For Workers Action to Stop the Deportations!

Students and Workers Demand
“ICE Out!” At Hunter College Speak-Out

On September 4, outside the City University of New York’s (CUNY) Hunter College campus, a speak-out was held in solidarity with immigrants and to demand “ICE out of New York! Stop the Deportations!” The speak-out was initiated by the Hunter Committee to Defend Immigrants (HCDI) and cosponsored by the Hunter chapter of the Professional Staff Congress (PSC), the faculty/staff union at CUNY, and by the CUNY Internationalist Clubs. The event brought out upwards of 125 people, including students, faculty and labor activists, and was covered by the cable news station NY1 as the kick-off to fall college protests.

The HCDI was established not long after the November 2024 elections, following a call by the CUNY Internationalist Clubs to organize students, faculty and staff against the incoming administration’s plans for mass deportations. Scores of students attended meetings of the Committee, which held film screenings, a “Know Your Rights” event and joined with the CUNY Internationalists as well as other student groups and PSC members in protesting against the Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) presence at a job fair at CUNY’s John Jay College of Criminal Justice in January. A CBP recruitment event was canceled due to the protests.¹ The Committee has insisted that rather than looking to university authorities, courts or the Democratic Party, we need to link up to the power of labor to defend immigrants.

This standpoint was highlighted in the September 4 speak-out by the presence of leaders and activists from the Labor Committee to Defend Immigrants (LCDI), including Charles Jenkins of the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists and Transit Workers Union Local 100; Chris Silvera, secretary-treasurer of Teamsters Local 808; Fitz Reid and Andrew Hackman of AFSCME District Council 37, all founding members of the LCDI; as well as union activists from the United Federation of Teachers, PSC, Teamsters Local 804, UAW Local 2179, SEIU 1199, RWDSU and the New York State Nurses Association.

Charles Jenkins spoke about the LCDI, saying “we had a committee before this administration took over to strategize and fight like hell to defend immigrants.” In a live interview on WBAI radio during the speak-out Jenkins emphasized that “there’s an attack coming on all of us” and immigrants are up first. Chris Silvera stressed how destructive imperialist conquests forced many to migrate just to find work. Health care workers held signs remembering Marie Ange Blaise, Jakelin Caal Maquin and Felipe Gómez Alonso, all of whom died in ICE custody. Dr. Steve Auerbach of the NYDocs coalition called on all hospitals and health care organizations to say, “No ICE in healthcare, ICE out of the hospitals, out of the clinics, don’t you dare!”

Maeve Campbell, a social worker and delegate in 1199 SEIU, spoke of patients coming in with wounds that should have been treated weeks ago but who were afraid of being targeted by ICE, and emphasized that over half of health care workers in NYC are immigrants. The crowd responded, chanting “Hands off our patients! Hands off our nurses!” Standing in front of a union banner proclaiming “PSC Stands with Immigrants, ICE Out of New York!” a Brooklyn College professor called attention to the case of four adjunct professors at the College who were fired in July clearly in response to their defending students when the NYPD rioted at the college to crush an encampment protesting the ongoing genocide in Gaza.¹ Then on August 25, she reported, five full-time faculty and one staff member were hauled in for questioning.

High school teacher Yari Michel, a delegate in the United Federation of Teachers and supporter of Class Struggle Education Workers, spoke of how committees to defend immigrants formed in her and other NYC schools, and how a resolution she introduced encouraging the formation of such union-led school-based committees was passed at the UFT Delegate Assembly in June by an overwhelming 93% vote. The resolution calls to mobilize the power of labor independently of the Democratic and Republican parties, and ends defiantly: “We will not let them take our students.” Domino, a Hunter student from the Internationalist Club, recalled how Democratic president Barack Obama set the record for the most deportations of any U.S. president at the same time as racist cop murder continued unabated, and how Democrat Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez pushed the illusory slogan to “defund ICE,” and then voted to fund ICE on her first day in office.

A high point in the speak-out was when brother Chris Silvera of Teamsters Local 808 said, “We have to build our own workers party.” The crowd responded enthusiastically, chanting “Not Democrats or Republicans – Build a workers party!” Hunter PSC member Sándor John, a supporter of the CSEW, stressed that “if they send the National Guard to this city, workers and students need to shut the city down.” “We have the power to do that,” he continued, but the power of the working class is chained to the capitalist system through the Democratic Party, and the labor bureaucracy is a key link in that chain. “That’s why we’re fighting for a class-struggle leadership of the labor movement to unchain the power of the working class.”

That chain of the Democratic Party and the capitalist politicians keeps getting made and remade, from generation to generation, John noted, asking the protesters, “Are you going to help remake that chain, or are you going to help break that chain?” “Why is Gaza devastated by this genocidal war?” he asked. Because U.S. bombs were provided by “Genocide Joe” Biden, the Democratic president that Bernie Sanders and AOC campaigned for. Democrats and Republicans are “two heads of the capitalist beast” of repression, imperialism and war, he said, and “to put an end to that we need to overthrow that system. We need a socialist revolution. There is no reform way out.” The event concluded with the chant, “ICE out of our schools, ICE out of New York!” ■

To contact the Internationalist Group and the League for the Fourth International, send e-mail to: internationalistgroup@msn.com

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