“DHS/ICE, Border Patrol: Out of CUNY Now!”

Student/Labor Protests Stop Immigration
Cops’ Provocation at CUNY Campus

Upon learning that U.S. immigration police agencies would be coming to a job fair at the City University of New York’s John Jay College of Criminal Justice, the CUNY Internationalist Clubs called a demonstration on February 25 (above) to protest this provocation. After a second demo was called two days later, the DHS deporters canceled a scheduled session, a direct result of the protests. (Internationalist photo)

By the CUNY Internationalist Clubs

On February 27, a campaign of protest and exposure caused the Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agency to cancel a special recruitment session it scheduled at one of the main campuses of the City University of New York, on Manhattan’s West Side. Together with I.C.E. (Immigration and Customs Enforcement), CBP is a key part of the infamous “migra,” as the immigration police have long been known in Spanish: it is a division of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the parent body of the U.S. Border Patrol. The planned session at the John Jay College career fair was a dangerous provocation, seeking to make the largest urban public university in the U.S. a recruiting ground for the Trump administration’s “mass deportation” drive. It was stopped as the result of two protests demanding “DHS/ICE, Border Patrol: Out of CUNY Now!” in front of the campus building where the job fair was held.

The protests were initiated by the CUNY Internationalist Clubs, which put out a flier, thousands of copies of which were distributed, exposing and denouncing the incursion by DHS/I.C.E./Border Patrol recruiters and calling a demonstration on February 25, when the three-day “CareerCon” fair opened. Some 150 students and faculty/staff union members, joined by activists from several other NYC-area unions, rallied outside the building. Together with students, faculty and staff from John Jay, many in the crowd came from Hunter College under the banner of the Hunter Committee to Defend Immigrants, and some from other campuses.

At the end of the February 25 rally, protesters
held a short march. (Internationalist photo)

Defenders of immigrant rights had mobilized on short notice in response to the news that recruiters from the New York State division of DHS, Homeland Security Investigations (which has been prominent in a number of recent raids) and similar agencies were slated to show up at this campus where – as is the case throughout CUNY – a huge part of the student body comes from immigrant families. (While the school is known for “criminal justice” majors, about half of the students are in other fields.) At the job fair, DHS was to set up shop together with recruiters from the military who plied their deadly trade alongside those sent by a raft of prison, police and sheriff’s departments from across the country.¹

When students then discovered that CBP had scheduled a “special information [i.e. recruitment] session” for the afternoon of February 27, a new Internationalist flier was rushed out denouncing this outrage, and a second demonstration was quickly organized. As reported by the campus student newspaper

“[News of] this event led to another protest by the John Jay community on the day of the information session as students distributed hundreds of flyers throughout the campus. The crowd spilled over the sidewalk into the street of the 59th Street entrance. Huge posters and signs addressed issues such as birthright citizenship, deportation, and immigrant rights.In deep anger, protesters chanted, ‘DHS, military, and police recruiters out now!’”

–The John Jay Sentinel, 3 March

Among protesters quoted by the campus paper was a member of the recently formed John Jay Immigrant Defense Committee, who said he had “talked to many students who were afraid because of these agencies and did not attend school. A professor told me how heartbroken she was when a student asked her if she is still safe on campus.” A leader of the school’s Latin American Student Organization said, “I had heard rumors but didn’t think the school would actually act that way toward students….” The “protest was so powerful and moving,” as “students and faculty came together for such an important cause,” she said.

After the rally of over 70 demonstrators, word arrived that the CBP had cancelled its recruitment session. That evening, it was confirmed that the cancellation was directly in response to the protest campaign.

“Workers and Students Unite!”

A New York City teacher described how committees to defend immigrants were being formed in several public schools. Demonstrators chanted “ICE out of New York, ICE out of our schools!” (Internationalist photo)

Reflecting the multinational demographics of New York City’s working class, according to City University and NYC government figures 40% of CUNY undergraduates speak a language other than English at home and 34% were born outside the U.S. mainland. At the February 25 John Jay protest, a young student told the crowd that her family had “worked in the fields and suffered discrimination,” as the rulers of this country want immigrant workers’ labor at the same time as they deny them their basic rights.

She said it is an outrage that the DHS and its subsidiaries like the Border Patrol were coming to the college to try to recruit among the student body made up of children of the city’s largely immigrant working class. Several other John Jay students spoke, including a representative of John Jay Students for Justice in Palestine, which together with a number of other campus groups had put out a protest statement demanding “ICE and DHS off our campus!” Students from CUNY’s Hunter College, City College and Brooklyn College were also among those who spoke and helped lead chants such as “ICE Out of Our Schools, ICE Out of New York!”

