Donald Trump is back for a second term of his fascist regime, set to immediately and massively escalate his anti-immigrant crusade to an unprecedented level. This includes further efforts to block immigrants from coming into the U.S., including deploying the U.S. military to the border, refusing (in violation of U.S. and international law) to allow people to enter the country in order to request asylum, and other measures.

The most chilling objective of this second round of the fascist war on immigrants is to launch “the largest deportation operation in American history,” aiming to deport at least 11 million immigrants.¹ These are mainly people who have been in the U.S. for months, years or even decades, who have started families and are raising children; people with jobs and community ties.²

A big component of this is going to be ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) raids in immigrant communities and workplaces in major cities.³ Trump’s “Border Czar” (i.e., Chief Deportation Pig) Tom Homan says, “There’s going to be a big raid across the country. Chicago is just one of many places. We’ve got 24 field offices across the country. On Tuesday, ICE is finally going to go out and do their job.” 

Reportedly, the Chicago raid will involve hundreds of ICE agents and last for a week. And as Homan says, that is just getting started and one city of many that will be hit. New rules are expected to be adopted that allow raids on previously “off-limits” locations like schools, churches and hospitals.

Imagine the terror this will unleash, not just among undocumented people and their families, but for the whole community, for everyone who “looks like” an immigrant or speaks another language than English, or speaks English with an accent. Imagine teams of armed ICE agents challenging people: “Show me your papers!” Storming onto construction sites, meat-packing plants or going to people’s homes or shopping areas, carrying the threat to upend lives and families. Kids afraid to go to school, parents unable to go to work or even to go out of the house, even to get food or medical care. Families split apart as undocumented parents are ripped away from their citizen children.

This is already happening in California, where the Border Patrol has been carrying out sweeps of farmworkers in the rural areas around Bakersfield. The president of a citrus industry group there reports, “People aren’t going to work and kids aren’t going to school… today 75% [of workers] didn’t show up.” A mom of a West Bakersfield high school student said her daughter’s school friends are “hidden in their houses. She is very sad for them.” Another student reported that one of her parents had been taken away.

Chicago is being picked as a starting point in part because it is a “sanctuary city,” where local authorities have pledged to restrict cooperation with immigration raids. As the call from THE REVCOM CORPS For The Emancipation Of Humanity, Chicago, for protests on January 21 says, 

The Trump/MAGA fascists want to make an example out of this sanctuary city: to break the resolve of decent people who would consider opposing them; to break legal protections and open the way for more massive round ups; and to serve as a battering ram for a fuller fascist offensive.

We call on all decent and justice loving people to join with us in making a different example of this city: Of people finding their courage in righteous, fierce opposition to these deportations, and aiming to move millions in collective action to make it so Trump cannot govern the country and implement his fascist program.

During his first term, Trump’s most infamous anti-immigrant policy was child separation, which sought to terrorize migrants from coming to the U.S. by tearing their children away from their parents and hustling them off without the parents knowing where they were. Human Rights Watch reports that “As many as 1,360 children have never been reunited with their parents.” Homan was in charge of that heartless child separation policy.

One of the big themes during Trump’s election campaign was whipping up racist hatred of immigrants, charging them with “poisoning the blood of our country”—language that closely echoes Adolf Hitler’s “justification” for “cleansing” Germany of Jewish people (which ultimately led to the murder of six million Jews). 

Now Trump intends to greatly expand “expedited deportation,” a process in which certain categories of immigrants can be denied their right to a hearing in immigration court, and a low-level immigration officer can order them deported without a hearing. And for those still eligible for a hearing, Trump intends to eliminate parole, meaning that people suspected of being in the U.S. illegally will be held in ICE detention for months or even years awaiting their hearing.

Homan has said that he needs to more than double the number of beds in detention centers to 100,000 to hold the people that will be seized in raids across the country. Fox News writes about “massive expansion of immigration detention.” At least one former ICE official said that deportations on this large a scale will require detention camps on military bases. Stephen Miller, one of Trump's top advisors, has said that the Trump administration would build vast holding facilities to serve as staging centers for mass deportations. And the Christian fascist-run state of Texas has offered Trump 1,400 acres of land on the Mexican border to build a huge detention center.

This is the beginning of a network of concentration camps for people being held indefinitely without due process, carried out by those who think immigrants are less than human. It is an atrocity on an enormous scale waiting to happen.

This will also involve a wide range of other measures to subject more and more people to deportation, and to speed up the process by stripping away basic rights immigrants and asylum seekers have had under U.S. and international law. The fascist regime intends to start rolling on many of these measures on Day One or soon thereafter. Much of this will be accomplished through the signing of dozens of executive orders on Inauguration Day.⁴

Trump plans to eliminate “birthright citizenship,” which was established by the 14^th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution after the Civil War.⁵ This could mean revoking U.S. citizenship from millions, including of 4.1 million children under the age of 18, born in the U.S. of undocumented parents, as well as all children of non-citizen immigrants born in this country going forward. He wants to cancel Temporary Protective Status for hundreds of thousands of people whose home countries are too dangerous to safely return there—in other words, Trump aims to deport people directly into situations where their lives would be at risk. 

To be sure, exploitation and oppression of immigrants have long been “as American as apple pie,” under Republican and Democratic rulers of this system of capitalism-imperialism. Much of the wealth of the U.S. was and is built on desperate migrants doing backbreaking and dangerous labor for pitifully low pay, and living in constant fear of being deported. And it is that same system of capitalism-imperialism, and the U.S. in particular, that is responsible for creating the very conditions that make it extremely difficult to survive in the countries immigrants are fleeing from. Obama and Biden both broke records for deportations. This is and has been horrendous, and is a compelling example of why this system as a whole needs to be abolished through an actual revolution and replaced with a radically different system and state, leading people to forge a whole new and better world. (See the Declaration from the revcoms: WE NEED AND WE DEMAND: A WHOLE NEW WAY TO LIVE, A FUNDAMENTALLY DIFFERENT SYSTEM.)

We need to be building up the forces for that revolution now. Nevertheless, what is unfolding now with the fascist Trump regime is a massive and brazen crime against humanity on another level, and it could well lead to even more horrific crimes. This cannot be allowed to go down. Trump/MAGA fascism, including its assault on immigrants, must be sharply challenged and defeated—and mobilizing very broad, very diverse and very courageous resistance is a key part of that.

There has already been some important resistance. In Los Angeles, THE REVCOM CORPS For The Emancipation Of Humanity put themselves on the line to defend immigrant day laborers from attacks by MAGA. In south Brooklyn, where a city-run migrant center was being closed down, hundreds of people from the surrounding area took responsibility to relocate immigrants to safe and secure locations. In Newark, New Jersey, immigrant rights groups are marking Inauguration Day with a rally “to send a message that there are people willing to stand up and fight.” 

These all indicate the potential for bringing forward thousands and millions, to wage a whole other level of struggle that can be part of creating a political crisis that makes society under fascist rule ungovernable, and that helps prepare the ground for a sweeping revolution against the system as a whole.