expansion of the technology, and to debate how best to fight back.

Why Should Floridians Care About Flock Cameras?

The Guardian reports that Flock cameras “scan license plates billions of times each month in about 6,000 communities in nearly every state in the US.” As Zach S., a PDSA member and one of the organizers helping launch our DeFlock St. Pete campaign explains:

“These cameras scan the license plate of every passing car and feed this data into a database that can be used by law enforcement to track people’s locations without requiring a search warrant. They also use AI features to record other identifying features of cars like make, model, color, racks, etc. Flock data is also typically shared with thousands of other law enforcement agencies across the country through broad data sharing agreements.

St. Pete started a pilot program in 2022 with 25 cameras, then extended this in 2024 with a $730,000, five-year contract for 50 cameras. This agreement was approved by city council on the consent agenda without any discussion or public input. Due to the limited transparency of St. Pete PD and difficulties acquiring public records, it is very hard to see how Flock is actually being used in the city or what sort of data sharing agreements are in place.”

Did these mass surveillance cameras sprout with any meaningful democratic input from the people being surveilled? Of course not.

Courts have long recognized that certain forms of location tracking require law enforcement to obtain a warrant. For example, courts have ruled that police generally cannot obtain cell phone location data or use GPS trackers to monitor someone’s movements without meeting constitutional requirements.

Flock cameras raise concerns because they can enable a similar form of location tracking without any safeguards. By recording license plates and the locations and times at which vehicles are observed, networks of ALPR cameras can be used to reconstruct where someone has traveled and when.

Anyone who drives through a neighborhood with a Flock camera can have their movements recorded. This isn’t just a civil liberties issue in the abstract; it carries frighteningly real and practical ramifications. Earlier this month, right here in the Tampa Bay area, Haines City Police officer Christopher Goodson was arrested for “misusing” a Flock camera database to stalk his former spouse. As Fox 13 reports, Goodson “logged 717 unauthorized inquiries into his estranged wife’s vehicle between September 2024 and June 2026.”

“Our Fourth Amendment is supposed to protect us from unreasonable search,” Zach added. “Flock is subverting these protections and allows law enforcement to track anyone they want without a warrant. Since the courts are not protecting our Fourth Amendment right, we must take action at the local level to get rid of these cameras so they can not be abused. Until we do so, anyone could be the victim of the[se] abuses.”

Flock Cameras are a Tool of Class & Racial Violence

It shouldn’t go unremarked upon that, wherever these cameras are installed, they can — and will — be used as a tool of racialized class warfare by the ruling class against working people.

“[Flock cameras] are being used to target immigrants, women accessing reproductive healthcare, and political dissidents,” Zach said. “Despite Flock’s claims that ICE is not accessing their data, independent reporting has found multiple times that this is not true. In Texas, a woman was tracked using Flock data for getting an abortion. There are many cases of law enforcement tracking protesters using Flock data.”

The data sharing agreement is of particular concern when we remember the St. Petersburg Police Department still has a 287(g) agreement in place with ICE. This agreement effectively deputizes local officers to perform federal immigration enforcement functions, including issuing immigration detainers to hold individuals for ICE, as well as identifying, interrogating, and processing suspected non-citizens.

Mayor Ken Welch and Police Chief Anthony Holloway have consistently claimed that the city’s 287(g) is just a formality and that local officers are not actively collaborating with ICE. But, where is our assurance that ICE is not being given access to data from the city’s dozens of Flock cameras? Every ALPR stands as an inherent threat to immigrant communities.

Existing data on real-world use of Flock cameras backs this up. The Virginia Center for Investigative Journalism found that law enforcement conducted “nearly 3,000 searches related to immigration enforcement on Virginia’s Flock Safety network” in just a single 12-month period.

The threat is not limited to immigrant communities. An analysis by Christopher Newport University found that majority-Black neighborhoods had four times as many Flock cameras installed compared to majority-white areas. Additional data from Oak Park, Illinois, revealed that 84% of drivers stopped in incidents tied to Flock data were Black, even though Black residents made up only 19% of the local population.

All this shows that Flock cameras are not merely an issue of individual privacy. They are woven into the struggles for racial justice, health justice, international solidarity, and more. This is why, here in St. Petersburg, we’re organizing against the use of Flock cameras and demanding that our city put an end to its contract with the company through our new DeFlock St. Pete campaign.

What are We Asking the City to do?

Our demand is straightforward: remove the cameras. Cancel the city’s contract with Flock and do not replace it with another ALPR vendor.

Dozens of cities and counties around the country have taken action to restrict or end their relationships with Flock. We believe St. Petersburg should join them.

We understand that, in theory, there could be practical applications of ALPR technology. But, the broader question is whether we want to allow a system in which the government can continuously collect information about where ordinary people travel without any meaningful oversight or accountability. This is critical; if we fail to reject this level of surveillance overreach now, then it will be almost impossible to undo later.

