Over the summer, seemingly out of nowhere and with no evident cause, lightning raids by masked and heavily armed federal agents began descending on people in large cities, small towns, and rural areas. The terror arrives in early morning darkness or broad daylight. People are picked up and hauled away from bus stops, schools, construction sites, dollar stores, and anywhere else immigrants may gather. Two immigrant men, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston, and Johan Sebastián Guerrero, in Maine, were murdered by ICE. Two others—Edwin Lopez-Cornejo and Jose Chajon-Raxon—died in an ICE detention center in Newark, New Jersey.

These raids and murders are the heart of a serious attempt to “racially purify” the U.S.—to drive and force millions of immigrants out of the country. It is well underway, right now. ABC News reported that in July alone, ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) agents arrested 51,000 people. This is the most arrested in a “single month in DHS [Department of Homeland Security] history …” and DHS director Markwayne Mullin has pledged that it also is just the beginning. 

Out of the Headlines, but “Quietly” Advancing the Fascist Agenda

During the first year of Trump’s second term, ICE staged high-profile and purposely confrontational invasion-like assaults in several cities across the country. They were met with sustained and courageous opposition in Los Angeles, Chicago, Minneapolis, and other cities. Thousands of people rallied and took other actions intended to protect immigrants from being rounded up. People around the world learned of and were inspired by this resistance to fascism in the “belly of the beast.” 

When Mullin became Secretary of Homeland Security this spring, he pledged to “fulfill the Trump administration's deportation goals while keeping the department ‘out of the headlines’.” The co-director of the Deportation Data Project, a research initiative, told NPR that “What we're seeing is an expansion in all of the different ways that ICE is detaining people. They're arresting people at airports, at ICE check-ins, at immigration courthouses, and this is the result of that."

Mullin’s offensive of widespread but “quiet” arrests advances the fascist agenda in three ways: 1) massive numbers of immigrants from all over the country are being deported, their lives ruined, their families torn apart; 2) fear is spreading among millions more that they could be next; and 3) awareness of, and opposition to, these “lower-profile” but more effective raids is not, for now at least, widespread.

Forging a Fascist Paramilitary Force, Turbo-Charging Deportations

Funding for ICE surged this year and has supercharged the fascist offensive. It now exceeds $200 billion. ICE has been on a “hiring spree”. It is by far the largest and most heavily funded police agency in U.S. history, and it functions as a paramilitary force loyal only to the fascist Trump administration. 

ICE has been further enhanced by Trump’s use of a previously obscure section of the Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1996 called “287(g)”. This enables state, local, and county police to “perform specified immigration officer functions under ICE’s direction and oversight”—meaning it enables cops to turn over to ICE people stopped or questioned for whatever reason a cop provides. 287(g) has turbo-charged the scope and pace of deportations.

Thirty-nine states have a 287(g) pact with ICE. Florida, Texas, and Georgia—three of the four states with the highest number of deportations—have been rapidly expanding 287(g) programs. As for New York and other states that now have no 287(g) agreement with the federal government: Tom Homan, Trump’s thuggish “Border Czar,” told a reporter in June, “You're are going to see more ICE agents than you have ever seen in New York City. And it’s coming. I just reviewed an operational plan. I’m not going to tell you exactly when it’s going to happen, but it’s coming."

A Big Lie to Conceal Big Crimes

DHS claims ICE is arresting “… Murderers, Child Predators, Violent Assailants, and Other Criminal Illegal Aliens.” This bullshit is the kind of filthy deceit Hitler and German Nazis called a “Big Lie” and used to justify their persecution of Jews in the 1930s. It is echoed every time Trump, Mullin or any local MAGA fascists try to justify their brutal and heartless attacks on immigrants. In the actual world, a study by the CATO Institute concluded that only 5 percent of people arrested by ICE had been convicted of violent crimes. 73 percent had no convictions at all. 

As social media message #124 from Bob Avakian (BA) reads: “Donald Trump’s whole fascist regime is caught in a contradiction of its own making: his continual BIG LIES!”:

[S]ince the reality is that there are not hordes of monstrous immigrant criminals, in order to carry out his perverted campaign "promise" to persecute and mass deport immigrants, Trump's thugs are targeting immigrants, including children, just going about their daily lives—where they work, at school, or a store, or a church, in their homes—or when they are showing up at their regularly scheduled immigration status hearings!

