Armed Action Carried out Against Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)

Micah Forrester

Read our editorial on mass deportations here, and the ongoing struggle against it here.

Ten people have been charged with various felonies for a successful armed action against the ultra-reactionary, anti-people Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) on July 4^th in Alvarado, Texas. According to monopoly media outlets, a group of masked people created a diversion to lure guards outside of Prairieland Detention Center before opening fire on them and injuring a responding police officer by shooting him in the neck with what is said to be an AR15-type assault weapon.

According to the federal court, the accused were dressed in all-black military-style clothing and began assailing the facility with fireworks. Anti-ICE and political messages defending the people were painted on vehicles at the facility. All the suspects fled the scene and ten people were arrested in the surrounding area.

The Johnson County Sheriff’s Department claim that they apprehended a vehicle containing a driver and firearms. Others were arrested in the vicinity on foot. The FBI claims to have found political literature in backpacks with the slogans “FIGHT ICE TERROR WITH CLASS WAR!”, “FREE ALL POLITICAL PRISONERS”, and a flag with a clenched fist reading “RESIST FASCISM, FIGHT OLIGARCHY.” In subsequent home raids “insurrectionary anarchist” literature was obtained.

The charges against the accused include three counts of attempted murder of federal agents and three counts of discharging a firearm in relation to a crime of violence. In desperation and fear that the masses will continue in their justified rebellion against the reactionary old-state, acting US Attorney Nancy E. Larson stated that “those who use violence against law enforcement officers will be found and prosecuted using the toughest criminal statutes and penalties available.” Such are the dark dreams of reactionaries who already use violence against the people including the “toughest criminal statutes” for carrying out their basic democratic rights, or just existing in this country and working without legal status in back-breaking and low-paying jobs. Such threats can only fall on the deaf ears of a people who are tired of inaction.

The Banks Overflow

Imperialism has entered a cyclical stage of protracted economic crisis. The reactionary violence and economic insecurity it inflicts on the whole world is also felt among the people within its borders, and this is at the root of such armed actions, which will continue to blossom spontaneously throughout the crisis. No amount of hand-wringing, false promises of reform, nor threats of death and imprisonment is going to change it—so long as the root remains intact, the people will be forced to conduct bolder and more organized activity, often guided by individualist and petty-bourgeois ideologies.

Without a political party of its own, the class war will remain spontaneous, and while it can strike blows, the class cannot conquer political power, which is the fundamental question of revolution.

According to Maoism, the conquest and defense of political power requires three things: the militarized Communist Party that leads; the Army of a new type, which fights, produces, and mobilizes, carrying out the mass work of the Party under its absolute leadership; and the united front of the allied classes which administrates to the daily needs of the struggle and bit by bit replaces the old, rotten, reactionary state with a new state. Chairman Mao teaches that “everything grows from the barrel of a gun.”

The action was carried out on July 4^th which is observed as American “Independence Day”, a day in which jingoism and xenophobic traditions and hysteria are promoted. The armed action against ICE broke silence. It follows the mass rebellion, which was brutally suppressed, and it is part of the rebellion; those captured are political prisoners of the class struggle. It is an action the ruling class is sure to try to drown in infamy and erase, but a just action that must be remembered by the people, as ten more accused join the growing ranks of this generation’s prisoners of conscientious action.

Photo: “Ice Pig.” painted on the side of a vehicle at the Prairieland Detention Center.

---

The Worker is an entirely volunteer-run revolutionary newspaper free from and radically antagonistic to corporate influence. We rely on the support of our readers to sustain our editorial line in service of the working class and the reconstitution of its party, the Communist Party. Make a one-time or recurring donation to our newspaper today: