Combat and Resist ICE Terror!

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) continues its cross-country offensive, hellbent on maximizing terror against foreign-born workers. Federal agents have executed a number of foreign-born workers and courageous activists defying the terror in the streets, and they continue to subject thousands more to torture—men, women, and children confined to disease-ridden dungeons subject to grotesque methods borrowed from US imperialist torture sites like Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib. The brave and just rebellion of the masses and the victories they have so far conquered in the streets and detention centers show the way out.

ICE terror is the political manifestation of imperialist economic crisis. Politics is concentrated economics, the acute expression of the interests of one class over the others. The imperialist ruling class is driven solely by the pursuit and accumulation of profit through the exploitation of workers, mediated by an intensifying competition among increasingly consolidated monopolies.

Imperialists must maximize production to corner the market while keeping down costs to outperform their competitors, and this requires maximizing exploitation: forcing workers to work harder, longer, and for lower wages. The mass impoverishment of workers combined with increasingly efficient production leads to cyclical crises of overproduction. Imperialists over-saturate the market and must destroy the forces of production—including the workers themselves—to minimize costs and increase profitability. The overproduction glut means they can no longer put the means of production to work or sell their commodities without declining rates of profit, and therefore they must halt production and lay off workers until demand rises again.

Immigration policy—and as one manifestation, ICE terror—is a tool for facilitating this process, controlling the flow of workers and their legal status based on the demands of imperialists.

Through its plunders, US imperialism creates the conditions of mass impoverishment and terror in the Third World, forcing a section of those workers to flee to the US in the pursuit of better conditions. US imperialists then increase profits from this movement of workers through the infusion of labor-power—kept cheap through oppression—into its economy, increasing competition among the workforce and depreciating wages and conditions all around.

Imperialism creates the conditions in which some are denied work while others are forced to overwork. The oppression of foreign-born workers ratchets up their exploitation, intensifies this competition, and deepens the stratification of the working class. The worst and lowest paying jobs go to those without legal status, without democratic rights, and without organizations through which to fight for their daily demands.

Construction and agriculture—among the least-regulated industries in the US, with low pay and high worker fatality rates—boast the highest number of foreign-born workers without legal documentation.

ICE terror and the heightening competition among workers festers chauvinism, dividing the working class and leading the most backward to identify with their exploiters against their class siblings. This cannibalism gives greater impulse to imperialist exploitation, legitimizing the heightened exploitation of one section of the working class while mobilizing the other behind imperialist economic recovery, thus strengthening the exploitation of the entire class. Imperialists fear the rising strike threats and combativity of the working class, so they seek to terrorize one section to nullify the whole.

What happens to one section of workers affects all workers. A successful strike or union drive inspires more workers to take up the fight for their demands and organization; likewise, the greater exploitation of one section of the class necessarily spreads misery across the class. That’s why the struggle against ICE terror and imperialism more broadly must express itself in internationalism in order to succeed, and leadership must be wrested from the opportunist agents of the Democratic Party who moan for “peaceful protest” despite having deported more people than Trump.

Tom Homan, Trump’s current “border czar”, has the backing of both Democrat and Republican mobs and was first appointed to an executive ICE position by Obama. Both party mafias serve the same interests of preserving the hegemony of US imperialism, differing only on how to most faithfully do so. The Democratic mafia prefers low-intensity warfare to keep rebellion to a minimum while the Republican mafia uses open terror in a desperate attempt to cow the population into submission. MAGA chauvinism is turned by the Democratic Mafia into the wretched slogan “Immigrants Make America Great”, both aiming to legitimize the heightened exploitation of foreign-born workers.

Neither of the mafias’ tactics can work for too long, because imperialism necessarily impoverishes more people by concentrating wealth and power in fewer hands. The people will always rebel against their oppression and exploitation, and this rebellion takes on increasingly violent dimensions to cast off the intensifying burden of the parasitic ruling class.

The heroic rebellions of the people against ICE terror provide raw material for deepening the campaign against mass deportations. Victories have been seen across the country where the people unite and confront ICE, from small-scale confrontations throughout New York state, where hundreds of people quickly mobilized and forced ICE officers to flee as they became outnumbered, to the pitched battles in the streets of Los Angeles and Minneapolis, with both cases resulting in the temporary retreat of federal forces.

Networks of anti-ICE rapid response teams provide important infrastructure to quickly mobilize against abductions. Prolonged mass rebellion directly confronting ICE agents has won victories at broader levels.

To realize the just demand of forcing ICE out, wide-scale rebellion must be sustained through organization, developing the existing organization of rapid response from purely defensive to an active defense, seizing the initiative by identifying ICE’s weak points and taking the fight to them to demoralize and exhaust the repressive forces.

Exposing terror is one thing, but directing the resistance against the main enemy, US imperialism, is key for revolutionaries.

The blackmail of pacifism must be countered by revolutionaries. The notion that simply recording the crimes of the state will result in the state correcting itself, or that rebelling will only make things worse by resulting in more intense repression are the putrid slops passed down from the mouths of bourgeois agents hoping to hold back the justified rebellion.

This means taking advantage of the tactical contradictions between the Democrats and Republicans, exposing the inherent limitations of the Democratic gangsters in opposing ICE terror and their fundamental collusion with the Republicans, while identifying the solution as the reconstitution of the working class’s own independent political formation—the Communist Party—to lead the overthrow of imperialism.

ICE terror is part of the project of reactionization which ultimately is directed against the whole working class—it focuses the brunt of its repression on foreign-born workers while the severe brutality against protesters, the ICE executions, and the prolonged detentions in federal torture chambers points to an expanding attack. The mass resistance to this acute expression of US imperialism’s plans for recovery is a call for revolutionaries to march shoulder to shoulder with the masses and, in doing so, to educate the fighters in internationalism and anti-imperialism, combining the struggle for daily demands with the struggle for power.

Image: “ICE agents and bystanders in Minneapolis after the January 07, 2026 shooting of Renée Good”. Credit: Chad Davis.

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