In April, US President Donald Trump announced, on what he dubbed “Liberation Day”, a regime of tariffs on every country in the world, based on a sketchy formula that assigned higher tariffs to countries with which the US has trade deficits.
Stock markets went into free fall, there was a huge sell-off of US bonds, and Wall Street and other business titans spoke out against the tariffs. Trump pulled back, said he would make multiple deals over the next 90 days, and the stock market returned to setting records. Wall Street coined a term for Trump’s move: “TACO” for “Trump Always Chickens Out”. 
In early August, with very few deals negotiated, the administration instituted broad-based tariffs. But unlike in April, the market took it in stride, even though they amount to the highest tariffs in a century: a 15-20 percent levy on all imports to the US. Trump carved out some countries for higher tariffs: Brazil at 50 percent, due to its prosecution of former President Jair Bolsonaro for trying to lead a coup after he lost the 2023 election. Trump set tariffs on <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2025/8/27/trumps-india-tariffs-take-effect-which-sector-will-be-hit-whats-exempt">India at 50 percent, reputedly to punish it for importing Russian oil</a>, but possibly also for refusing to <a href="https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/has-trump-lost-india-punitive-tariffs-and-nobel-peace-prize-insults-erode-once-close-relations">support his delusional bid for a Nobel Peace Prize.</a>
Then, on 29 August, the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit upheld an earlier decision declaring most of these tariffs illegal. Their fate will now be in the hands of the US Supreme Court.
A tariff is a tax on imports paid to the US government. US importers pay it. In fact, many of them are unable to claim their products until they pay the tariff. Ultimately, the cost falls on consumers who pay higher prices on imported goods such as coffee, or who pay higher prices on products containing imported inputs. Think, for example, of cars or household appliances whose prices increase because tariffs have increased the prices of imported steel and aluminium. Prices may not have spiked much yet, but if the tariffs remain in place, we will likely see prices increase by the end of the year.
The Yale Budget Project estimates <a href="https://budgetlab.yale.edu/research/state-us-tariffs-july-14-2025">that tariffs will add about US$2,800 to the average household’s costs over the next year</a>. And some estimates suggest they could add $4,000-$5,000 to the cost of a new car. So much for Trump’s promise to lower prices on day one!
Government statistics are <a href="https://budgetlab.yale.edu/research/short-run-effects-2025-tariffs-so-far">starting to show a pick-up in inflation on particular goods and sectors that rely on imports</a>. There are three main reasons why most people have not yet experienced big tariff-fuelled price increases. First, many companies, anticipating that Trump would impose tariffs, “front ran”—meaning that they built up their inventories before the tariffs went into effect. It’s likely that the decline in the first quarter gross domestic product, which most economic analysts attributed to an abnormal increase in imports, reflected front-running behaviour.
Second, companies are eating the costs, eroding their profits, rather than passing them on to consumers. It’s possible that some companies were relying on the courts tossing out the tariffs, or a mercurial Trump deciding to lower them. <a href="https://moneymorning.com/2025/07/23/gm-and-stellantis-lose-billions-as-tariffs-reshape-u-s-auto-industry/">Both GM and Ford reported losses in the billions that they attributed to tariffs. They have yet to raise prices across the board.</a>
Finally, other countries have yet to retaliate with tariffs of their own.
But these strategies merely postpone the tariff shock to the future. Unless companies want to accept lower profits, or lay-offs or bankruptcy, they will be forced to raise prices. 
Much of the neoliberal commentariat treats Trump’s tariffs as an absurdity, akin to RFK Jr’s anti-vax demolition of science or the crackpot beliefs of flat earthers. But the left <a href="https://youtu.be/f1CdbCsetpw">Keynesian economist Yanis Varofakis, the former finance minister in the Syriza government in Greece,</a>
says we must take Trump’s tariffs seriously. Trump has been ideologically committed to tariffs and an autarchic or nationalist view of the US’s role in the world economy for decades. In recent decades, economic nationalism has been rising across the entire US ruling class, as administrations of both major capitalist parties seek to compete with China and to prod the European Union to increase its military spending.
Besides the fact that Trump seems to believe that tariffs will ignite a US “golden age”, he also views them as a way to wield his clout, both domestically and in foreign affairs. He has arguably been more successful on the domestic front, as his on-again, <a href="https://www.npr.org/2025/03/07/nx-s1-5318785/tariff-dodging-companies-exemptions-engineering">off-again threats to levy tariffs on certain industries lead those industry CEOs to make concessions or donations to Trump.</a> The opportunities for corruption are endless.
On foreign policy, Trump has reset the US’s average tariffs on imports to somewhere between five and six times what they were in 2024, without yet experiencing widespread blowback from US trading partners. He and other tariff “hawks” in the administration calculate that other countries have more to lose from being locked out of the US than the US has to lose in trade with them.
<a href="https://www.wsj.com/world/americas/canada-to-remove-25-tariff-on-some-u-s-goods">Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, elected in an anti-Trump “Canada </a><a href="https://www.wsj.com/world/americas/canada-to-remove-25-tariff-on-some-u-s-goods"></a>strong<a href="https://www.wsj.com/world/americas/canada-to-remove-25-tariff-on-some-u-s-goods">” campaign earlier this year</a>, recently lifted retaliatory tariffs against the US, the destination of 75 percent of Canada’s exports. Canada is now attempting to negotiate a deal that will limit US tariffs on certain targeted Canadian exports, such as lumber, steel and aluminium.
On the other hand, Trump’s impetuous decision to place a 50 percent tariff on imports from India threatens to undermine the decades-long US cultivation of India as a counterweight to China in Asia. The <a href="https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/india-alliance-jake-sullivan-kurt-campbell">symbolism of leaders of India, China and Russia meeting together in Beijing</a>
wasn’t lost on mainstream foreign policy hands.
<a href="https://www.yanisvaroufakis.eu/2025/02/04/on-channel-4-is-donald-trumps-tariff-war-about-to-totally-backfire/">Varoufakis thinks that tariffs may slow the US economy, but the US is still sucking in massive amounts of capital from the world</a>. If that continues, Trump may get away with the tariffs, even if they don’t produce the things he promised: reshoring American industries or replacing income taxes, among some of the more far fetched. But if Trump succeeds in cutting the US trade deficit, other countries will have fewer dollars to reinvest in the US stock market and in other assets.
To Marxists, tariffs are neither good nor bad. They are no better nor worse than “free trade.” They are just one mechanism capitalist states use to gain an advantage over other capitalist states in the international economy.
“Free trade” is most often the policy of the global economic and military hegemon. Britain in the nineteenth century pushed for “free trade” as a way of expanding markets for its industrial economy. Similarly, since the 1930s, it has been a policy of the US government to expand free trade.
The breakdown of free trade today is part of the breakdown of the unipolar US empire that existed in the decades following the Cold War and the collapse of the USSR-dominated Eastern bloc. Now that China is in a close competition with the US, the US government and its business leaders have embraced more protectionist measures against it. Here is where the politics of tariffs enters the discussion.
For now, if most people associate tariffs with higher prices, <a href="https://www.gelliottmorris.com/p/trump-is-underwater-on-trade-in-40">they are among the most unpopular parts of Trump’s already very unpopular agenda</a>. But one place where they are not condemned—outside of MAGA world and a few favoured industries—is in the US labour movement.
Unfortunately, leaders like <a href="https://jacobin.com/2025/04/uaw-fain-trump-tariffs-nafta">United Auto Workers President Shawn Fain</a>, Teamsters President Sean O’Brien and the United Steelworkers of America have embraced the Trump tariffs. This isn’t anything new. “Buy American” has been part of the labour movement for decades. But for labour to buy into Trump’s tariffs now, when <a href="https://internationalsocialism.net/the-parliamentary-cretinism-of-the-democrats-opposition-to-trump/">Trump and his administration are waging an existential war against labour</a>, is letting MAGA off the hook.
Industrial union leaders support tariffs to prop up US industries where their dwindling ranks work. But support for tariffs targets the wrong enemy. The socialist labour scholar Kim Moody has shown that declining jobs, unionisation and living standards in the US owe more to automation and speed-up than to trade.
Socialist labour activist Andy Sernatinger’s critique of the <a href="https://tempestmag.org/2025/04/nationalism-workers-power-and-the-myth-of-auto-tariffs/">UAW’s position, titled “Nationalism, workers’ power, and the myth of auto tariffs”</a>, showed that there are as many autoworkers today in the US as there were in 1992 (before the North American Free Trade Agreement, NAFTA). But far fewer of them are in unionised jobs. That’s because the unions have conceded control of the shop floor and have only weakly competed for non-union workers in plants in the southern states, where much of the job growth in recent decades has occurred.
For labour to sign on with policies that are shot through with nationalism and anti-Chinese racism is extremely dangerous. Labour activists <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Vincent_Chin">should remember the 1980s case of Vincent Chin</a>, a Chinese American man who was beaten to death with a baseball bat by an auto industry supervisor. Chin’s killing took place at a time when the UAW was leading an anti-Japanese car campaign that featured media events in which union members smashed up Japanese-made cars with bats and hammers. Chin’s killer shouted racial slurs at him while he beat him.
Not only does this sort of politics sow divisions among workers, but it also contributes to the general racist and nationalist climate that the Trump administration is leading from the top. It lays the foundation for political support for further economic, political and military confrontation with China.
Even if tariffs don’t have the catastrophic effects—like COVID-era empty store shelves and price gouging—that many predicted, they will still contribute to a slowing economy, higher prices and potentially mass lay-offs. The jobs economy <a href="https://www.wsj.com/podcasts/whats-news/hiring-slowdown-spells-a-weakening-labor-market">is already weak</a>—the <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2025/09/03/job-opening-data-falls-to-levels-rarely-seen-since-pandemic.html">number of job openings is around the level it was during the COVID recession</a>.
It’s not clear that Trump’s tariffs are the cause of all these problems. There is solid evidence that consumer spending was tapped out at the end of last year, before “Liberation Day”. But tariffs are not going to improve the situation. And in the current context, Trump’s tariffs are just another attack on the working class.
First published at the <a href="https://internationalsocialism.net/the-trouble-with-trumps-tariffs">International Socialism Project</a>. Lance Selfa is the author of <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Democrats-Critical-History-Updated/dp/1608461920" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">The Democrats: A Critical History</a>
(Haymarket, 2012) and editor of <a href="https://www.amazon.com/US-Politics-Age-Uncertainty-Reality/dp/1608468534" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">U.S. Politics in an Age of Uncertainty: Essays on a New Reality</a> (Haymarket, 2017). He lives in Chicago.

Lance Selfa

The trouble with Trump’s tariffs

CHICAGO—Two events that occurred within days of each other in early August speak to the state of the opposition to President Trump’s assaults on working people and democracy. 
On 1 August, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals (supposedly the most liberal circuit in the US) upheld Trump’s March executive order that used “national security” as a pretext to void union contracts in several federal government agencies. Within days, managers across the federal government—most significantly, the <a href="https://federalnewsnetwork.com/veterans-affairs/2025/08/va-says-its-ended-most-collective-bargaining-agreements/">Veterans Administration</a>—ripped up their union contracts.
The second noteworthy event came a few days after the union-busting court decision. All Democrats in the Texas legislature left the state to deny Texas Governor Greg Abbott and his Republican legislative henchmen a legislative quorum to implement a Congressional gerrymander that would reduce the number of Democratic Congress members from the current thirteen to eight. That would leave the Texas Congressional delegation at almost 80 percent Republican in a state where Trump won 56 percent of the vote in 2024.
Most liberals and Democrats viewed the court-sanctioned union-busting with a yawn, if they noticed it at all. But the threat of losing seats in Congress sent Democrats to battle stations.
California Governor Gavin Newsom pledged a referendum to give the California legislature the power to gerrymander to net at least five and as many as nine new Democratic-friendly districts. Newsom electrified partisan Democrats who viewed him as a rare Democratic politician who would stand up to Trump. Even the ever cautious former President Barack Obama backed Newsom’s plan.
Aside from the details of the redistricting battles that could unfold in multiple states before the 2026 midterm elections, we should ask why Democrats and many of their liberal supporters are so exercised about gerrymandering, but passive about most of the other depredations of the Trump regime.
Perhaps it’s no surprise that politicians would be more concerned about their jobs than about the jobs and rights of their constituents and voting base. But it’s also an indication of the degree to which the logic of what Karl Marx called “parliamentary cretinism” has captured so much of the opposition to Trump.
The liberal opposition to Trump can conceive of defeating him and Trumpism only at the ballot box. So, anything that might impede Democratic electoral gains is an existential question for them.
To return to the labour example, it’s clear that, aside from heroic efforts by the still-small group of activists in the Federal Union Network, the labour movement has hardly responded to Trump’s union-busting. The lawsuits labour leaders have filed and supported have slowed down, but not stopped, Trump’s determination to de-unionise the federal workforce. 
In a labour movement that still counts 14-16 million members, including more than 1 million working for the federal government, the potential exists for mass protest action, including strikes, slowdowns, occupations, organising the unorganised, days of action and the like to galvanise a real opposition to Trump. But for most labour leaders, this is not even part of their thought process. As long-time labour activist and socialist <a href="https://mronline.org/2025/07/16/hard-truths-about-the-us-labor-movement-an-interview-with-chris-townsend/">Chris Townsend put it in a recent interview</a> with Monthly Review: 
“We have slid into a period in our labour movement where decline, decay, stagnation, and timid leadership have become formalized. The ‘leadership’ today in many unions is at best an administrative layer: functionaries carefully tending to the decline, keeping things on track as we are pushed towards oblivion. There are examples to the contrary, but not very many in my experience.”
The atrophy of social movement organisation and reflexive fealty to the Democrats among most non-government organisation leaders have led us to this point. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, fears that the US Supreme Court would overturn legalised abortion led to protests in the hundreds of thousands in Washington. <a href="https://www.vice.com/en/article/the-history-of-planned-parenthood-v-casey-and-pro-choice-activism-roe-v-wade/">This mobilisation stayed the hand of the Supreme Court majority—then, as now, </a>Republican-appointed.
But when the Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade in 2022, no major abortion rights group called a national demonstration, and protest organising fell to under-resourced groups of dedicated activists in different localities. The implicit (and often explicit) message from the national groups was for supporters of abortion rights to put faith in the electoral process of state-level referenda and the election of Democrats to Congress and the White House. This was during a time when even <a href="https://www.glamour.com/story/why-doesnt-congress-just-make-roe-v-wade-federal-law">pro-choice Democrats struggled to articulate simple promises of passing a national abortion rights law</a>, especially if it required (as it almost certainly would) getting rid of the Senate filibuster.
American Federation of Government Employees National President Everett Kelley’s response to the anti-union court decision showed how union leaders are also captive to the Democratic Party’s liberal proceduralism: 
“For sure, we are going to fight for our existence. It’s very unsettling and very disturbing that the Ninth Circuit issued the ruling that they issued. I don’t think that any president should have any unfettered authority that goes unchecked”, <a href="https://www.msn.com/en-us/politics/government/unions-battle-for-survival-hit-new-wave-with-trump-termination-of-bargaining-agreements">Kelley told The Hill</a>. “That’s a portion of the reason why unions exist, to make sure there’s checks and balances inside of the agencies.”
Unconsciously, Kelley is echoing the rhetoric of Democrats like Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, who regularly appeals to Congress and the courts to honour the age-old constitutional system of “checks and balances” against the autocrat in the White House.
In a Boston Review essay, “<a href="https://www.bostonreview.net/forum/the-dead-end-of-checks-and-balances/">The Dead End of Checks and Balances</a>”, political scientist Lisa L. Miller points out how much of Trump’s authoritarian power grab is following the US Constitution’s empowerment of a wealthy minority at the expense of the broad working-class majority. Miller argues that the “checks and balances” that figures like Schumer cite—federalism, the courts, division of the Congress into two houses—have historically served capitalists and the rich to veto popular initiatives like national health insurance, rather than helped ordinary people. 
Periods of popular reform have come only when mass movements have forced the political system to break free from the straitjacket of “checks and balances”.
Some of the more activist sections of unions understand this. A recent article in Convergence magazine co-authored by three leaders of the Chicago and Los Angeles teachers’ unions <a href="https://convergencemag.com/articles/labors-strategy-must-lean-into-synergies/">makes the case for reviving the general strike</a> as part of labour’s strategy to defeat Trumpian authoritarianism. So far so good. But it’s clear that the authors view labour activism as a way also to resuscitate the Democratic Party in time for the 2026 and 2028 elections. So the article notes: “Strikes and electoral work reinforce each other”.
This makes their call to militancy less a bold break with the current labour leadership than a refashioning of the standard “inside-outside” strategy to reform the Democratic Party. That is, organise “outside” the Democratic Party to pressure for reform “inside”. 
The long <a href="https://internationalsocialism.net/whatever-happened-to-political-independence/">history of these efforts to reform the Democratic Party</a> has mostly served to accommodate radicals and activists to the Democrats’ status quo rather than shift the Democrats to the left. We saw it last year when self-described democratic socialists Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders went “all-in” for Kamala Harris, despite Harris’ corporate-friendly politics and support for Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza. (By the way, it’s noteworthy that the article by the three teachers’ union leaders and a labour studies professor—all self-described radicals and socialists—doesn’t mention Gaza.)
It’s clear that the left and the labour and social movements are in a very precarious state, and debates about how to fight back against Trumpian authoritarianism will be crucial. But elections and the courts won’t save us, as Townsend pointed out:
“The New Jersey and Virginia elections this November may provide a Democratic Party boost, but Trump couldn’t care less. He obviously plans to expand his unilateral war on working people, and the courts are going to allow it. This guy is governing like any crazy boss that the unions see all the time. Bosses who ignore the contract and do illegal things. Because they know that it is unlikely that you will rise up. They know that time is on their side, not our side. They control most aspects of the situation. So just like when this happens in a union context, we need to reconsider our entire position, our response, our tactics. We need union leadership who will consider bold responses, militant responses, tactics that defy conventional wisdom.”

Democratic electoralism won’t defeat Trumpism

Zohran Mamdani’s successful campaign to become the Democratic Party’s mayoral candidate in New York City struck a chord with many people who want a political alternative to the pro-business, pro-war status quo. 
The task for US socialists is to translate this potential into a real movement capable of winning its demands, cutting down the rich and powerful and advancing a radical world view. Unfortunately, only a month after his shock victory, there are clear signs that Mamdani is moving in the opposite direction. 
With the mayoral election set for November, Mamdani is trying to shore up the support of the city’s business leaders. In closed-door meetings with top executives, he has walked back his statement that “billionaires shouldn’t exist”, equivocated on his plans for a rent freeze and repudiated the pro-Palestine slogan “globalise the intifada”. 
He has distanced himself from past criticisms of the New York Police Department and indicated openness to retaining current police Commissioner Jessica Tisch, a billionaire heir and ardent defender of police murder. Mamdani’s pledge to maintain current NYPD funding levels is no small problem for a candidate who harnessed the hopes of anti-racists and Palestine solidarity activists. The NYPD is a massive force for repression: with 36,000 officers and 19,000 civilian employees, it’s larger than some national armies. This is the force that was brought onto the city’s university campuses in 2024 to crush the Gaza solidarity encampments.
Mamdani’s brand pivot from leftist firebrand to safe pair of hands for Wall Street is a predictable product of his political strategy. Mamdani isn’t running for mayor as a stunt to raise the profile of socialist ideas; he’s serious about winning the position. But the whole notion of a “socialist mayor of New York” is a contradiction in terms. Anyone in this position would be responsible for the actions of the country’s largest police force, and would be one of the city’s largest employers, in charge of negotiating wages with 330,000 government workers. They would have to maintain attractive conditions for business to invest in Wall Street, home to the most predatory corporations on the planet. In short, Mamdani seeks an executive position crucial to the functioning of US capitalism. 
The recent experience of Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson, propelled by the city’s left and labour movement into office, should serve as a warning. Johnson induced unions to sign a no-strike pledge for the duration of 2024’s Democratic National Convention, while his police force attacked Palestine solidarity protesters outside it. The Chicago left that supported his candidacy has emerged from the experience discredited and demoralised. That was Chicago—the pressures exerted by big business and state bureaucrats will be far more intense in New York City.
Mamdani’s political program doesn’t express any real desire to confront these forces. Though he promotes supportable ideas for social reform, none of this is backed up by class struggle politics, even at a rhetorical level. Compared to previous prominent democratic socialists, Mamdani’s messaging lacks the combativity and sense of struggle that is the basic heart of socialism. 
Whereas Bernie Sanders framed his 2016 campaign as a confrontation with the power of the billionaire class, Mamdani implores the left to be “passionate about public excellence ... how we can make government more effective”. One of the objectives listed on his website is to “make it faster, easier, and cheaper to start and run a business”. His demands for rent controls and free bus rides, while progressive, are well within the parameters of traditional liberal conventions in New York. In fact, free crosstown buses were previously proposed by billionaire NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg. None of Mamdani’s proposals involves wresting away significant wealth and power from the ruling class. 
Mamdani declared in his victory speech that he hopes to be a “model” for the Democratic Party, pushing it to the left. This is the political approach championed by his organisation, the Democratic Socialists of America. In the US’ restrictive two-party system, leftists who prioritise office-holding above other objectives naturally gravitate toward working inside the Democratic Party, which offers the most immediate avenue for electoral success. But experience shows that instead of pushing the party to the left, participation in the Democratic Party pushes people like Mamdani to the right. They end up being coopted as part of the tamed “progressive” wing of a profoundly undemocratic party run by millionaires and billionaires. 
We’ve been here before. Wave after wave of progressives and self-described socialists have run insurgent campaigns inside the Democratic Party, which generate excitement and a sense of possibility, before quickly disappointing the hopes of their followers and finding a comfortable place in the establishment. 
In 2018, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s victory unleashed an avalanche of expectations on the left. But rather than “burning it down”, as one of her staffers promised, AOC instead championed the Biden administration’s right-wing domestic and international agenda, from voting to impose a unilateral employment contract on railway workers and quash their right to strike, to funding Israel’s Iron Dome. Politicians like AOC move swiftly from raising people’s political horizons to restraining them. There’s no evidence that Mamdani’s trajectory will overcome the pitfalls of his predecessors. 
His political strategy, promoted by the DSA, gets things completely back-to-front. Democratic Socialists recognise that public sentiment can be well to the left of the establishment. They see left-wing positioning as a means to win office, useful to the extent that it advances electoral gains. This is why DSA member and Jacobin magazine writer Eric Blanc lauded Mamdani for abandoning the demand to defund the police, which Blanc said would have affected his electability. This whole approach contrasts the radical view that participation in elections is important only to the extent that it can promote left-wing politics and social struggle. 
The DSA strategy envisions socialist organisations as cheer squads for elected officials, not vehicles that can act independently of whoever is in government. A co-chair of the New York City Democratic Socialists of America made this explicit in a recent interview: “The fate of DSA, and honestly, I think, the progressive movement in New York, is tied to Zohran’s administration, and we’re aware of that”. 
If the fate of the socialist movement in the heart of world capitalism relies on an individual who’s clearly ready to adapt to the structures of New York’s government, then the movement is in for a world of disappointment and demoralisation. 
Socialists can initiate movements for the demands Mamdani raised, such as rent controls, higher wages and taxes on the rich. But this has to start with a commitment to win people to a distinctly socialist strategy, separate from the major parties of US capitalism. 
Mamdani’s popularity reflects mass enthusiasm for left-wing politics, but this sentiment won’t go anywhere positive if it’s funnelled into yet another attempt to radicalise the Democratic Party.