A Battering Ram for Fascism

The viciously and violently escalating assaults on immigrants are not only a horror that must be opposed and defeated in their own right, they are what BA has called a “battering ram” for consolidation of full-on fascism. Message #124 continues that: 

These terroristic attacks on immigrants, and those standing with them, are part of this fascist regime’s overall moves to forcibly impose a return to the kind of situation that existed in this country for most of its existence—where racist oppression and oppression based on sex and gender, and crude, unthinking allegiance to American supremacy are openly proclaimed, and this is being enforced now by a regime full of deranged anti-scientific fanatics, while those who oppose this are violently attacked. This Trump fascist regime is determined to blast ahead to enforce all this with increasing and intensifying police state tyranny.

What Is To Be Done

Protests against these outrages continue, but in much smaller numbers than previous protests. There have been several marches and vigils after the murder of Lorenzo Salgado in and around Houston, and protests and vigils at the Newark, New Jersey detention center, among others. But the fact is that none of this is even close to the kind of protest needed, in numbers and in determination. According to a group describing itself as “an independent conflict monitor”, “pro-immigration demonstrations are now at their lowest levels since early 2025, shortly after Trump began his second term. Amid a record 50,000 ICE arrests in July, pro-immigration demonstrations in the United States were nearly 10 times less frequent than shortly after the backlash over a controversial ICE operation in Minneapolis in January.”

More investigation should be done as to why this is so, but two things have been remarked on by people who are within this movement: one, that the tactics of ICE are enabling these fascist thugs to move much more swiftly, without notice; but second, that significant numbers who were actively protesting last year are now turning to involvement in the Democratic Party and in particular the DSA.

It is important that people continue to develop the ways and means to defend immigrants from these outrages, countering the adjustments that the fascist regime has made. But getting drawn into the Democratic Party, including in the form of supposedly changing it into a vehicle for “democratic socialism,” is actually a huge step backward and away from what is needed. This system has for decades utilized immigrants as a source of extremely super-exploited labor in industries like construction, agriculture, and the lower rungs of the health care system—often keeping them “illegal” to increase their vulnerability. It has also drawn on highly skilled doctors and scientists from oppressed nations to fill in other needs of the system. This view is what is represented in the Democratic Party. 

To those who are joining the DSA or the Democrats themselves in the hopes of changing that party, you need to really confront the fact that, as the revolutionary leader Bob Avakian has written so pointedly, “If you try to make the Democrats be what they are not and never will be, you will end up being more like what the Democrats actually are.” Despite your intentions, you will end up fighting for what will amount to a more efficient integration of these human beings into this mode of international plunder and domination.

Meanwhile, the fascists who now run this system view immigration differently. These descendants of (and increasingly open followers of) Adolf Hitler really do believe their own poison that these immigrants somehow dilute the so-called “purity of American blood,” and weaken the ties that hold society together. They are fanatics, convinced that America will not be able to confront the huge challenges this system faces without open and vicious white supremacy, male supremacy and anti-immigrant xenophobia, all held together with Christian nationalist religious lunacy. 

But ugly and horrific as this fascism is, both these programs and both these parties are rooted in the needs of this capitalist-imperialist system at a time in which it is running up against its limits. 

So yes, important as such resistance is, we need more. More profoundly, people need to scientifically dig into how and why we got here. And further—people need to grapple with what is it really going to take to get to a place where no longer are armed fascist thugs prowling the streets and sweeping thousands of people away, where persecution of immigrants, of women, of LBGT, of Black, Brown, and Native people is over with; where people work together to get to a world without wars, and to heal the planet from the destruction inflicted by capitalism imperialism. 

As we wrote in “Immigrants In New Jersey On Heroic Hunger Strike: Shockwaves From Delaney Hall Detainees and Sharpening Divides,” 

There IS in fact a migration crisis, with hundreds of millions compelled to flee their homes facing dangerous desperate journeys just to survive. But 1) this is global; 2) it is caused by capitalism-imperialism and cannot be solved in any good way under this system; but 3) it CAN begin to be solved through a real revolution and the institution of a new socialist republic in North America founded on the Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America, written by the breakthrough revolutionary leader and founder of the new communism, Bob Avakian.