LOS ANGELES, June 23—All over Los Angeles this week, communities have protested the family separations, jails for babies and children, and Immigration Customs and Enforcements (ICE) raids. Some held vigils and started an occupation in front of the downtown Los Angeles immigrant detention center. Others held rallies in their local neighborhoods. Progressive Labor Party participated in a rally that revealed the need for multiracial unity against the bosses.
No child is free under capitalism
In one Black working class neighborhood in South Los Angeles, a rally was called on Friday evening. PLP organized friends and nearby residents to come out and make our voices heard. But the rally was sparsely attended. This neighborhood is in the middle of a fight against gentrification. One ogranizer from Little Africa, a local group in the neighborhood, spoke some truth about the hundreds of years of Black children being separated from their families through poverty and mass incarceration. Then, it got ugly. Another speaker parroted Trump’s hateful, anti-immigrant rhetoric in an attempt to scare white liberals out of the neighborhood.
Some people in the crowd were Black nationalists who called for more Black-owned businesses that they believe will employ local, underemployed workers. Nationalism feeds into these false divisions between members of the working class. PLP calls for internationalism, no bosses, no borders—just one working class united. As one sign said: “No Child is Free Until All Are Free.”
Long history of state terror
Imperialist powers have a long history of separating children from their parents (see page 2). In Nazi Germany, Jewish families were forced into concentration camps where children were separated from their parents and gassed to death. Now, under the Trump administration’s zero tolerance policy on unauthorized border crossings, the U.S. government is seizing migrant children (including infants) from their parents and putting them in separate detention centers while their parents are held on misdemeanor charges for trying to enter the U.S.
Corridor of capitalist violence
Most of the migrants seeking asylum in the U.S. from the southern border are from three Central American countries (El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala), countries where the U.S. spawned military regimes, as well as enacted trade policies such as NAFTA that helped create intolerable living conditions for the working class (see page 5). Migrants are trying to save the lives of their families, and yet U.S. courts have rejected over 75 percent of their asylum requests (NYT, 5/2). Migrants from Haiti are also coming through Mexico but with the end of Temporary Protective Status (TPS) they are settling in Mexicali and Tijuana because they can’t cross the southern border.
Hypocrisy of the Dems
 As communists, we agree that the liberal politicians don’t care about Black people or migrant workers until they need them for the next election or to fight their imperialist wars. Now the Democrat leaders are expressing outrage when in the previous administraion, they turned a blind eye to the Deporter-in-Chief, Obama, who deported over 3 million immigrants and Hillary Clinton, who supported deporting unaccompanied children and called for “jailing black predators.”
Although unauthorized entry into the U.S. is half what it was in the 1990s and unemployment has fallen in recent years, Trump is trying to con white and Black workers into believing that immigrants are stealing their jobs, rather than the owners who send production and jobs abroad or who automate their operations. This has a political purpose: to keep working people from realizing one of their greatest resources—their number and their unity.
Trump and his supporters are building fascist terror and trying to keep the U.S. working class divided against itself. As they prepare for wider war, we must sharpen class struggle. On the job, in the schools, on the campuses, in our churches and community groups we must fight for a communist understanding of the world. Same enemy, same fight, workers of the world unite!