The people of Los Angeles and surrounding areas have taken a courageous stand against Trump’s reign of terror targeting immigrant families. In response, the administration has falsely labeled those taking to the streets in protest of the brutal war on immigrants as “rioters” and called in thousands of National Guard soldiers for a crackdown. But the people are not deterred – in Los Angeles and across the country, protest is continuing with even more determination. This could be a turning point where the entire working class unites to push back Trump’s efforts to shred our basic rights and dignity.
The situation dramatically escalated on Friday when heavily armed police from multiple federal agencies carried out military-style assaults on crowded areas in order to arrest people they accuse of being undocumented. As authorities struggle to meet increased quotas for arrests, they are turning to these types of highly visible and provocative actions to make a political statement. Los Angeles, a city with a large immigrant population and a Black liberal mayor, was an attractive target as administration officials played politics with the lives of countless immigrant families to push a racist narrative about “law and order”.
The order to deploy the National Guard must be immediately reversed. The politicians want U.S.-born workers to believe that immigrants are dangerous criminals, and that the National Guard and other essentially military actions are needed to defend the country from an “invasion”. The only threat to working people – no matter where they were born – comes from the millionaires and billionaires who deny us the basic necessities of a decent life, and are now seeking to take away what little we have left. The real violence that has taken place in the last several days in Southern California has come from both local and federal police who snatched people off the streets and then attacked those who protested against it, including the leader of one of the largest unions in the state – SEIU California president David Huerta.
It’s no coincidence that the war on immigrants is ramping up just as the administration and their right-wing allies in Congress are preparing to slash Medicaid and food stamps in order to pay for tax breaks for the rich and a massive increase in war spending. They are also preparing enormous cuts to education, public health, and other absolutely critical public programs. They want to blame immigrants for all of society’s problems, problems that in reality stem from the deep inequality that has allowed the billionaire class to hoard unimaginable wealth.
Immigrants are and have always been a central part of the working class of this country. We cannot allow them to divide us and turn neighbor against neighbor. If the whole working class takes a stand in this critical moment, we can change the politics of this country and deal a blow to the billionaire agenda of the Trump administration that it will never recover from.
The National Guard deployment is a desperate attempt to intimidate people out of exercising their First Amendment rights. If they can get away with it in Los Angeles, then that will only embolden the Trump administration to use greater and greater repressive force all across the country, against any expression of dissent regardless of the issue in question. For those who believe in immigrant rights, for those who believe in democracy, for the entire working class – now is the time to take to the streets in protest!