Luca Tavan

Can Zohran Mamdani advance socialism in the United States?

The anti-migrant onslaught in the United States is being significantly expanded with a US$170 billion injection into the border and immigration regime. 
Even before this injection of funds, militarised raids have laid siege to Latino communities. Teams of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) thugs have descended on farms. And it has become routine for heavily armed, masked goons to <a href="https://www.economist.com/united-states/2025/07/10/what-goes-on-in-americas-immigration-courts">abduct people</a> from immigration hearings, leaving undocumented people deciding whether to risk arrest by showing up or risk becoming more of a “criminal” by missing their court date.
President Donald Trump <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/05/us/politics/trump-immigration-deportations-arrests.html">had been stymied</a> in his administration’s first months in his attempt to reach unprecedented levels of deportations. But the massive assault that started in Los Angeles in June began to turn the situation around, <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/immigration/trumps-immigration-record-far-high-arrests-low-deportations-rcna217752">breaking the record</a> for the most immigration arrests ever. Now, it looks like all systems go for the president’s fascistic agenda. 
The program is real, not rhetoric
In April, <a href="https://azmirror.com/2025/04/08/ice-director-envisions-amazon-like-mass-deportation-system-prime-but-with-human-beings/">ICE Director Todd Lyons pledged</a> to make the deportation process “like (Amazon) Prime, but with human beings”. The administration has a target of 3,000 arrests per day, a tenfold increase on last year’s number. Trump’s “border tsar,” Tom Homan, in early July called for at least 7,000 arrests per day, which would amount to 2.5 million per year.
Migration cops exhibit exceptional cruelty as they attempt to reach these massive government targets. Agents recently camped outside of a hospital for a week to re-apprehend a woman who suffered a health crisis caused by the initial raid, which left her “handcuffed and covered in vomit” for more than eight hours, <a href="https://lapublicpress.org/2025/07/ice-agents-glendale-hospital-waiting-to-arrest-a-patient/">according to a report in the Los Angeles Public Press</a>. 
ICE leaders now <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jun/04/immigration-officials-increased-detentions-collateral-arrests">openly encourage</a> agents to target as many migrants as possible—without warrants or even evidence of criminality. These “collateral” arrests of random people boost deportation numbers as much as any other. Since January, there has been a thirteen-fold increase in arrests of migrants with <a href="https://austinkocher.substack.com/p/55654-people-now-detained-by-ice">no criminal history</a>, and now almost two-thirds of all people in ICE custody reportedly have no criminal conviction. 
When a journalist pointed out these statistics, Homan got openly racist enough to suggest that a person’s “<a href="https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/maddowblog/white-house-border-czar-suggests-ice-can-detain-people-based-physical-rcna218285">physical appearance</a>” was a good enough reason for ICE to target them. And shamelessly, raids have expanded to workplaces and community hubs where they expect to find vulnerable undocumented people. 
There is a discrepancy between the number of arrests and the number of deportations because not all arrestees are legally allowed to be deported immediately. But the administration is trying to lower the bar by expanding classifications for expedited removal and <a href="https://www.nycbar.org/reports/the-trump-administrations-early-2025-changes-to-immigration-law/">expediting the removal</a> of those already in proceedings. It has increased the pool of officially targeted immigrants by <a href="https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/trump-deportations-million-more-undocumented-legal-status-b2773394.html">removing legal protections for more than 1</a> million people. It is also seeking more deals with underdeveloped countries to take payments in exchange for deportees who can’t be sent back to their countries of origin. 
With the massive cash injection to support these attacks, Trump’s stated goals of a million deportations per year start to seem more frighteningly possible than ever. 
Immigrant prisons are reaching new depths of horror
The federal government has allocated an extra $45 billion to expand the country’s detention facilities. The prisons are packed with hundreds more people than they have beds for, sometimes at <a href="https://ig.ft.com/us-immigration-detention/">triple their capacity</a>, and brutal new tent cities are being built. Among them is the so-called Alligator Alcatraz, where cages inside tents were thrown up in eight days to hold hundreds of migrants on a remote airstrip in the sweltering Florida Everglades. 
This effort has fuelled a boom in the for-profit immigrant prison system. Most of these for-profit prisons are incentivised to hold as many people for as long as they can, so they overcrowd facilities, deny medical care and keep sick people detained for as long as possible. The leading prison profiteers involved, Geo Group and Core Civic, have been raking in record profits from human misery and speculating on even better years to come. 
They also use part of their profits to lobby for policies that strengthen their position. Detained migrants accused of crossing the US-Mexico border illegally <a href="https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/new-ice-policy-blocks-detained-migrants-from-seeking-bond-f557402a">will not be able to seek bond</a> to be released while their case is processed through the courts. So now, in the months or years in which they are awaiting a decision on their status, they will be trapped in these immigration gulags while prison capitalists will rake in greater profits each day. 
ICE is becoming more powerful
ICE is the primary agency responsible for the arrest, detention and deportation of immigrants within the US. The agency aims to hire 10,000 new agents, nearly tripling its force of arresting officers, and creating the potential for the spate of raids unleashed on Los Angeles to be repeated elsewhere at an even greater scale. 
This already brutal machine has been forged into a <a href="https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/ice-secret-police-horrifying-team-trump-laughing-1235384250/">ghoulish army</a> of masked people snatchers under the Trump administration. They’ve become even more explicitly politically reactionary, using <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/7/11/canary-mission-how-us-uses-a-hate-group-to-target-palestine-advocates">Zionist hate groups</a> to find lists of anti-genocide activists to brutalise.
This injection of resources will make ICE the <a href="https://edition.cnn.com/2025/07/09/politics/ice-cbp-police-los-angeles-immigration">best-funded</a>
police agency in the US—more well resourced <a href="https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/ice-funding-world-militaries-b2790466.html">than the vast majority</a> of the world’s militaries. 
The immigration machine is becoming embedded 
One of the other morbid innovations of the Trump administration has been to coopt virtually <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/justice-department/ice-operation-trump-focus-immigration-reshape-federal-law-enforcement-rcna193494">all federal policing agencies</a> into the immigrant oppression machine. This builds on the legacy of cooperation between local law enforcement agencies and ICE that was established through the Bush and Obama eras in the 287(g) program. When agencies sign onto these programs, local police are deputised as immigration agents and act as a force multiplier for ICE. 
Since Trump came to office, these agreements have <a href="https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/blog/immigration-challenges-implementing-the-one-big-beautiful-bill/">increased more than sixfold</a>. More than 6,200 local cops are already deputised as immigration agents. The targeting of people for <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QfdA9nIDUfk">minor infractions</a> in the hopes that they will be deportable has been an increasingly common pastime for local police, and more migrants are running out of space to breathe. 
Trump’s budget will <a href="https://www.themarshallproject.org/2025/07/12/trump-budget-bill-police-immigration-criminal-justice">further entrench</a> this cooperation: US$15 billion has been earmarked for local and state collaboration with immigration enforcement. This triples federal expenditure for these agencies. 
People are still fighting
It’s not all bad news, however. Even before the explosion of immigration protests in June, there had been more immigrant rights protests in the <a href="https://acleddata.com/2025/06/12/us-expert-comment-la-demonstrations-the-most-explosive-escalation-of-tensions-between-demonstrators-and-police-since-blm/">first five months</a> of 2025 than in the previous five years. And despite the brutal crackdown that followed the Los Angeles protests, people are still confronting ICE outside <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/09/us/ice-immigration-protest-san-francisco.html">immigration courts</a> and demonstrating against <a href="https://www.wuft.org/politics/2025-07-14/protesters-rally-against-proposed-ice-detention-facility-in-clay-county">proposed jails</a>. In one instance, doctors and nurses <a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/losangeles/news/ontario-medical-office-immigration-enforcement-arrest/">tried to protect</a> vulnerable workers when they took shelter in a California medical clinic. 
An Economist/YouGov poll in July found that 52 percent of Americans think that Trump’s immigration policies are too harsh, up from 40 percent six months ago. A Gallup poll also found that the share of people wanting immigration reduced dropped from 55 percent last year to 30 percent today. So while only a minority of people are fighting against the government, the number of people hostile to Trump’s policies is growing. 
The administration has unleashed a brutal attack, and the future is frightening, but the situation remains volatile. What we witnessed last month in Los Angeles shows the potential for a fightback. Let’s hope the next fight is even bigger.

