The response of the progressive movement to ICE’s latest attacks and now planned surge in NYC has been far too sluggish and passive. The lesson of Minnesota cannot be lost. Now is the time to organize walkouts, mass action, protest, and work stoppages. Now is the time for urgency and courage.
We have seen that fight-back spirit on the streets in recent weeks in Houston, Maine and Madison, and now it needs to be expanded.
As of this morning, more than 300,000 Haitians in the United States — many who have been here for many years if not decades — have no legal right to work and no legal way to remain in the country. The Supreme Court’s June ruling clearing the way for the termination of Temporary Protected Status reached the lower courts today, and ICE is reportedly preparing to move within days, with Springfield, Ohio a priority target, the same city Trump slandered in 2024 with the lie about Haitian immigrants eating pets.
The Department of Homeland Security’s official comment on the fate of a third of a million people was that “it’s closing time,” and that it is “not too late to get a $2,600 check and a free flight home.” The government intends to send them to a country ravaged by US-constructed violence and economic crisis, where 1.5 million people are already displaced, and where the State Department tells U.S. citizens not to set foot. DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin says that advisory “had Americans in mind and not Haitians.” Whether there’s even infrastructure for mass deportation flights to Haiti is an open question; the operation will likely serve as a mass detention scheme, to transfer billions of tax dollars into the private prison companies, which in turn invest heavily in MAGA candidates.
Another 200,000 Salvadorans who are long-term immigrants in the country are likely to lose TPS protection by September.
So the question is not whether this is monstrous. The question is what stops it.
It will not be the courts — the courts just authorized it. It will not be the midterms, still months away, and which at most would have the Democratic Party win both chambers and still not shut down a single raid. And it will not be through the normal legislative process; the bill to extend TPS for Haitians until 2029 passed the House in April, but was blocked a few days ago in the Senate, where it continues to carry a standing veto threat. Such a bill, however inadequate, would be a big step forward. We want it to pass. We want full legalization. But bills like that one do not pass because they are just and humanitarian. They pass when the political costs of not passing them become unbearable to the people who hold power in the country.
Six months ago the movement proved in Minnesota how the working class can bring to bear its vast social and economic power. Operation Metro Surge was the largest DHS operation in U.S. history, and it collapsed — not because a governor denounced it, but because on January 23 more than 100,000 people marched in Minneapolis in the middle of a workday in 20-below cold, and a week later 300 actions followed in nearly every state. That is why the Minnesota Chamber of Commerce was begging for “de-escalation,” why Greg Bovino and Kristi Noem were fired, and Homan announced a drawdown. Those actions expressed, and in turn helped stimulate, a wave of popular condemnation and indignation that suffused the media, permeated every institution, and broad layers of the population. That’s what happens when the working class stops large sections of the economy, when students walk out and disrupt business as usual, when every official and institution complicit in such state violence is branded far and wide as a criminal.
That’s the same lesson we learned 20 years ago, when the “Day Without An Immigrant” political strike not only defeated an anti-immigrant bill, but created the first momentum in decades for comprehensive immigration reform in Congress. That movement ended when people proclaimed it was time to stop marching and direct all energy to the November midterms — and we see how that turned out.
Haitian TPS holders are not just victims. They have moral and economic leverage, but it requires larger sections of the population coming into motion. Roughly 200,000 Haitian TPS holders are in the workforce, including some 15,000 in agriculture and 13,000 nursing assistants. They staff nursing homes, hospitals, meatpacking floors, warehouses, and airport ground crews — precisely the sectors where a wildcat strike or stoppage is not an inconvenience but a crisis. Pull 13,000 nursing assistants out of long-term care in a single week and the industry does not function.
Workers facing imminent arrest and family separation cannot take the lead in a strike from a detention center. The action has to come from their coworkers, neighbors and the unions to which they belong. It has to come from citizens and permanent residents, who can more easily walk out and whose employers need them. Unions should be organizing this, and the legal architecture is there for any leadership willing to use it: an armed raid on the shop floor is a health and safety emergency under any honest reading, and employer cooperation with ICE against workers engaged in protected activity is an Unfair Labor Practice waiting to be charged. If labor leaders will not get creative to lead in this way, they can at least find ways to let their members act.
Trump makes decisions based on what he believes will help his political and economic fortunes. It is false to say he doesn’t care about public opinion. He is also susceptible to pressure from the corporate and financial elite. Hospital, nursing home, construction and logistics executives do not want their workforce disappeared either — that’s why many are supporting the bipartisan legislation to extend TPS. But they will always be inclined to comply with the state. But what if they feel they will be faced with wider job actions, greater economic dislocation? One could easily see, in the face of widespread action from below, a situation where corporate executives, mayors and governors could also demand “ICE Out.”
New York shows the same problem in miniature. The State has given twelve law enforcement agencies until August 25 to unwind their 287(g) cooperation agreements with ICE. That’s a demand the movements have long desired, but now it’s coming too late, giving another month of state cooperation to Stephen Miller and Tom Homan at the exact moment they have announced they are coming. State authorities, including the legislature, could move quickly to move this up to tomorrow, to really throw a wrench in ICE’s plans. But that won’t happen if the liberal elite is being celebrated, rather than criticized, for their slow action.
Following the killings of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston on July 7 and Joan Sebastian Guerrero in Biddeford on July 13 — neither of whom was the target of the operations that killed them — we cannot allow such violence to become normalized. A new surge of violent ICE raids have been announced, and the moment calls for mass mobilizations to shut down business as usual .
Minnesota did not wait. That is the whole of the lesson. No one group called the shots. There was a wide range of activity in every neighborhood and community, from all directions. The teachers and students played a crucial role — which creates both challenges and opportunities for the summer months. But it was a true people’s movement, based on self-organization and initiative, united around a common call that met the moment with urgency and unity.
Let us remember: The people who Trump is deporting this week work in the hospitals, homes, fields, and warehouses of this country, and the men signing the removal orders know it. They are betting that no one will make them feel it — that they can rile up their base without riling up a mass people’s and workers’ movement.
Featured image: Liberation Photo