Linking up with the power of NYC’s labor movement was a key theme of the protests. More than a dozen members of the Professional Staff Congress (PSC) faculty/staff union came from John Jay, Hunter and other campuses of the City University, carrying union signs calling for DHS/I.C.E. to keep out of CUNY. The PSC recently established an Immigrant Solidarity Working Group, which together with “Know Your Rights” trainings, production of a poster and “Education Not Deportation” buttons, and other activities, is organizing on campuses across the CUNY system.

On February 27, a second protest at John Jay against a scheduled session of the DHS brought out scores of demonstrators. Shortly after, it was reported that the session had been cancelled and it was later confirmed that this was directly due to the protests. (Internationalist photo)

Among those joining students in protest outside John Jay were PSC Secretary Andrea Vasquez and former union vice president Mike Fabricant, who spoke against campus incursions by DHS and other repressive agencies. Sarah Chinn and Sándor John of the Hunter PSC chapter also addressed the demonstrators. Speaking to the February 27 rally, longtime former PSC president Barbara Bowen declared: “It is the most cynical and dishonest action to bring I.C.E., which represents repression, racism and destruction, to recruit here.” Denouncing attempts to portray immigrants as criminals, she said workers and students should join together, “not align with the boss who is saying to take immigrants away and deport them.” Bowen called the deportation raids a form of “kidnapping” reminiscent of the slavecatchers before the Civil War. New York’s notorious Rikers Island jail bears the name of a man infamous for using the Fugitive Slave Act to send escaped slaves back to the slaveowners, she noted.²

An organizer of the Labor Committee to Defend Immigrants (LCDI) led the crowd in an improvised version of Ray Charles’ “Hit the Road Jack,” switching the words to “Hit the road ICE, and don’t you come back no more, no more…!” Emphasizing the “indivisible” connection between defending “immigrant rights, union rights, trans rights and the rights of us all” against the reactionary onslaught, he described the LCDI’s creation in January on the basis of a series of conferences bringing together members of a wide range of NYC-area unions aiming to bring out the power of labor in the struggle to stop the raids and deportations.

A workers’ walk-out against an immigration raid would “electrify the workers movement from coast to coast,” the LCDI speaker said. He contrasted this to the labor leadership’s subordination to the Democratic Party, “which is either prostrate or actively collaborating with Trump,” as NYC mayor Eric Adams is. “Students and workers unite!” chanted the crowd.

A UPS Teamster described immigrant defense efforts in his and other unions, explaining that “the power of the working class can stop everything in it tracks, which is why we started the Labor Committee to Defend Immigrants.” The Committee is bringing together members of many unions including “six different Teamsters locals, the Transport Workers Union, and class-conscious teachers who’ve started committees in their public school.” Healthcare workers are working to set up committees, “because they’re not going to let [I.C.E.] take their patients away.”

A leader of the recent successful drive for unionization of workers at Brooklyn’s Nitehawk cinema/restaurant said:

“We must organize our coworkers and fellow union members to join us in this fight! We must form committees to defend immigrants in our workplaces, in our schools, in our unions. The power of our labor, of the working class, will be the deciding factor in this struggle. We will not allow this disgusting racism to break our solidarity with our immigrant comrades. Their struggle is our struggle, their fight is our fight.”

The student demonstrators (many of them recently out of high school themselves) listened intently as an NYC school teacher spoke about the formation of committees to defend immigrants in several of the city’s K-12 schools, applauding loudly as she ended her remarks with the slogan “NYC Teachers Say: You Won’t Take Our Kids Away!”³

That the demonstrations at John Jay led to cancellation of the sinister CBP recruitment event points to the potential for systematic and serious organizing on a class-struggle perspective. The protests built on the intensive organizing work at Hunter, City College and elsewhere by the CUNY Internationalist Clubs, which in November initiated the Hunter College Committee to Defend Immigrants. (See “Hunter Students Organize Against Anti-Immigrant Drive” on the Revolutionaries in the Class Struggle blog.) This harks back to the Committee to Defend Immigrants and Muslims formed in 2017 in response to the grotesque “Muslim ban” that Donald Trump decreed at the outset of his first presidential term.⁴

Today, with a second Trump administration vowing to unleash “the largest mass deportation operation” in U.S. history, it is important to remember that the deportation machine he relies on was ramped up by Democratic “Deporter-in-Chief” Obama and his successors in the Biden/Harris administration. Trump’s “border czar” Tom Homan, whose threats and venomous declarations seek to spread fear among millions of working people, was head of I.C.E.’s deportation branch under Obama, who in 2015 presented him with the U.S. government’s highest civil service award.

With all our rights under attack, it’s crucial that the working class break the chains binding it to the political representatives of capital. This is why we of the CUNY Internationalist Clubs work to win young people seeing the brutal reality of capitalism today to the only alternative: helping to build a revolutionary workers party that fights to put into practice a key slogan we led students in chanting during the recent CUNY protests: “¡Luchar, vencer, obreros al poder!” (Fight, win, workers to power). ■

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

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