Our message to St. Pete city leaders: public safety and civil liberties are not mutually exclusive. We can protect our communities without creating infrastructure that can be used to surveil, over-police, terrorize, and abuse them.

How Can You Get Involved?

This campaign is just getting started, and building a successful movement will require educating and organizing people throughout our community.

We’re planning presentations to local organizations, canvassing, social media outreach, and other public education efforts. We’ll also be reaching out to elected officials and candidates in St. Petersburg to discuss our concerns surrounding Flock cameras and ask where they stand on the issue.

The interest from the community is there. The DeFlock St. Pete campaign kickoff event hosted at the Barack Obama Main Library on August 15th saw an overwhelming turnout; so much so, in fact, that more than two dozen people unfortunately had to be turned away due to capacity issues at the library. This shows that concerns about surveillance extend well beyond our organization, and plenty of ordinary Pinellas County residents are already onboard to #DeFlockStPete!

Organizers have set up dedicated communication channels to help coordinate the campaign. Pinellas DSA members who want to get more involved in the campaign are welcome to join! More information will be available through Discord and, where appropriate, at meetings of our Socialists in Office Working Group.

Flock cameras are already here. The question we now face is: do we allow an expansive surveillance infrastructure to become a permanent part of our community? Or, do we organize now to stop it?

Get involved, talk to your neighbors, and help us demand a St. Petersburg where privacy and civil liberties are protected for everyone! Together, we will DeFlock St. Pete!

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This Week, the Department of Homeland Security announced that it is abandoning its intention to build a detention facility in a warehouse on Salt Lake City’s west side. This partial victory belongs not to politicians grandstanding in the courts but to the tireless mass organizing of Salt Lakers and working people nationwide. From the activists who showed up week after week to protest at the site of the planned concentration camp, to the citizens who put pressure on elected officials to get creative when opposing this facility, to the workers who refused to build DHS’s brutal machinery.

While we are under no illusions that the abandonment of one cog in the mass deportation machine will end ICE terror, we nevertheless celebrate this as a win and commit ourselves to continuing the fight. We must work to abolish ICE and DHS altogether. This starts by forcing cities like Riverton to cut their 287(g) contracts, the current campaign by our Immigrant Solidarity Working Group. If you, like us, believe that the only way to grind the gears of deportation to a halt is to build working class power, we invite you to join Salt Lake DSA and organize with us.

Contact: SLDSA Steering Committee | steering@saltlakedsa.org

The post SLDSA Statement on DHS Cancelling ICE Warehouse Plans first appeared on Salt Lake DSA.

Bosses will argue that full-time employees are simply contractors to cut benefits and save money. Here's how to tell if you're misclassified.

The post How to know if you’re misclassified appeared first on EWOC.

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

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

By: Tony A

ANDOVER – The yard signs for hometown candidate Daniel Koh are thick in this suburb north of Boston, as the six-way race for the Massachusetts 6th Congressional District enters its final weeks. A passerby might be curious to ask: “Who is paying for all these signs?”

At least financially, Koh is dominating the field, with over $4 million raised as of the most recent filing deadline. And as the campaign would have it, his campaign is largely funded and backed by labor.

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

I’m proud to stand with labor, and I’m proud to have labor standing with me.

Hear directly from labor leaders on why they’re backing our campaign pic.twitter.com/w3Bko5JdAf

— Dan Koh (@dank) August 11, 2026

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

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

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

For better or worse, Koh is the labor candidate. Given Koh’s resume, this labor coalition is disappointing, but unsurprising.

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

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

Executives & AIPAC Dollars

Labor isn’t the only movement funding Koh.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

If you’re driving by a Koh yard sign, remember it was likely paid for by AIPAC-linked donors, a labor union, or both.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here’s Fisher in chapter 4 of Capitalist Realism: 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So then, what is to be desired? 

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

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

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

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

And so, neither must we, as socialists. 

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

It’s a big week for the Prop I!

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

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

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

See you there!

Events & Actions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Letter Writing & Pizza

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

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Picnic in the Park!

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

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Bay Get Ready: People’s Assembly

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

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

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

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Apartheid-Free Bay Area

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

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

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Decolonization Studies

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

RSVP here (Decolonization Studies – DSA San Francisco Organization)

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Beach Day with Palestine Solidarity Working Group

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

RSVP for Beach Day via Partiful

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

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Reportbacks

DSA SF In Print

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

Read the full article here

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Yes on I Field Kickoff

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

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

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July EWOC Fundamentals of Workplace Organizing: Final Reportback

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

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

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

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

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.

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A Contemporary of the Patriot Act and the War on Terror

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

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

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

What ICE Actually Does

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

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

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

How ICE Impacts Humanity

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

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

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

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