Since mid-December there has been a dramatic intensification of repression against immigrants in the United States. Particularly affected are undocumented immigrant workers, who have been picked up by the hundreds in a series of raids by the Immigration Control and Enforcement (ICE) police of the Department of Homeland Security. Huge squads of black-uniformed ICE cops have swooped down on plants from Massachusetts to California and even in Times Square in New York City. Families are ripped apart, with mothers and fathers loaded onto fleets of buses  with whited-out windows while their children are left in school or day care centers. Those arrested are sent far away, often more than 1,500 miles, to immigration jails from Georgia to San Diego to await deportation.

The fact that these raids have taken place with barely a peep of protest from the unions and the antiwar movement is outrageous. The immigrant workers are being targeted as part of a broadscale effort by the U.S. government to regiment the population for war. “Illegal” immigrants are treated as the “enemy within,” labeled “potential terrorists” by immigrant-bashing right-wing politicians and Homeland Security chiefs. We demand that the labor movement urgently take up the cause of our class brothers and sisters being persecuted by the ICE Gestapo. The next time there is a raid in a union stronghold like New York, workers should massively pour into the streets to block this atrocity.

Protest statements count for little. It is necessary to bring out the ranks of labor in struggle to defeat the imperialist war abroad and the bosses’ war on immigrants, racial minorities and working people “at home.”

The raids started off with mass arrests of immigrants at Swift & Co. packing plants in six states (see “Outrage!  U.S. Arrests Over 1,200 Immigrants in Factory Raids,” The Internationalist No. 25, January-February 2007). This was followed, on January 24, with the arrest of 21 workers at the Smithfield Packing Co. plant in Tar Heel, North Carolina. This was the plant where more than 1,000 workers walked out and shut down production last November in defense of immigrant workers who had been fired because of “no match” letters from the federal government alleging discrepancies in their Social Security numbers. The firings sought to intimidate workers in a hard-fought unionization campaign by the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW), but the workers bold walkout forced the company to back down temporarily (see “Labor revolt in North Carolina,” The Internationalist No. 25).

The Internationalist Group put out a leaflet, distributed at the January 27 antiwar march in Washington, D.C., calling for mass union protests in defense of the arrested Smithfield workers. The UFCW, we wrote, should “shut down unionized meatpacking plants from coast to coast!” Packing house workers are overwhelmingly immigrants, many lacking the legal documents demanded by the bosses’ government. This industry illustrates the dependence of U.S. capital on foreign-born workers to do the heaviest and most dangerous work. According to official estimates, there are more than 13 million undocumented immigrants in the United States today, the vast majority of them workers. There is no way that the government can deport them all. No matter how many “no-bid” contracts the feds award to Halliburton to build concentration camps, they can’t lock up everyone, and the economic consequences for the capitalists would be disastrous.

But the factory raids continue in an attempt to sow fear among immigrant workers. The likely intent is to prevent a repeat of the mass demonstrations of millions of workers that took place last spring, leading up to a mass walkout on May 1 that shut down packing plants and numerous businesses from coast to coast. In late February, the hated immigration (migra) cops seized some 200 janitors at 63 locations in 17 states working for a chain of labor contractors who supply cleaning crews to restaurants.

The latest raid, on March 6, kidnapped 350 workers at a factory in New Bedford, Massachusetts that manufactures survival vests, backpacks and grenade pouches for use by the U.S. military in Iraq. With Coast Guard helicopters hovering overhead and a boat in the cove at the rear, employees ran for the exits but were forced back. Workers described a scene of sheer terror in this Nazi-like raid. People were screaming and crying as they were ordered to line up in different areas, citizens on one side, non-citizens on the other. According to the New Bedford Standard-Times (7 March), six hundred federal agents, police and officials were involved in the raid. Detainees were not allowed to make calls or answer cellphones. Agents drew pistols and forced workers onto the ground.

The fact that the New Bedford company was producing military goods with undocumented workers, is hardly unusual. War profiteers always use cheap labor: in Nazi Germany, the plants were staffed with slave laborers. In mid-January, ICE raids picked up immigrant construction workers at the Naval Air Station in Key West, Florida, at the Quantico Marine Base in Virginia, and building barracks at Fort Benning, Georgia. In an earlier case, a military contractor in San Diego was charged with hiring “illegal aliens” to help construct the metal barrier being erected as part of the militarization of the Mexican border!

