President Trump ordered the US National Guard and Marines to the streets of Los Angeles to counter protests against the deportation of immigrant workers and their families. This is a major escalation of violent action by the Administration against protesters. In response, over 2,000 demonstrations and protests, coinciding with Pride events in many places, took place in cities and towns across the US, last weekend. The organisers say this involved up to five million people. Steve Hollasky looks at the background to Trump’s actions.
socialistworld.net
Trump’s USA is a nightmare for migrants. Resistance to the rising number of deportations is growing, alongside opposition to the repressive, undemocratic and arbitrary actions of the Trump administration.
They arrive day and night in anonymous vehicles; they do not identify themselves, they break into homes and businesses, tear families and workforces apart, and brutally break any resistance. They drag people off to camps and throw them out of the country.
It seems as if there are no longer any limits for the officials of the ICE, the United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which is subordinate to the Department of Homeland Security. They have been combing through US cities for months. No mercy is shown. The target of 3,000 deportations per day must be met. According to US media reports, there have now been seven deaths in deportation camps. Even US citizens are being targeted.
People are being pressured to betray their neighbours. The victims rarely have any legal recourse. For migrants, the ICE’s actions must feel like a visitation from hell.
Laboratory experiment in Los Angeles
Footage of a man trying to prevent his family from being abducted in an ICE vehicle went viral around the world. He braces himself against the transporter for a hundred metres, is pushed in front of it, and falls to the ground.
This incident is just one example of what has been happening in Los Angeles in recent days: desperate resistance against an apparatus that lacks neither power, resources nor motivation.
Tech multibillionaire Elon Musk, who recently made his dispute with the US president public, has provided ICE with information. The agency he headed, DOGE, researched addresses, workplaces, schools and universities. Places where migrants stay. And ICE officials arrested them there.
But oppression leads to resistance sooner or later. Neither DOGE nor ICE, nor Musk or Trump, can break this law.
The protests in L.A. became audible. At demonstrations, speakers demanded an end to mass deportations. Streets were temporarily occupied, and attempts were made to prevent attacks by ICE officials. They responded with violence, as did the police.
Law enforcement officers fired a rubber bullet at the legs of an Australian journalist. Her cries of pain were among the few of their kind that made it into the mass media.
When Martin Luther King was asked by journalists at his last press conference before his assassination in Memphis in 1968 whether he took responsibility for the violence at a demonstration he had led by striking city sanitation workers, the human rights activist replied that these incidents were the result of racism and oppression. He said that neither he nor the demonstration were responsible, but rather what was going on in US society. In L.A., cars belonging to the police and ICE officials have been set on fire in recent days.
Then came the bombshell: Trump sent in the National Guard.
What does Trump want?
Trump has no qualms about using armed force. Back in 2020, during his first term in office, he called for the National Guard to be deployed against the Black Lives Matter movement. Trump I is not the same as Trump II. At the time, most governors opposed the move and Trump I left it at that. Not so Trump II: the orders to send 2,000 National Guard troops and 700 Marines to L.A. was issued against the protests of Democratic Governor Newsom.
Trump II did what Trump I would have done. He denigrated his opponent’s name. On Truth Social, Newsom became ‘Newscum’ – ‘scum’ being the word for dregs.
But that only distracts from the essential point: the governor, not the president, has the right to order the deployment of the National Guard. Unless, that is, the president declares a national emergency.
Project 2025
‘Project 2025’, the programme for autocratic state restructuring, developed under the auspices of the Heritage Foundation, aims to significantly strengthen the power of the president. The use of the military within the country is both a goal and a means of achieving this aim and is therefore an integral part of the programme.
Like a mantra, they paint a picture of the imminent takeover by ‘neo-Marxism’. The reaction has its own terminology: anything that does not suit Trump and the Heritage Foundation can be neo-Marxism. Fantasising about a takeover by this vaguely defined neo-Marxism is (still) divorced from the social realities of US society. This should also be clear to the planning staff behind Trump.
They are interested in creating enemy stereotypes and threat scenarios to push through their own agenda. Trump is prepared to divide the state apparatus to then rebuild it in his own image. The situation is an expression of the increasingly dysfunctional character of the political system in the US. Local authorities in California and Los Angeles are refusing to assist ICE.
Democratic Senator Padilla was seized, pushed to the floor and handcuffed at a press conference held by the US Secretary of Homeland Security. Individual police officers publicly expressed their solidarity with the protests. Clashes between the National Guard and local security forces cannot be ruled out in such situations. It is no exaggeration to say that this situation could escalate into civil war-like conditions.
Is Donald Trump strong or weak?
So, is Trump continuing to pursue his own agenda, unfazed? Is he determined to implement Project 2025? He certainly wants to give that impression when he stands in front of his helicopter on the lawn next to the White House wearing his MAGA baseball cap and calling for Gavin Newsom’s arrest.
However, there is much to suggest that Trump deliberately brought about this escalation to distract attention from his own failures on many fronts and thus do something about the falling approval ratings for his presidency. Trump failed to end the war in Ukraine within 24 hours, or even within six months.
The tariffs he imposed – and then partially suspended – have so far only had the effect of lowering economic growth forecasts for the US and making a recession possible in the year. When China responded with export controls on its rare earths, US companies were up in arms, with some publicly discussing the possibility of relocating production to China. The lives of the working class are not beginning to improve under Trump. All this is causing Trump’s approval ratings to slide. The director of Transatlantic Networks, Andrew Denison, himself a former National Guard member, described Trump’s drop in approval ratings from 52 to 42 per cent as ‘historic’ in an interview with the German TV news channel ntv. However, he also points out that ‘a majority’ still supports Trump on immigration. Trump clearly wants to make this issue the focus of public debate to regain ground.
The plan to increase deportations from Guantanamo, the ‘hard line’ on immigration, the use of ICE – Trump still enjoys majority support for these things, at least for now. But he is also provoking resistance and exacerbating the already enormous polarisation in the country. The huge number of people with a migrant background in the Los Angeles area, in California and throughout the United States are likely to feel challenged by Trump’s actions. Solidarity effects cannot be ruled out either, or as demonstrations in other parts of the country prove, they already exist.
And resistance is not only coming from the streets. Trump lost in the first hearing in court and won temporarily in the second hearing, meaning that control over the National Guard in California remains in his hands for the time being. Rhetorically, he has already had to back down, as his actions against migrant workers are going too far for some entrepreneurs. Trump was quoted as saying: ‘Our great farmers and people in the hotel and leisure sector have said that our very aggressive immigration policy is taking away very good, long-term workers from them.’
Whether Trump is stronger or weaker, and even more so, whether he will emerge stronger or weaker from this conflict, has – as so often – to do with the forces on the other side.
Are the Democrats helping?
Gavin Newsom and his party colleague Karen Bass also know how to put themselves in the spotlight. They condemn the deportations and the deployment of troops. But a closer look reveals that the Democrats do not stand for fundamentally different policies. Currently, 530 people are being deported every day because of Trump’s measures; under Democratic President Joe Biden, the figure was sometimes 467. Overall, there has been no qualitative increase in deportation numbers so far, as Trump is far from achieving his stated goal.
The police operation against demonstrators in Los Angeles, under Democratic leadership, is also not characterised by dialogue and de-escalation: the use of tear gas and flash grenades is driving apart people who want to demonstrate against the deportation of their relatives and friends. It does not take much patience to search social media for accounts of police violence.
At the time of writing, L.A. imposed an evening curfew. Despite the wave of police brutality against the Black Lives Matter protests following the murder of George Floyd in 2020, not much has changed, even in democratically governed large cities.
There are still racists in the ranks of the US police; there is still no real public control over the LAPD and all other police agencies in the United States. Nor is there any control over the National Guard or the army, which Trump is now deploying.
But that’s not all. On other issues, too, the Democrats are no fundamental alternative to Trump; after all, they represent the interests of the US capitalist class just as much as he does. They just have slightly different ideas about how best to represent them. No, the section of the establishment that has rallied around the Democratic Party is no help in the fight against Trump.
Resistance! Now!
Whether it’s Navidi, Newsom or Bass – their calls for restraint among the demonstrators are not letting up. As if that would stop Trump. The mayor of Los Angeles announced that they had nothing against deportations, but that the number was disturbing. Newsom said they would take legal action against the deployment of the National Guard. But regardless of the upcoming court decision, the damage has been done, Trump is expanding his authoritarian rule, and mass deportations continue. In Project 2025, court battles are part of the strategy.
What is currently happening in the United States shows just how thin the veil is between democracy for a handful of rich people and Trump-style authoritarianism.
The attacks by Donald Trump’s administration are affecting millions of people, the vast majority of whom are part of the working class. The workers of the United States hold the solution in their hands. Trump is attacking their political and social rights. They must find a way to fight together. Trade unions could play an important role in this, because they could organise class struggles of all workers against rearmament, against the abolition of social rights, against the sexist and racist policies of the US government. The arrest of union leader David Huerta during an anti-deportation protest shows that the representatives of workers have already been targeted by Trump’s planners.
Mass union mobilisations against Trump’s social cuts, deportations, police violence and the use of the military within the country are needed now. This is no longer just about Los Angeles. The Republican governor of Texas has now called for the deployment of the National Guard in his state. The desire to support Trump, secure deportations and accustom the population to the use of the military within the country is likely to be the driving force behind the Texas governor’s actions.
Trump’s attack is not haphazard. In the long run, it can only be repelled and turned into an offensive if the US working class creates its own independent party that opposes the Democratic and Republican variants of pro-capitalist and imperialist politics with its own programme for a break with capitalism. A party that can plan defensive measures against ICE raids and resist attacks by the armed forces, and that puts forward demands such as the dissolution of police special units and democratic control of the police and security agencies by committees made up of trade unionists, workers, young people and migrants. The Independent Socialist Group (ISG) in the United States calls for the formation of such a workers’ party and is actively spreading this idea in the trade unions and social movements.
There is a grain of truth in the warnings of Trump’s advisors. The greatest enemy of this system would be the ideas of Karl Marx, because they offer an alternative to social cuts, military intervention at home, deportations, misery and despair.