Brendan Stanton

Trump is creating ‘one big beautiful’ gulag state

NEW YORK—There is justifiable delight across the US left over the super-rich’s panicked response to democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani’s win in New York City’s Democratic Party mayoral primary last month. Whatever the outcome of the general election in November, the result is good news for all those seeking to build an activist response to the hard right turn in US politics under Donald Trump, including socialists who reject voting for Democrats on principle.
Activists have long focused on the issues that drove Mamdani’s win: a rent freeze, affordable housing, free buses, free child care for kids up to age 5, a higher minimum wage and progressive taxes. But Mamdani’s candidacy, driven by thousands of volunteers, highlights such efforts and their popular appeal in a city where the <a href="https://www.gothamgazette.com/49-topics/economy/683-as-incomes-gap-widens-new-york-grows-apart">richest 1 percent controls 44 percent of all wealth</a>, a fourfold increase in three decades. 
Mamdani appealed to the <a href="https://robinhood.org/news/robin-hood-annual-poverty-tracker-report-shows-25-overall-poverty-rate-in-new-york-city-climbing-beyond-record-highs-observed-in-2022/">one in four people who live in poverty</a>. He won big in immigrant communities and left-leaning neighbourhoods populated by young intellectuals and white-collar workers. This is partly because 52 percent of renters spend more than <a href="https://comptroller.nyc.gov/reports/spotlight-new-york-citys-rental-housing-market/">30 percent of their income on housing</a>. Housing costs that hammer even the middle class mean minimal options for the poor: some <a href="https://citylimits.org/wait-times-for-nycha-apartments-doubled-last-year-as-number-of-vacant-units-climb/">278,000 are on waiting lists</a> for public housing.
These are just some of the long lists of statistics that explain how Mamdani stunned the establishment by trouncing the scandal-ridden former governor, Andrew Cuomo. Hedge fund billionaire Daniel Loeb sounded the alarm to his cohort, <a href="https://x.com/DanielSLoeb1/status/1937800092255183096">declaring on social media</a>, “It’s officially hot commie summer”. The Mamdani spectre haunting Loeb came even as President Donald Trump tried to drop the hammer on US urban politics by sending the Marines into Los Angeles to crack down on immigrant rights protesters.
Mamdani and his supporters have imposed themselves on the Democratic establishment, including union leaders, who mostly endorsed Cuomo. But the New York state legislator, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, faces the same constraints as any Democratic politician. One need not look too far back in history to see how the party is a shock absorber for left-wing electoral efforts within its structures.
Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, a democratic socialist who campaigned for president as a Democrat, became the Senate Finance Committee chair during the Biden administration, carrying the president’s agenda rather than pushing for the reforms he’d advocated on the campaign trail. Congressional representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, another DSA candidate who burst onto the scene with a Democratic primary win over a New York powerbroker, has staked out mainstream Democratic positions and disappointed her socialist backers with her stance on Palestine, union rights and much else.
Barack Obama, who crafted a progressive brand as a candidate in the 2008 presidential elections, made corporate handouts his top priority once in office, while workers suffered through the financial crisis and subsequent economic downturn. The disappointment of Obama’s successive administrations created the opening for Trump to be elected as a “populist” eight years later.
Mamdani’s success on a more left-wing program and his real shot at becoming mayor of New York won’t make him immune from these pressures, which are especially acute for anyone aiming to run the headquarters of world capitalism. Nor will his success transform the character of the Democratic Party.
What’s different is that Mamdani’s success defies the Democratic pattern of retreat. Most Democratic legislators have done nothing to challenge Trump’s power grab and the <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/us-republicans-pass-the-most-damaging-laws-in-generations">passage of federal legislation</a> that will strip health care from millions, increase the immigration crackdown to monstrous proportions, boost military spending and cut taxes for the wealthy. What’s even more remarkable is that the message of resistance to Trump is being carried by a youthful figure with a Muslim background who’s stood up for Palestine amid a witch-hunt across US politics and academia against anyone criticising Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza.
Mamdani’s success has led to two approaches among New York’s financial oligarchs: discredit and destroy, or contain and coopt.
It is hard to tell if those pursuing the first strategy are more outraged by Mamdani’s plan to raise their taxes or his support for Palestinian rights. As journalist <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/news/essay/zohran-mamdani-and-mahmoud-khalil-are-in-on-the-joke?utm_campaign=cm&amp;utm_source=crm&amp;utm_brand=tny&amp;utm_mailing=TNY_SubPersRec_020520&amp;utm_medium=email&amp;bxid=604695f06ea59138606fc186&amp;cndid=64050397&amp;hasha=8ecae643b2ebaec30f78f91ab7d16dce&amp;hashb=30047e3e6b001e088c14e7e66134985210e5549f&amp;hashc=4a0480735e1f1439ba1de333abd360ce5706083ba1ba8dc795f297bbf98757e7&amp;utm_term=NYR_CYGNUS_PERSRECS">Hanif Abdurraqib noted</a>, “far-right conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer posted on X that Mamdani wanted to bring both Sharia law and communism to New York City”. But what matters to the bosses most is the threat to their money. JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, the dean of Wall Street bankers, said that Mamdani is “<a href="https://www.foxbusiness.com/politics/jamie-dimon-criticizes-zohran-mamdani-marxist-blasts-democrats-dei-push-big-hearts-little-brain">more a Marxist than a socialist</a>”. Kathryn Wylde, head of a business council, the Partnership for New York City, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/24/business/dealbook/new-york-mayor-mamdani-cuomo-business.html">summed up the mood of her peers</a>: “Terror is the feeling”. 
The Wall Street oligarchs aiming to discredit and destroy Mamdani assumed they had succeeded in permanently rewiring New York City politics in their interest. One of their own, Michael Bloomberg, boss of the media and technology empire that bears his name, served as mayor in the 2000s. During his tenure, the Democrat-controlled city council rewrote local laws to allow him to run for a third term as he focused on real estate development in the city, symbolised by multiple super-tall residential skyscrapers as homes for the world’s wealthiest.
Bloomberg’s successor, liberal Democrat Bill de Blasio, served the following two terms, ushering in some reforms such as extended public preschool. But he failed to reverse Bloomberg’s reductions in public sector pay and benefits and tended to his own real estate allies as his popularity waned. 
De Blasio’s successor, Eric Adams, a Black former police captain who first gained a public profile by calling out police racism, took office in 2022 on a program prioritising law and order. He was backed by Bloomberg and other wealthy residents. Multiple scandals led to Adams’ indictment on federal charges. But Trump’s Justice Department dropped the case—an obvious exchange for the mayor’s support for Trump’s anti-immigrant crackdown. Adams, who had no chance of winning the Democratic mayoral nomination, skipped the primary and created his own party from scratch.
This created an opportunity for Cuomo to make a political comeback. Cuomo, who’d been forced to resign as governor following a series of sexual harassment allegations and a cover-up of COVID deaths in elder care facilities, immediately attracted tens of millions in campaign contributions. Bloomberg was again at the centre of the fundraising action.
Now, money is again flowing to him for the general election—Cuomo created his own party in case he came up short in the primary. (Democratic politicians who denounce the left for attempting to build third parties have no hesitation in doing so when it serves their interests, as was the case in the <a href="https://jacobin.com/2021/11/buffalo-new-york-india-walton-mayoral-election-byron-brown">mayor’s race in the city of Buffalo</a> a few years ago.)
If the wealthy Mamdani-haters can’t stop him from being elected, they will resort to Wall Street’s playbook from New York City’s fiscal crisis of 1975. At that time, the federal government refused to provide financial aid, and the state governor and legislature put the city under the effective control of an unelected commission dominated by Wall Street bankers. The result: tens of thousands of layoffs of municipal workers and cuts to social services. The Trump-era version of such measures would be harsher still. The White House has already promised to punish New York if voters elect Mamdani.
A Mamdani victory is a very real possibility. Cuomo’s failure in the primary and his uncertain-at-best prospects in the general election have led to a contain-and-coopt effort by some prominent business leaders, who scoff at the notion that Mamdani’s victory would drive the ultra-rich and Wall Street banks to move to Miami en masse. Dubbed <a href="https://www.wsj.com/us-news/the-mamdani-millionaires-supporting-the-socialist-for-nyc-mayor-13c1636b?gaa_at=eafs&amp;gaa_n=ASWzDAimg6O7LLbl5--Y6CUVLT5e2rL93grwVR3HHy04OvwKJx4B7LbQvMUVPjgAN_4%3D&amp;gaa_ts=6879e38f&amp;gaa_sig=tZXMvFOJewE-nvDSGWa-lxCShixNREM4taLNlXB3RYB1oRRQDzYuHgj77KX3dgYihF6Uk6rZP76CX1mMD5tGkQ%3D%3D">“Mamdani millionaires”</a> by the Wall Street Journal, this group has a broad range. It includes younger well-off professionals who nevertheless find New York intolerably expensive, are aghast at the intensifying social inequality and would prefer moderate forms.
Others seeking to engage Mamdani include pragmatic deal makers who realise that blindly carrying out the program of the billionaires is courting a mass resistance far more threatening to their interests than Mamdani’s program. These liberal elites view Mamdani’s campaign promises as a milder version of the municipal program of the 1930s and 1940s under liberal Republican Fiorello La Guardia, who won elections by making concessions to a powerful labour movement and a big left dominated by the Communist Party. The result was a New York City-specific enhancement of the mid-twentieth-century welfare state. Mamdani’s program seeks to revive such programs—but in the context of a far weaker labour movement and dramatically smaller left.
Given this balance of class forces, the business liberals calculate that a Mayor Mamdani could be curbed. Their plan is modelled on their approach to the 1989 election of David Dinkins, a DSA member and the first Black person elected mayor. Dinkins defeated a Democratic incumbent and Republican Rudolph Giuliani in large part because of widespread outrage over a series of racist murders. The corporations quietly strangled Dinkins’ agenda and funded a successful Giuliani comeback on a law-and-order, pro-business program.
If victorious, Mamdani should expect similar treatment. If he does not accommodate these liberal ruling-class elements, they’ll join the hardliners in backing an opponent. And most business elites who pragmatically support or tolerate Mamdani today would back his opponents in a future election anyway, even if Mamdani were to make big concessions to them.
With some of the wealthiest and most powerful people on the planet on one side and a democratic socialist with many thousands of grassroots volunteers on the other, the left is under a lot of pressure to get involved in the electoral campaign. 
Yet it is not necessary to join Mamdani’s campaign and vote Democrat in order to take initiatives around the issues raised in this campaign. Rent freezes and housing costs are just one example: the nearly century-old tradition of rent control and stabilisation in New York will have to be revived as an activist movement for tenants’ rights, as will the struggle for a higher local minimum wage. Such fights can now be stepped up in New York and beyond, along with the ongoing struggles for Palestine and immigrant rights.
Whatever the outcome of the New York mayoral race, a mass, activist left independent of the Democratic Party will be needed to win the social gains Mamdani’s supporters seek. 
G. Stewart is a socialist and journalist in the US.