After being arrested, the immigrants are held in detention camps, such as the one outside Raymondville, Texas where more than 2,000 immigrants are housed in ten huge, windowless tents where they are confined 23 hours a day. “I call it ‘Ritmo,’ like ‘Gitmo’,” the U.S. torture center at the Guantánamo naval base in Cuba, said immigration lawyer Jodi Goodwin (Washington Post, 4 February). Many of these camps are privatized, such as the ones run by the Corrections Corp. of America and Geo Group, Inc. A January report by the Inspector General of the Justice Department on five ICE detention facilities found  inhumane and unsafe conditions, including inadequate health care, vermin, lack of clean underwear and undercooked poultry, as well as missing and non-working telephones. Altogether, some 26,000 people are currently being held in these American concentration camps.

But beyond the barbaric conditions of the migra raids and camps, the “crackdown” on immigrant workers includes murderous terror by officials and racist vigilante groups. On January 12, a Border Patrol agent in southern Arizona shot and killed Francisco Javier Dominguez Rivera, a migrant from Cuautla in the Mexican state of Morelos. On January 28, a truckload of immigrants was ambushed and the driver killed near Tucson by several armed men, believed to be anti-immigrant vigilantes, who were wearing camouflage uniforms and military-style berets. On February 8 in the same area, a pickup truck of immigrants was fired on by two men with high-powered assault rifles who killed three migrants and seriously wounded a woman; two dozen migrants were reported missing (from the Immigration News Brief, 4 March, available by writing to wnu@igc.org).

Stop the Raids Meeting in Western Connecticut

One place where there has been labor-based protest against the immigration raids is in the western Connecticut city of Danbury. In 2005, the mayor sought to deputize state troopers to deport immigrants. Instead, the ICE cops seized two dozen immigrant workers in the space of four months using classic “sting” operations. In one case a federal agent posed as a contractor and then arrested eleven day laborers. At a meeting of over 400 people at Western Connecticut State University in Danbury on February 25 called to protest the federal raids, some arrested immigrants who had just gotten out of jail were in attendance. Also there to tell their stories were two workers from the Swift packing plant in Utah that was raided last December. The meeting was organized by the Regional Coalition for Immigrants Rights, in which the leftist group Socialist Action is active, and was endorsed by the Western Connecticut Central Labor Council.

At the event, which was protested by 40  or so anti-immmigrant racists, the Swift workers recounted how the company had known for months about the possible raids, and had turned over personnel records to the government. Anabel Pimental held up a photo of her brother, sister-in-law and their children asking how they could take away the parents and cruelly break up this family. Eddie Acosta, coordinator of the AFL-CIO centers for day laborers, denounced the “guest worker” programs included in pending immigration reform legislation as barely disguised slavery. He called for legalization of all undocumented workers in the U.S. But Acosta did not mention that the labor federation supports the liberal Democrats like Senator Ted Kennedy whose immigration “reforms”  include “guest worker” indentured servitude and do not give immigrants without papers anything remotely resembling legal rights. In fact, hardly a word was said from the podium, including from would-be leftists, against the Democrats or the labor fakers who support them.

A spokesman for the Internationalist Group spoke from the floor during the discussion period and received considerable applause when he emphasized that all of the talk about solidarity means nothing unless labor mobilizes its power to defend immigrants. He pointed out that the UFCW should have shut down packinghouses nationwide after the December raids. He also noted the presence of the meeting of striking Brooklyn immigrant workers (see page 4), calling on NYC labor to come to their defense. The IG spokesman objected that talk of “legalization” was deliberately vague and instead it is necessary to demand full citizenship rights for all immigrants. And he emphasized that the Democratic Party is no friend but an enemy of immigrants, that the thousands of mainly Near Eastern and South Asian immigrants arrested after the 11 September 2001 attacks were arrested under the provisions of Democrat Bill Clinton’s 1996 immigration “reform.”

The IG speaker underscored that it was necessary for immigrants in the U.S. to understand the need to support the struggle of black people in this country that was founded on slavery. That several hundred immigrant workers from the Smithfield plant in North Carolina turned out on January 15 to march on Martin Luther King Day is recognition of this key fact. The participation of black and white workers in addition to immigrants in the November walkout at Smithfield was crucial to the success of that struggle. Above all, it is necessary to build a multi-racial and multi-ethnic revolutionary workers party to lead the struggle for workers revolution that alone will secure genuine equality and liberation for all the exploited and oppressed. n