Beware of Democrats in Anti-ICE Clothing
Long Nguyen
Already this year, ICE has killed over a half dozen people including Alex Pretti and Renee Good. They have deported thousands more — over 600,000 since Trump took office — immigrants, workers, and occasionally even U.S. citizens. The Democrats have all the while been sitting on their hands, doing nothing at best. Many Democrats have actively helped to fund ICE, even under Trump.
Last year, Democrat-controlled legislatures in California, Illinois, and Minnesota stripped healthcare benefits from undocumented immigrants. Democrats have cut public services for immigrants, attacked workers, slashed budgets, etc, etc.
Many of those same Democrats are now trying to pose as anti-ICE.
Adam Smith, the current Congressman for south Seattle and south King County, is putting on quite the show. Smith recently said that ICE needs to be “reined in.” He has called ICE a “profound threat to public safety.” He recently sponsored a bill with Pramila Jayapal called the “Dignity for Detained Immigrants Act.”
Don’t fall for Adam Smith’s act.
Smith voted to create ICE in 2002. He has voted repeatedly to fund it. Prior to the creation of the Northwest Detention Center, a privately-run immigration prison in Tacoma, Smith wrote a letter calling it an “important facility.” Smith’s campaign is bankrolled by pro-ICE corporations like Palantir, which rakes in tens of millions of dollars from contracts with ICE. Palantir develops a software called “ImmigrationOS” which ICE uses to track, target, and deport immigrants. Smith also takes money from Palantir’s co-founder, pro-Trump billionaire Joe Lonsdale. Lonsdale recently said about ICE, “I think we should be way more aggressive than we are, and I think that all the pushback in Minnesota is ridiculous."
The Democratic Party will do nothing on their own initiative to stop the Republicans’ assault on immigrants. If anything, they will fuel it every chance they get.
Smith helped build Trump’s deportation machine. Now that Kshama Sawant is running against him as an independent socialist calling to abolish ICE, he has to be more careful. He has to put up a progressive facade.
What is required to stop Trump and shut down ICE is an independent movement of socialists, unions, and rank-and-file workers. We need to build a party independent of the Democrats and Republicans — a working class party. The first step in building such a party is a definitive break from the Democratic Party. We need independent, working-class candidates that can stand up to the Democrats, Republicans, and big business.
The strongest independent socialist candidate running anywhere in the country right now is Kshama Sawant.
Workers produce everything in society. Society cannot function without workers, but it can function without the billionaires. Yet under capitalism, the billionaires get to decide how everything is run, what is produced and how it is distributed. The billionaires also dominate our politics. Billionaires have two parties, and we have none. They flood the elections with money every year to decide which candidates we get to choose between. It’s time to break that stranglehold.
No matter how much the billionaires would like to deny it, workers do have power.
A general strike would shut down the entire country, really showing who’s in charge of society. Last year, Italian dock workers led a general strike that forced Trump and Netanyahu into a partial ceasefire in Gaza, giving a small respite to the Palestinian people.
But strikes require coordination and leadership. A mass workers’ party could turn protests into strikes, and turn strikes into political challenges to the two party system.
If we want to get there, we need to take the first step by electing an independent like Kshama, who will show that it’s possible to take on the two-party system and win. We can win, but it will take going to war with the Democrats in order to take Smith down.