G. Stewart

The billionaires’ Mamdani freak-out and opportunities for the US left

Donald Trump ruined everyone’s Fourth of July holiday by signing what he so fatuously called the “One Big Beautiful Bill”. It may be the single most damaging piece of legislation signed into law since: who knows? 
Ronald Reagan’s first budget in 1981, which marked a major conservative turn in US social and economic policy, seems moderate by comparison. Comparisons to other historically racist, repressive and anti-immigrant laws of the past—the McCarran Internal Security Act of 1950, the 1924 Immigration Act or even the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850—are not out of the question.
For such a radical change in social and economic policy, it barely squeaked by. Vice President J.D. Vance had to break a 50-50 tie in the Senate to pass it. And it received 218 votes in the House of Representatives, a four-vote majority in the 435-member chamber.
Many horrible things have been shoehorned into its nearly 1,000 pages, as Republicans who voted for it without reading it will discover. And while the GOP members might be pleasantly surprised by what they find, everyone else will be horrified. Three major impacts of this big, ugly mess are clearly discernible from the details.
The rich are made richer. The bill permanently extends Trump’s 2017 tax cuts that were tilted toward the rich. According to <a href="https://budgetmodel.wharton.upenn.edu/issues/2025/7/1/senate-reconciliation-bill-budget-economic-and-distributional-effects">an estimate from the University of Pennsylvania Wharton School</a>, the richest 0.1 percent of households will, on average, be more than $300,000 better off in 2027.
While the tax part of this bill preserves the status quo, it also exempts larger fortunes from estate taxes and increases the deductability from federal taxation of the amount of money taxpayers pay in state and local taxes. The “pro-working class” tax reforms that Trump and the Republicans will tout—no taxes on tips, added tax deductions for seniors 65 and over, and no taxes on overtime earnings—<a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2025/07/03/temporary-tax-breaks-in-trumps-big-beautiful-bill.html">are heavily circumscribed and temporary</a>. All of them will disappear by 2028.
Even if one accepted the standard “trickle-down” argument that cutting taxes on the rich leads to a boom in investment and growth, it’s hard to see how largely preserving the status quo will provide “rocket fuel” for the economy, <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/video/2025/06/02/rep-darin-lahood-on-reconciliation-bill-this-is-going-to-be-rocket-fuel-for-the-economy.html">as Illinois Republican Representative Darren LaHood put it</a>. Even more fanciful is the notion that the unleashed economic growth will lower the government’s budget deficit and allow the tax cut to “pay for itself”. This has become an article of Republican faith approaching almost religious status, <a href="https://www.crfb.org/papers/tax-cuts-dont-pay-themselves">despite 50 years of empirical evidence to the contrary</a>. But Republicans have sustained their strategic goal of starving the government of funds and putting the onus on a future Democratic administration to raise taxes to cover government spending.
The poor are made poorer. To get the funds to make the 2017 tax rates permanent, to increase the military budget to more than $1 trillion for the first time and to establish a vast deportation machine, Trump and the Republicans are stealing from the poor. The University of Pennsylvania analysis suggests that the poorest 20 percent of households will endure a 7.4 percent decline in income by 2033.
Over the next decade, the bill cuts almost $1 trillion from Medicaid (medical insurance for low-income people) and about $500 billion each from Medicare (medical insurance for the elderly) and food assistance. This is the single largest cut ever to the already thin social safety net. <a href="https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/conservative-lawbreakers-bigger-problem/">As Sasha Abramsky, writing in </a>the<a href="https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/conservative-lawbreakers-bigger-problem/">
Nation, put it:</a> 
“If you thought the safety net systems fought for, and secured, during the Progressive Era, the New Deal, and the Great Society, were a mainstay of modern society, think again. If you thought that after a decade-plus of sparring, the increased healthcare coverage generated by the Affordable Care Act was now a generally accepted part of the social fabric, you were, it appears, sorely mistaken.”
Cuts to Medicaid will cost 12-17 million people their health insurance, depending on which estimate is more accurate. About 3 million will lose access to food assistance. But the effects go far beyond those cuts. Safety net hospitals, especially those in rural areas, will cut services and jobs, if not close altogether. Cuts to subsidies for Affordable Care Act insurance will drive up out-of-pocket expenses. Soon, everyone’s health insurance will cost more and cover less.
This has nothing to do with rooting out “waste and fraud” or securing these programs for the future, as Republicans claim. Many of them have lied through their teeth, saying that the act doesn’t cut Medicaid, even though the black-and-white of the bill said so. The key point is that this represents, in crystallised view, the political right’s full agenda: tax cuts for the rich, entitlement cuts for the poor and the showering of money on the military and other repressive apparatuses of the state. 
“They pushed right up to the limit of what their budget could do and still hold enough votes to win a majority”,<a href="https://paulwaldman.substack.com/p/why-they-did-it"> the liberal writer Paul Waldman explains</a>. “And with every immigrant parent torn from their children’s arms, every family that loses their health coverage, every young person who decides to forego college, every rural health clinic that shuts down, every research grant that gets revoked, every solar energy project that gets dismantled, they can sit back, smile, and say, ‘This is why we came to Washington. No matter what happens tomorrow, it was worth it’.”
Anti-immigrant repression will be turbocharged. One of this package’s biggest “winners” is the immigration enforcement apparatus, which will receive more than $170 billion over the next four years. To put it in perspective, the current budget for the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency—whose masked agents are kidnapping people off street corners and from workplaces—is just under $10 billion.
The amount of money devoted to this arrest/detention/deportation operation will be more <a href="https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/congress-throws-more-money-at-removing-immigrants-than-most-countries-spend-on-their-armies">than is allocated to other federal agencies like the FBI, the Bureau of Prisons—even the US Marine Corps</a>. The sort of operation that ICE conducted in Los Angeles earlier this year will be expanded in every major city in the country simultaneously. And with an unaccountable, militarised police force operating nationwide, no-one—including US citizens—will be safe.
The federal government has been authorised to spend more than $45 billion to build a network of detention facilities like Florida’s <a href="https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2025/07/03/where-is-alligator-alcatraz-detainees-escaped-immigration-facility-nj/84457477007/">Alligator Alcatraz</a>, which will mostly house people who are not charged with a crime, but who are slated for deportation. The assault on the social fabric and civil liberties that is coming will be unprecedented since the internment of Japanese Americans during the Second World War.
Because most of these facilities will be privately operated and crash-built, the opportunities for corruption will be limitless. Talk about “waste, fraud and abuse”! They could even be a source of <a href="https://sentientmedia.org/people-in-ice-detention-forced-to-work/">forced labour for industries such as farming and construction</a> that depend on immigrant workers.
With states and localities losing Medicaid, one of the largest federal sources of local and state budgets, they will be hard pressed to resist the one source of federal money where the spigot is fully open—that is, the billions that will be available to sign up local law enforcement as a “force multiplier” for ICE. And if rural hospitals close down, the GOP is hoping that ICE prisons will provide substitute <a href="https://boltsmag.org/how-the-gop-megabill-would-turbocharge-local-immigration-enforcement/">jobs that will entrench them in local political economies for the foreseeable future</a>.
For now, the “big beautiful bill” is, by most reliable measures of public opinion, extremely unpopular. In fact, it is the second most unpopular bill considered in Congress since the 1990s (second to Trump’s 2017 attempt to repeal the Affordable Care Act), <a href="https://www.gelliottmorris.com/p/one-big-unpopular-bill">according to data journalist G. Elliott Morris</a>. The party-line vote, in which no Democrats in either the House of Representatives or the Senate voted for it, means that the GOP owns it and its consequences.
The Democrats expect its unpopularity and adverse effects will help them win one or both houses of Congress in the 2026 midterm elections. But November 2026 is a long way off.
Moreover, Democrats don’t have clean hands. Their messaging on the bill focused on how it would slash Medicaid to pay for tax cuts for the rich. Fair enough. But in 2023 and 2024, in an effort to restore “normalcy” after the COVID pandemic, the Biden administration ended the expansion of Medicaid, tossing <a href="https://www.kff.org/report-section/medicaid-enrollment-and-unwinding-tracker-enrollment-data/">16 million people from the program</a>. This was one of the contributing factors to <a href="https://www.crisesnotes.com/one-election-takeaway-voters-hate-temporary-safety-nets/">Kamala Harris’ loss to Trump in the 2024 election</a>. 
Democrats were also reluctant to condemn the expansion of ICE and its gulag. Again, that’s to be expected from a party that has spent the last few years running away from any pro-immigration stance. Forty-eight House Democrats and 12 Democratic senators voted with the Republicans for the Laken Riley Act, which is helping ICE to round people up, and 75 of them <a href="https://www.newsweek.com/75-democrats-house-antisemitism-resolution-ice-gratitude-2083177">supported a resolution expressing “gratitude” to ICE</a>.
All of this means that the Democrats, the courts, and other institutions are not coming to save us. In fact, many of them are being coerced or corrupted into accepting Trump’s austere authoritarianism as the new normal. The labour and social movements can only depend on ourselves to prevent the US’s further slide into the abyss.
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Lance Selfa is the author of <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Democrats-Critical-History-Updated/dp/1608461920">The Democrats: A Critical History</a> (Haymarket, 2012) and editor of <a href="https://www.amazon.com/US-Politics-Age-Uncertainty-Reality/dp/1608468534">US Politics in an Age of Uncertainty: Essays on a New Reality</a> (Haymarket, 2017). He lives in Chicago.

US Republicans pass the most damaging laws in generations

Donald Trump is on a rampage against workers in the United States. According to the 2025 Global Rights Index, published by the International Trade Union Confederation, the world’s largest trade union federation, the new administration has “taken a wrecking ball to the collective labour rights of workers”. Trump has stripped protections and bargaining rights for tens of thousands of public sector workers and paralysed the National Labor Relations Board, which protects employees’ rights to organise and join unions. And he’s just getting started.
The US union movement is historically weak. Strike rates remain at decades-long lows. Union density has steadily declined from a peak of 35 percent in 1954, recording a new low in every decade since then. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, just 10 percent of all workers are now in unions. This obviously poses challenges for the workers’ movement, particularly for workers who want to organise against Trump’s reactionary agenda.
Red Flag’s Ryan Stanton spoke to Joe Burns—a labour lawyer, union activist and bargaining negotiator since the 1990s—about where the US union movement has gone wrong and what needs to change. Burns recently completed negotiations for 27,000 United Airlines employees and Association of Flight Attendants members. He has written three books on labour organising: <a href="https://www.igpub.com/strike-back/">Strike Back</a>, <a href="https://www.amazon.com.au/Reviving-Strike-Working-Transform-America/dp/1935439243">Reviving the Strike</a>, and <a href="https://shop.redflag.org.au/products/class-struggle-unionism">Class Struggle Unionism</a>.
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What is the state of the American labour movement in the era of Donald Trump?
It’s obviously a difficult period with Trump in office. He has unleashed attacks on immigrant workers and workers in the federal government. But the problem is much bigger than just Trump. The United States has seen a decline in the percentage of workers who belong to trade unions. Only six out of 100 private sector workers now belong to unions. While there are flashes of success here and there, the reality is that the labour movement has been stuck for decades.
This is in large part because we’ve abandoned the principles of class struggle unionism. We put a lot of money into organising, but we’ve been unable to convince workers to join our weak and ineffective unions. We were told that when Democrats like Biden got in and we had a new NLRB [National Labor Relations Board], things would be different. But the similarities between presidential administrations over the last few decades outweigh the differences. The decline in union membership has continued at an equal rate under both Republicans and Democrats. All the Democrats have done is change some rules around the margins. 
We’re not going to revive the labour movement this way. The union reform movement and the left within the labour movement are the weakest that I’ve seen in decades. Certain sectors of the economy and certain states are better organised, but I think the crisis is pretty much throughout the labour movement in the entire country. There are a lot of fuzzy ideas about teaching organising approaches, as if that’s our problem. 
We really need a complete revamp of approach. Labour’s decline is not fundamentally a product of one party or another—they are both capitalist parties. It reflects a deeper problem with the labour movement. What we really lack are the principles of class struggle unionism and how we fight both inside and outside of our unions to take on the capitalist class. And I think it starts with the left of the labour movement coming to grips with the crisis that we face and what it’s going to take to move forward. That’s the fundamental problem. 
My first two books focused on reviving the strike in both the public and private sectors. My most recent book, Class Struggle Unionism, focuses on the internal problems within the labour movement, including our inability to confront the shifting regimes of labour law, the legal restrictions on the right to strike, worker self-activity and so on. Although my knowledge of the Australian union movement is somewhat limited, I do try to follow things over there and it seems that both union movements face similar problems. 
How have the unions approached the Trump administration?
Well, obviously Trump is doing this sort of right-wing populism thing. He’s certainly won over a base with his tariffs and protectionism, which have an appeal to auto workers and steelworkers, who have been decimated by decades of neoliberal attacks and the elimination of protections for workers. Many liberal labour leaders are aghast that Sean Fain from the UAW [United Auto Workers] and others support the tariffs. However, we spent a lot of the 1990s fighting against the North American Free Trade Agreement and other free trade agreements that were geared towards allowing corporations to shift manufacturing jobs overseas without regard for workers. These agreements allow capitalists to exploit workers around the world, while eroding manufacturing unionism. 
So, it’s not surprising to me that some of these unions support tariffs. It’s economic nationalism, but it’s also rooted in material reality in which workers have faced job losses. They’ve felt the effects of an era of neoliberalism that was spearheaded in many ways by the Democratic establishment. However, the tariffs are not going to fix things. To the extent you support them and take a narrow, sectional point of view, you cut yourself off from your natural allies and move away from class struggle unionism. In the worst case, you end up like the Teamsters [one of the largest unions in the US], who have been cosying up to Trump. This is an abandonment of working-class principles. 
Has there been much opposition to the Trump administration from the union movement?
For the most part, the union leaders oppose Trump—at least rhetorically. To be fair, while the UAW came out with qualified support for Trump’s tariffs, they have fought him on other issues. Although we’ve seen some protests, there hasn’t yet been the same kind of opposition we saw during his first term. I think he came on so ferociously that it put people on the back foot. While the union movement is participating in smaller, localised protests, I wouldn’t say they are doing much to seriously oppose Trump. 
What is the relationship between the US union movement and the Democratic Party? 
The union movement allied itself with the Democratic Party through the 1930s, ’40s and ’50s. The unions deluded themselves into thinking they had an important role in business and government. They have the trappings of power, but not real power. Over the years, the labour movement has allowed itself to be incorporated into the Democrats and become increasingly dependent on the state for its existence. In doing so, we’ve accepted of a lot of restrictions on unions and the right to strike. 
However, despite what we are commonly told, the Democratic Party is no ally of the labour movement. We have to keep in mind that Trump is not the first president to attack migrants or attempt to gut the federal workforce. Democratic governors called out the National Guard in the 1980s to break the Hormel meatpackers’ strike in Minnesota, where I’m originally from. Democratic President Bill Clinton and his vice president, Al Gore, got rid of 400,000 federal worker jobs in the 1990s, probably more than they’ve cut so far with Elon Musk and DOGE. 
The problem isn’t just that the labour movement spends a tonne of money supporting Democrats, money that could go into organising. And the problem isn’t just that this offers a false path and defrays the real issues affecting workers. The real problem is that it reflects the entry of capitalist ideology into the labour movement. As Tony Mazzocchi, the leader of the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers International Union, who tried to start a labour party in the 1990s, used to say: the bosses have two parties, it’s time for workers to have one. The Democrats are a wholly corporate-funded and controlled political party. It was the Democrats’ anti-working-class policies that provided the basis for Trump’s rise to power. 
In your book Class Struggle Unionism, you loosely define three approaches to modern trade unionism: business unionism, liberal unionism and class struggle unionism. What do you mean by these terms? 
For the first 100 or so years of trade unionism, the fundamental divide was between what I call business unionism and class struggle unionism. Business unionism tended to be a narrower trade unionism, often focused on representing a group of workers under a particular employer or industry. Business unionists didn’t see themselves as having a broader role in society, and certainly not a role of transforming the relationship between workers and employers. Their slogan can be famously summed up by the slogan, “A fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work”. 
In contrast, we have a long, rich history of class struggle unionism, which takes a fundamentally different point of view. It recognises that the source of power and privilege in society is exploitation in the workplace. Whether you’re at Starbucks, Amazon or Ford, your labour creates value during your shift. You get paid a portion of that value in wages, and the rest flows upwards to a handful of people. That’s how we get billionaires in society; that’s the source of power and privilege. 
So, if you truly want to take on the billionaire class, you have to start in the workplace by challenging exploitation. When I talk about class struggle unionists in the United States, I think of the Industrial Workers of the World, or the Wobblies as they are better known, in the early 1900s. I think of the folks around the Communist Party in the Trade Union Unity League of the 1920s. I think of Farrell Dobbs and the Trotskyists who led the Teamsters rebellion of the 1930s. I think of the powerful, left-led international unions that came out of the 1930s, who were then decimated in the red scares of the late 1940s and early 1950s. 
In the 1970s, thousands of anti-war and student activists joined the new communist movement. Many of those people then joined the labour movement with a conscious viewpoint of class struggle unionism. They went into the labour movement to transform it and put it on a fighting class struggle basis. They saw the working class as critical to a broader transformation of society. A lot of those leftists who went into the labour movement in the 1970s engaged in a lot of good struggles. They were probably a bit ultra-left and spent too much time fighting each other, but I think a lot of good struggles came out of their efforts. 
However, in the 1980s, we faced a withering attack on trade unionism. We saw a wave of legal restrictions on the right to strike and on solidarity action, and the permanent replacement of striking workers. Great Britain, Australia and the United States shifted to restrain the sort of worker self-activity that had built a powerful labour movement, especially solidarity, cross-class and class-wide trade unionism. We were getting pummelled. This was one of the factors that led to the implosion of the socialist left in the late 1970s and early 1980s in the United States. A lot of these people drifted away into labour education, and some of them entered the mid-levels of the labour movement. This is when we saw the rise of the “third way” of labour liberalism in the 1980s. It was somewhat rooted in this grouping of people who were ideologically progressive or even socialist, but who began to turn away from class struggle unionism.
They hoped to straddle the two worlds of business unionism and class struggle unionism. They focused on things like the “corporate campaign” and the “organising approach”. A lot of this is rooted in the technical expertise of these sorts of mid-level staffers in the labour movement. Their politics flips from idea to idea. One minute we need social unionism, then we need broad community campaigns, then we need more trained organisers and so on. Unions have developed all sorts of alternatives to the strike, and they’ve begun to look more like NGOs than actual fighting organs of the class. In many ways, they have just walked away from the fundamental root of the crisis. 
A good example is the Service Employees International Union, which has led well-promoted campaigns to organise fast food workers. But this was all bullshit. They would lead “industrial action” that would have like 50 staffers and a handful of fired workers pretending that the workers were on strike. Some of the recent Amazon strikes were like that, too. There’s a real proliferation of these types of actions—what I call publicity strikes. Even groups such as Labor Notes talk less about the reform and how fucked up the labour movement is, and a lot more about the “secrets of the successful organisers” and “what are the techniques that organisers need?” 
Well, the problem isn’t the techniques. What we need is class struggle unionism. We need more fights with the bureaucracy that doesn’t want to engage in the sort of militant struggle that’s necessary to revive the labour movement. These bureaucrats don’t want to break with the Democratic Party or the state apparatus by violating injunctions and doing all the things that we would need to do to win and to attract workers to our movement.

Ryan Stanton

Class struggle unionism in the USA: an interview with Joe Burns

Sometimes, there is good news. In the era of Trump 2.0, it might come only in small doses, but we ought to grab it with both hands when it presents itself.
New York’s political earthquake is one such piece of news. In the nerve centre of global finance and the fortress of US liberal Zionism, a self-declared socialist who opposes Israeli apartheid and calls out its genocide has won the Democratic Party’s nomination for mayor. Zohran Mamdani overcame a campaign of slander—and a river of Wall Street money flowing to his chief opponent—by pulling together an army of volunteers and what appears to be an unprecedented mobilisation of young voters.
The immediate backdrop to the victory was millions of people protesting across the US, through April, May and June, against the Trump administration and its reactionary agenda, including militant protests in Los Angeles against deportations. New York ought to be viewed as part of the broader resistance to Trump and a repudiation of the Democratic Party’s failure to challenge the administration. 
While this was an electoral mobilisation, and therefore inherently limited compared to a social movement, it proved to be more transformative of the political situation than any of the street protests. They showed that masses of people are prepared to stand up to Trump in some way or another, but none significantly shifted the political dial.
The difference is primarily due to Mamdani defeating the combined efforts of the New York establishment. And that’s what people see: a precious victory on the terrain most favourable to the rich and powerful—capitalist elections that mostly go the way of those with the most money and connections. It’s a tremendous feel-good story for the left to break through at the very moment that people are most worried about a fascist takeover of US politics, and as Trump and the billionaires seem to have everything going their way.
Mamdani’s campaign demonstrated that there is a significant base of young people who want a left alternative to both Trumpism and the sclerotic, right-wing Democratic Party status quo. While his campaign focused on class questions—New York is the most expensive and unequal city in America—surely it is no coincidence that this earthquake followed last year’s major political tremor: <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/what-weve-learned-in-new-york-city">the Palestine solidarity encampment movement</a>, which precipitated a crisis in liberal Zionism and among the Democratic base, and politicised campuses across the city. The Democratic establishment that now stands humiliated at the hands of a mass bloc of 18–35-year-old voters is the same establishment that relentlessly smeared and violently smashed the city’s encampments—and which declared that this election was primarily about Mamdani’s opposition to genocide.
Yet this is not only a New York story. The November mayoral election is shaping up to be one of national significance. Trump, the Republicans and a section of the Democratic establishment want to make Mamdani an avatar for everything they are against. Millions of people inspired by his program—doubling the minimum wage, making child care free, resisting the deportation agenda, making housing affordable and taxing the rich—likewise see in New York a vision of the sort of political alternative they want nationally.
This is not just an American tale, either. The US leads the world culturally and politically; often, that influence is malign. So when Trump wins, right-wingers on every continent import and adapt his toxic brand of politics to local conditions. When trash liberal social theories—often some variant of the self-absorbed, moralistic identity politics that dominate universities—become fashionable in the US, they permeate progressive circles around the world, stifling the development of a genuine left.
But the US also has a history of exporting hope. And right now, left-wing and progressive people around the world are cheering. Finally, it’s not another headline about another fascist advance somewhere in the world. Finally, the news coming out of America is not only about the latest horror inflicted by the White House on workers and the oppressed. Finally, there is a sense of victory—a feeling that the political establishment everywhere could be rocked, even defeated, by a political alternative organised around a simple message: less for the rich and more for the poor, regardless of race, gender or legal status.
Mamdani is not only on everyone’s lips. His coalition is the future of the left and potentially of big-city political culture and sensibilities: young, socialist-leaning, pro-Palestinian and open to anti-imperialism. That the Democratic establishment—Wall Street billionaires and liberal imperialists—have been totally embarrassed and are now seemingly engulfed in crisis is the cherry on top. 
Recognising these positives doesn’t mean drinking the Kool-Aid of municipal socialism, however. So to be clear: the good news is not
that Mamdani could become mayor of the biggest city in the United States. The mayor’s office is not akin to a seat in a legislature from which a socialist could consistently organise resistance and build a socialist party. The New York mayoral office is one of America’s most powerful executive positions—running the country’s largest police force, enforcing all local and state laws in its biggest city and ultimately ensuring that Wall Street finance functions smoothly. 

Without the backing of a mass socialist party and an insurgent working-class movement, even the most principled of revolutionary Marxists would be incapable of withstanding the institutional and ruling-class pressures that are brought to bear on the chief executive of capitalism’s most important city. 
Given the current balance of class forces, a moderate like Mamdani has no chance. His organisation, the Democratic Socialists of America, would be no counterweight to the social and economic power of New York’s ruling class and upper-middle classes. The party can’t even hold to account elected representatives with zero formal responsibilities—the list of DSA members or DSA-endorsed legislators who have gone on to make peace with the Democratic Party establishment is hardly a secret. Indeed, if Mamdani were to win, many DSA members would likely be brought into government jobs to help administer New York capitalism. 
Mamdani is already working hand-in-glove with sections of the Democratic Party. That ought to come as no surprise—he ran as a Democrat, after all. He may go further trying to prove himself a “competent” safe pair of hands for the New York business class. If he were to compromise enough, he could even be welcomed into the fold before the November election. Stranger things have happened. 
If such things transpire and Mamdani’s supporters aren’t prepared, they could easily become demoralised or cynical, or politically drift to the right as they justify the capitulations as just being realistic. 
That’s why Marxists emphasise the building of politicised social movements and the organised power of the working class. Our side can certainly have victories in which people play a more or less passive role. However, lifting political consciousness and building political resilience require much more than electoral campaigning. Genuine “realism” begins with understanding that capitalist institutions—such as the Democratic Party and the state—are obstacles to social change that need to be smashed rather than embraced.
Nevertheless, another scenario could be that the New York establishment coalesces around an alternative candidate who seems likely to win easily. In that case, Mamdani could double down on the most left-wing aspects of his program and inspire even more people to look to socialist politics for solutions to the obvious problems of capitalist society.
These “ifs”, “buts”, “maybes” and “probablys” will be the subject of more coverage and conversations in the coming weeks and months as the campaign unfolds. The script isn’t entirely written in advance—time, as always, will tell.
But for now, the good news is in: a socialist message has politically galvanised masses of young people in the heart of global capitalism; and that message has echoed from the five boroughs of New York, inspiring people across oceans. True, the good news could be short-lived. But it ought to be a shot in the arm for everyone trying to build a socialist party.

Editors

Fairytale of New York?

President Donald Trump’s attacks on migrants have dramatically stepped up in recent weeks. But he has been met with protests and civil disobedience, including a national day of mobilisations involving several million people across the country. 
Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents have dropped the pretext of targeting “the most dangerous criminals” and shifted their focus to immigrant workers. The ICE repression machine has been so brazen as to violently and publicly arrest four prominent Democratic politicians, most recently <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/sen-alex-padilla-forcibly-removed-dhs-sec-kristi-noems-press-conferenc-rcna212688">a senator from California</a> and a high-profile <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/17/nyregion/brad-lander-immigration-ice.html">New York City mayoral candidate</a>, who have been critical of the raids.
With the number of border crossings from Mexico now at historic lows, the easy deportation numbers racked up by the Democratic administrations of Barack Obama and Joe Biden—by simply turning people around as they entered the US—have been out of reach for Trump’s racist machine. Top White House aide Stephen Miller therefore <a href="https://www.wsj.com/us-news/protests-los-angeles-immigrants-trump-f5089877">instructed ICE</a> to “just go out there and arrest illegal aliens”. Miller, <a href="https://www.splcenter.org/resources/extremist-files/stephen-miller/">the hard-right architect</a> of Trump’s anti-migrant policies, specifically directed agents to target workplaces. 
The point is not only to terrorise and deport people, but to galvanise the MAGA political base by testing the limits of the federal government’s powers against non-citizens, protesters and Democratic-controlled states and cities. Trump wants to <a href="https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/trump-doubles-expanding-deportations-americas-biggest-cities/story?id=122894265">bulldoze</a>
the existing meagre “sanctuary” policies and wage war on their defenders. He wants ICE to be an unrestricted force of <a href="https://peoplesdispatch.org/2025/05/20/united-farm-workers-union-protests-ice-arrests-of-farm-laborers-involved-in-union-drive/">labour discipline</a> and <a href="https://time.com/7272060/international-students-targeted-trump-ice-detention-deport-campus-palestinian-activism/">political repression</a>. And he wants to establish that no-one—judges, mayors, governors, senators or protesters—can get in his way. 
As an example of the atmosphere, the chair of the Senate Subcommittee on Crime and Counterterrorism has <a href="https://x.com/HawleyMO/status/1932936510967251155">sent letters to organisations involved in protests against ICE</a>, accusing them of “bankrolling civil unrest” and threatening criminal investigations.
A glimmer of hope
In Los Angeles, home to a million undocumented people and millions of other migrants and their descendents, the ICE onslaught sparked the most significant resistance we’ve seen since Trump returned to office. 
Heroic protesters in Los Angeles have documented and disrupted ICE raids. They started a <a href="https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/06/demonstrators-are-trying-to-make-sure-ice-agents-cant-sleep/">“No Sleep for ICE”</a> campaign—locating the hotels housing federal agents and making sure they can’t rest after spending their days attacking migrants. They organised mass mobilisations, shutting down traffic and putting resistance at the centre of political discourse. And, unlike many previous waves of immigrant rights struggles, they have maintained a militant edge in opposing the police and the state.
Although the “No Kings” marches—the millions-strong mobilisations held on 14 June across the country—were organised by groups much closer to the Democratic Party establishment, the spark from Los Angeles helped make them younger and more diverse than the last national mobilisations on 5 April. 
We have been shown glimpses of what is possible when determined activists give a concerted lead. And we have seen that some of the most marginalised and oppressed in US society can be a leading edge in a fight against Trump. 
Despite the massive wave of protests that peaked on 14 June, however, the attacks on migrants have continued. And on top of migrant arrests, <a href="https://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/spanish-language-journalist-documents-immigration-raids-detained-ice-122944707">journalists documenting the brutality</a> have frequently been targeted. Yet protests are still rippling through the country, and the dynamics of this powder keg could yet shift. Much will depend on how far Trump keeps pushing in his war on Democratic-controlled cities—particularly if the federal government goes all out against Chicago and/or New York. 
Capitalist contradictions
Trump and his cronies want a campaign of federal terror and community division. They know that Trump’s stocks rise when racism, nationalism and a domestic war on “the enemy of the people” (meaning opponents of Trump) are the political currency of the day. 
However, US capitalists were doing fine with the pre-Trump levels of anti-migrant brutality. Poverty and fear already kept undocumented workers’ heads down and resulted in most accepting far less—lower wages, fewer rights—than they deserve. Hungry bellies and fears of family separation across dangerous borders force people to accept horrible conditions in the de facto apartheid US labour system. 
The wealthiest in US society have benefited greatly from exploiting the millions of undocumented workers—cheap housekeepers and nannies, cheap labour for businesses, an even more exploitable labour force across the border, more tax dollars for the state without a range of welfare obligations, downward pressure on the wages of other workers and so on. 
Many capitalists, therefore, have opposed the more aggressive ICE raids for disrupting the labour supply and for generating bad press and disruptive protests. That’s why the face of the Democratic Party’s “resistance”, California Governor Gavin Newsom, talked from both sides of his mouth when the protests escalated in Los Angeles. Newsom rode the wave of sympathy for migrant communities while bragging about his government’s <a href="https://www.kcra.com/article/newsom-california-prison-system-ice/63789927">longstanding cooperation</a> with ICE. He said that protests are necessary in the face of tyranny, while <a href="https://calmatters.org/justice/2025/06/immigrant-legal-aid-budget/">restricting access</a> to immigrant legal support. 
It was a cynical political calculation from the Democratic establishment’s presidential frontrunner; a nod to the wealthy that he can carry through the regular politics of divide and rule without being a wrecker.
Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, a stalwart of the left of the party, was arguably worse than Newsom. In the wake of the rebellion against the raids, Sanders <a href="https://x.com/BernieSanders/status/1932148252800905415">misrepresented</a>
Martin Luther King Jr’s statements on riots to condemn the heroic Los Angeles protesters. Diverting attention from the need for protests, he <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Al7wpZL-QCI">emphasised</a> the importance of governors, not the federal government, having the power to deploy the National Guard. 
The Democrats want to prevent the federal government from undermining their local and regional authority. But they don’t want to spark resistance that could threaten the profits or interests of their capitalist friends and donors. 
Where to now?
The protests have been an inspiration and a breath of fresh air. They point in the direction of popular resistance, rather than resignation, and in the direction of direct action, rather than reliance on the capitalist courts and politicians. 
The more working-class people take to the streets in defiance of the government and its agents, the more they expose the bankrupt Democratic strategy of largely hunkering down until the midterm elections. Democrats don’t want mass democracy and the genuine involvement of the people—they just want Trump’s project to implode so that they can become politically relevant on the back of extremely low expectations, as they did in 2020 with Joe Biden’s presidential election victory. 
It’s still early, but we haven’t yet seen the <a href="https://www.zinnedproject.org/news/tdih/immigrant-protests-peak/#:~:text=On%20April%2010%2C%202006%2C%20the,but%20failed%20in%20the%20Senate.&amp;text=Hundreds%20of%20newspapers%20covered%20the%20protests.">scale of disruption</a> or economic impact that defined the wave of immigrant rights protests in 2006, when there were mass workplace walkouts. That was the peak of the first big wave of immigrant activism, which beat back the anti-immigrant <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Border_Protection,_Anti-terrorism_and_Illegal_Immigration_Control_Act_of_2005">Sensenbrenner Bill</a> and <a href="https://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-0306-engler-immigration-protests-2006-20160306-story.html">shaped a generation of activists</a>, this author included.
While there seems to have been a greater degree of militancy in this new wave of protests, the depth of the crisis and the appetite for months of disruptive street demonstrations fall well short of the 2020 Black Lives Matter rebellion. Those protests <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2020/12/31/2020-the-year-black-lives-matter-shook-the-world">pushed the state back</a> for a brief moment, and sparked a <a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/george-floyd-black-lives-matter-impact/">global movement</a> against racism and police brutality. 
Nevertheless, the protesters should be celebrated, even if they haven’t yet become the type of mass movement that could stop this authoritarian regime in its tracks. Activists discussing the need for a <a href="https://wagingnonviolence.org/2025/04/what-would-general-strike-in-the-us-look-like/">general strike</a> and orienting their efforts towards the power of the labour movement are important. But organising independently of the forces that would undermine these efforts is crucial. 
Real power lies in the working class, and a big fight from organised workers could shake this regime. Yet the strong links of the NGO and trade union wing of the immigrant rights movement with the Democratic Party lead far too many down the dead-end road of supporting a “lesser evil” that is perfectly happy to <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-election/-border-broken-democrats-solidify-shift-tougher-migration-stance-conve-rcna167638">target and scapegoat</a> migrants when it is politically expedient.
In Texas, I was part of nearly a dozen different immigrant justice organisations. More than half of them no longer exist because key organisers burned out or moved on. The other half have either limped on independently or have fallen further into the Democratic Party sphere of influence and moderated their actions. 
The question for the left now is how much it can organise and build from this moment. The crucial task is to build an independent socialist left that sharpens its politics for this and the next fight.

Green shoots of resistance in the United States

As the mass ICE raids began on Friday in Los Angeles, members of the socialist group Tempest participated in rapid response and other protest efforts with mass organisations into the weekend. The Community Self-Defence Coalition, in which Tempest members participate, is a key formation that coordinates LA’s rapid response efforts. Tempest’s LA branch members were actively involved in defence efforts during skirmishes across downtown LA, the pitched battle in the city of Paramount and rapid response efforts to repel ICE in the city of Pasadena. They compiled and recorded their experiences throughout the weekend, covering the first days of mobilisation. All photos are by the Tempest LA branch and friends. This piece was first published at <a href="https://tempestmag.org/">Tempest magazine</a>.
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FRIDAY 6 JUNE
The first day involved nearly a dozen raids near downtown Los Angeles, Sun Valley and North Hollywood neighbourhoods, and LA County suburbs, including Pomona. Emergency rallies were called and converged around the downtown Metropolitan Detention Center. After dispersing protesters there, different law enforcement officers went over to the adjacent district of Chinatown to stage late night around 9pm. There was a lot of contradictory and confusing information spread across different protest chats throughout the night. At first, we were told that they were setting up for a night raid; later, word on the block was that they were setting up for Trump’s “border czar” Tom Homan’s press conference at 7am the next morning. Dozens of FBI agents stationed in a parking lot in Chinatown on Hill St., later joined by Border Patrol, LAPD, and Homeland Security. Protesters quickly gathered to monitor and heckle them, soon outnumbering law enforcement, which also reinforced their numbers. Know Your Rights information was blasted on megaphones in English, Spanish, and Cantonese, as protesters informed local residents of their rights.
Things became more intense as armoured personnel carriers and additional law enforcement personnel poured in, although it was still unclear why they were staging in Chinatown. Some protesters, including bikers, tried to block vehicles from entering the lot. Some identified undercover officers and their vehicles on the protesters’ side and successfully heckled them to leave. Others followed various vehicles exiting the lot to figure out where they were going. Soon, law enforcement occupied the whole street beyond the lot to pressure the protesters out. Loud popping sounds started, with some claiming that they were sound cannons being blasted by the police. The pressure from protesters continued into midnight, after which all law enforcement retreated without explanation. There were no further reports of mass raids and Homan’s press conference the next day. (Homan later appeared on television the next afternoon to announce the deployment of the National Guard.)
<figure><img src="https://newcms.redflag.org.au/files/public/articleCoverImages/Tempest-1.jpg" alt="" /></figure>
SATURDAY 7 JUNE
On the second day, rapid responders rushed to the city of Paramount in the morning, located about a half hour drive south of LA, upon reports of an ICE raid at a Home Depot. Paramount developed into a war zone throughout the day. Paramount is a majority low-income and Latinx area, and one of LA’s key industrial regions. The organised left has little presence in this area, but the militancy seen on 7 June demonstrates the spontaneous power of Brown working-class youth in defending their communities. ICE cars were seen burning. Hundreds of law enforcement officers were deployed throughout Paramount, throwing tear gas and flash bombs as protesters fought back and the Home Depot barricaded itself for safety.
As the Paramount battle stretched on, supporters continued to respond to different reports of ICE raids across LA, as some continued to support detainees at the downtown detention centre. More people began gathering back at the detention centre early in the evening. Around 100-150 protesters were there around 7pm. LAPD gathered en masse to use tear gas and shoot pellets at protesters in this area between 8 and 10pm. Most of the street around the detention centre was cleared out and occupied by hundreds of LAPD officers. In the meantime, Homan confirms on national television that he’ll be federalising the California National Guard for deployment in LA, against Governor Gavin Newsom’s dissent. It was unclear that night what this meant or when exactly the Guard would arrive. The day-long battles in Paramount stretched west into the city of Compton, which was one of the last sites where militant mobilisation continued that day.
There were reported ICE sightings at probably six other locations throughout southern California but the majority of protest and state activity occurred primarily in the vicinity of the Home Depot in Paramount and Compton that went into the early morning Sunday, and again at the Downtown LA Metropolitan Detention Center where protesters had been gathered the entire day.
<figure><img src="https://newcms.redflag.org.au/files/public/articleCoverImages/Tempest-2.jpg" alt="" /></figure>
SUNDAY 8 JUNE
LOS ANGELES
On 8 June, Angelenos woke to the news that over 2,000 National Guard had been deployed. A protest in the predominantly Latinx working-class Boyle Heights neighbourhood was planned by Centro CSO and other immigrant rights and local groups for the morning. Crowds had also already begun to gather back at the detention centre downtown.
<figure><img src="https://newcms.redflag.org.au/files/public/articleCoverImages/Tempest-3.jpg" alt="" /></figure>
Activists gathered at Mariachi Plaza to protest the ICE raids of the previous two days. Speakers included labour movement icon Dolores Huerta. Speakers generally emphasised not only the rights of immigrants but also applauded the courage and rapid response of the activists gathered, as well as the importance of showing the Trump administration that people will continue to fight back against his draconian methods. The gathering mobilised to march down 1st Street for 1.5 miles to the Federal Metropolitan Detention Center on Alameda Street where they met a larger crowd of activists that had been gathering from the previous two days. Within minutes of arrival, the authorities fired upon the crowd of protesters, presumably with only tear gas, and the front of the crowd began to disperse. There did not appear to be any serious injuries, though many seemed unprepared for tear gas, and some were adversely affected. The Centro CSO organisers, worried about crowd safety, encouraged those remaining from the Mariachi Plaza rally to return to Boyle Heights. Many of us stayed to record the events, in particular the fully militarised presence of local, state, and federal authorities, including the National Guard. I left soon afterward when the tear gas became too overwhelming.
The crowd at the detention centre remained at about 100-300 people for the next two hours and had not yet encountered further violence. Protesters stood off with the ~20 California National Guard members stationed at the rear of the building. Eventually, a squadron of ~15 LAPD cars arrived further down the road, pre-positioned to block one exit along the walled-in road. A large portion of the crowd then moved around the guarded door and went around the corner, escaping a potential kettle. The police formed a line around their vehicles and appeared to fully surround a portion of the protesters, but did not make arrests.
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Around this time, a rally called by the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL) at the city hall nearby began to march toward the detention centre. It was unclear whether the march was part of the original rally plan or if the crowd spontaneously decided to march. This mass contingent arrived just in time to reinforce the surrounded protesters near the detention centre. As they arrived, the police were forced to retreat promptly. Thousands of protesters continued to flood the streets outside the detention centre throughout the afternoon and occupied the nearby intersection at Alameda and Temple. Some remained around the intersection while others continued to march. This contingent went through Little Tokyo back to the Federal Building.
At this point, the crowd was too large to be effectively organised. Some remained at the detention centre, others continued to march, while a smaller group occupied the freeway.
A formation of LAPD officers opposed the crowd of ~200 protesters, who kept a close distance from the line. The police continued to shoot volleys of less-lethal weapons into these different sites, though protesters remained steadfast for hours. Pro-Palestine slogans and clothing were not only ubiquitous, but many of those furthest in the front defending the protests from the police were wearing keffiyehs. We witnessed multiple people around us injured. Street medics helped many protesters tend to their injuries. The police soon declared unlawful assembly but were unable to fully sweep the intersection for hours. At one point, the police declared that they would begin arrests in a minute, but were halted by a protester’s car that slowly rolled through the intersection with a child sitting at the window, raising a Mexican flag with his fist up. The crowd protected them, and the sweeps were delayed for another half an hour.
After another stand-off, the protesters crossed over the median of the freeway, stopping the flow of traffic in the opposite direction. As soon as this happened, the police widened their line and began shooting flash bangs in the sky above the protesters on the freeway. Peaceful protesters were met with disproportionate state violence that increased with time, including being fired on with less-lethal guns from rooftops. Several Waymo automated cars were burned. Significant numbers of protesters remained in the streets at various points around downtown LA into the evening and after nightfall. They were forced off the freeway but continued to march to other locations. As the protesters’ numbers grew thinner, police aggression increased. By sunset, the remaining protesters were forced to construct makeshift barricades using benches and signs.
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PASADENA
In Pasadena, word got out early in the morning across rapid response chats that ICE and DHS agents were staying at three local hotels: the Westin, Dena Hotel, and the new AC Hotel. There were reports of ICE agents questioning hotel workers who were servicing the rooms. By noon, Unite Here and the National Day Laborers Organizing Network brought out more than one hundred people from Pasadena and Altadena to inquire about and protest ICE’s presence. Faith leaders, community organisations and politicians, including Mayor Victor Gordo, showed up afterwards, and the crowd swelled to several hundred. Speakers at the rally denounced the intimidation and the hotel’s collaboration with ICE as they profit from family separation.
Throughout the day, protesters marched and circled the block, vowing to stay until ICE left. Some of the ICE vehicles’ tires were damaged. The protest served as a rallying point for the community. Community organisations like AUSIIME and the pro-immigrant band Los Jornaleros del Norte kept spirits high throughout the day with chants, cumbia, and anti-ICE songs. After several hours of protests, local politicians who had been intermediating with management announced that ICE had been asked to leave the hotel, and the crowd erupted in jubilation. Still, protesters did not leave until the agents had checked out and continued waiting, anticipating any movement. Since the morning, workers had been informing the rally of potential ICE movements, and everyone anticipated the humiliating exit from the hotel. After fixing their popped tires under the hot sun, ICE agents began to exit swiftly from the parking structure where protesters waited for them at all exits. As vehicles swerved through the parking structure, they were chased out by triumphant protesters who celebrated their victory, chanting “Si se pudo!” (We did it!)
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MONDAY 9 JUNE
Early in the morning, families of several workers (mostly women and youth) who were detained in Friday’s mass raid at Ambiance garment factory gathered for a press conference, assisted by the Garment Workers Center and other community organisations. A Tempest member assisted with security. The detained workers were the main providers in their families, and the families shared that they have not been able to hear from them yet. They called on ICE to free them, and to leave our communities. A group of over 100 people gathered to support them, including Palestinian and Palestine solidarity organisations, Indigenous organisations, progressive clergy, and other community nonprofits. The families also shared that Ambiance has still not released the workers’ owed wages to them, and a delegation of them went to the company offices after the press conference to demand these wages. There was no visible police presence or counter-protests, but many of us were informed throughout the event that ICE activity was beginning again in other parts of LA, including in Huntington Park, and the Fashion District again just a mile away from us. Many attendees went directly to the Grand Park rally to support David Huerta and SEIU right after.
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Later that morning at 11am, there was a rally at Grand Park in downtown led by SEIU in support of SEIU California President David Huerta, who was detained for participating in the protest against the mass raids at the detention centre on Friday. There was a curiously light police presence at first, despite the clashes over the weekend. In addition to SEIU International and various locals, many other major unions were present, including AFSCME, UHW, LULAC, Teamsters, UNITE HERE!, ILWU, LIUNA, IBEW and IATSE. There were also representatives of various civic and community organisations, like Clergy and Laity United for Economic Justice (CLUE), LAUSD, CARECEN, UCLA Labor Studies and LA County. The DSA-endorsed City Councilmember Ysabel Jurado was also present and spoke.
The general theme was that David Huerta’s arrest is also an injury to all of us. It was a demonstration of around 2,000 to 3,000 people that affirmed courage in the face of the federal presence sent by Trump. A band, Las Cafeteras, performed some songs like “La Bamba”, “If I Was President”, “Stand By Me”, which also asked the audience what they would change if they were president for a day. Prominent labour leaders spoke and affirmed labour’s role in the fight against fascism, including SEIU president April Verrett, Dolores Huerta, NAACP president David Johnson (who connected workers’ and civil rights, drawing on the Black struggle). Johnson powerfully declared that the Black struggle has taught him that saying nothing about the oppression of the most vulnerable would be an invitation for more abuses against everyone. Representatives from Justice for Janitors USWW, like Luis Fuentes, spoke about David Huerta’s labour bona fides.
But there was little emphasis on the need to build a resistance outside of the Democratic Party. Dolores Huerta emphasised nonviolence and the need for electoral strategies during the midterms, which was reaffirmed by the SEIU political policy director. Another policy representative spoke about the importance of forming coalitions with allies in other movements, emphasising the need for strength in numbers and solidarity.
Police presence and pressure began to ramp up toward the end of the rally, as a student walkout that morning converged at the nearby Federal Building. Hundreds of students and other community members began to join, and police vehicles from other cities, such as Vernon, Torrance and San Marino, appeared.
The Trump administration announced the deployment of Marines into LA around this time, as mass raids ramped up targeting many cities across Orange County, south of LA.
The situation remains highly fluid, and more protests are sure to occur in the coming days and weeks. There have already been reports of heightened ICE activity for the next 30 days. Tempest LA branch members will continue to participate and report on any resistance activities.
This piece was first published at <a href="https://tempestmag.org/">Tempest magazine</a>.
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