President Donald Trump’s latest vicious attack on undocumented immigrants and their children has accelerated the rise of fascism amid U.S. imperialist decline.
Trump is supported by a mass, racist section of the working class that scapegoats and dehumanizes immigrant workers for the failures of the profit system—even as the bosses super-exploit immigrants for needed labor. But larger masses of workers around the world have recoiled in outrage and disgust at this state-sponsored child abuse, which has traumatized more than two thousand children. These workers are pushing back in support of their class sisters and brothers, and politicians are running for cover.
On June 20, in response to growing protests and defections from his own racist camp, the Terrorist-in-Chief signed an executive order to modify his “zero tolerance” policy to prosecute all “illegal” border-crossers—including seekers of asylum—and to kidnap and warehouse their children. Videos of teenagers in cages and audio recordings of toddlers crying inconsolably for their mothers recalled past concentration camps, from Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Japanese internment hellholes during World War II to the Nazi death factories in Germany. Trump upheld this fascist tradition with a racist rant blaming Democrats for allowing “illegal” immigrants “to infest our country” (CNN, 6/19).
Monstrous treatment of Latin children
The capitalist bosses—Democrats and Republicans alike—have a monstrous history of victimizing children to terrorize and divide the working class. Over more than two centuries of slavery in the U.S., countless children were bought and sold away from their parents. Into the 1970s, more than one of three indigenous children were stolen from their families by government agencies and religious institutions (dailykos, 2/2/13).
With the U.S. Supreme Court upholding Trump’s racist anti-Muslim travel ban on June 26, the bosses have declared open season on immigrants—and proven once again that the U.S. Constitution isn’t worth the paper it is written on. To implement their legalized kidnappings, the Gestapo of the U.S. Border Patrol lied to parents who “were told their children were being taken for a bath” (Los Angeles Times, 6/16). Others, including at least one breastfeeding mother, had their children physically yanked from their arms (Hufffington Post, 6/22). In the dead of night, the Department of Homeland Security shipped two babies under a year old to an airport in Michigan (Detroit Free Press, 6/20).
Abuse in these concentration camps is rampant. An undocumented 14-year-old in McAllen, Texas, said he was “kept in handcuffs and then tied to a chair with a restraint placed over his face with holes so he could breathe.” Similar punishment was meted out to at least five other children, including one who said he was strapped naked to a chair for more than two days (CNN, 6/21).
On June 26, a federal judge ordered the Trump administration to reunite all separated families within 30 days, and those with children under five within 14 days. Given the administrative chaos and the fact that many parents have already been deported, the ruling’s impact is uncertain at best. Hundreds of children will likely be trapped in institutions across the country for indefinite periods, with little or no contact with their families. As the judge wrote: “[U]nder the current system, migrant children are not accounted for with the same efficiency and accuracy as property” (New York Times, 6/27).
Under capitalism, workers are disposable
commodities.
Trump advances fascism
While Trump’s anti-immigrant gutter racism represents a clear step toward fascism, the foundation for his approach was laid by predecessors from both parties. In 1996, Bill Clinton backed the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act, which authorized a border wall, beefed up the brutal Border Patrol, and allowed for the jailing of undocumented immigrants for up to two years before deportation.  In 2005, George W. Bush’s Operation Streamline further criminalized immigrants by making a second border crossing a potential felony.
Deporter-in-Chief Barack Obama forced over 3 million people out of the U.S. While Obama won liberals’ approval for backing the Dream Act, “he actually contributed to the criminalization of large groups of immigrants and so fed directly into Trump’s future rhetoric. He also drew on Bill Clinton’s ‘tough on crime’ policies in ways that linked the criminalization of people of color with the deportation of ‘criminal’ immigrants (also overwhelmingly people of color)…[and] helped foment white racial fears” (Nation, 4/25/17). Under Trump’s June 20 order, the government will set up new family-style concentration camps—Obama’s preferred solution. Another proposal would imprison up to 20,000 “unaccompanied alien children” on four military bases in Texas and Arkansas (NYT, 6/22).
Emboldened by a 90 percent approval rating among Republicans (NYT, 6/24), Trump remains defiant. He trumpets Big Lies about fictional immigrant criminality while calling for an end to “due process” and the elimination of judges to hear immigrants’ claims for asylum.
Splits in a declining empire
But Trump may be pushing the limits of what the main wing of the U.S. ruling class will tolerate, at least at this moment. While the finance capitalists care nothing about immigrants, they have deep concerns about the mulilateral alliances that prop up their teetering empire, from NATO to NAFTA—all in jeopardy under Trump’s “America First” agenda. The bosses also have growing qualms about the inept president’s ability to fend off rising imperialist rivals China and Russia.
Capitalism is in crisis worldwide, with the U.S.-led “liberal world order” in freefall. Nationalist rulers have seized power from Eastern Europe to Turkey to the Phillipines. Formerly stalwart U.S. allies like Germany, Italy, and Britain are in internal disarray. In the New York Times (6/18), in an opinion piece titled “Fall of the American Empire,” main-wing mouthpiece Paul Krugman bemoaned Trump’s latest anti-immigrant attacks and the decline of U.S. imperialism in equal measure:
Committing atrocities at the border, attacking the domestic rule of law, insulting democratic leaders while praising thugs, and breaking up trade agreements are all about ending American exceptionalism, turning our back on the ideals that made us different from other powerful nations….
We were the leader of the free world, a moral as well as financial and military force. But we’re throwing all that away.
Meanwhile, the U.S. military is seeing a rise in enlistments by Latin workers (Pew Research Center, 4/12/17)—a group of vital importance for the main-wing bosses’ plans for an eventual World War III. They must find a way to win millions of young people to fight and die for U.S. imperialism, the main point of Obama’s Dream Act. The rulers need racism, too, to divide and exploit our class—but Trump has made it too raw, too obvious, too ugly. The liberals’ pleas for “humanity” is really a call to sustain U.S. global supremacy.
International solidarity
Workers are rising to say: Enough is enough. Antiracists have demonstrated against deportations in New York, Chicago, Boston, Los Angeles, Houston, Paris, and London. Their solidarity represents a tremendous opportunity for the revolutionary communist Progressive Labor Party.
For PLP and its international base, the global migration crisis underlines our struggle to build a world without racist borders. As capitalism implodes and fascism intensifies, so too will a working-class movement grow and spread throughout the world. We are united in the same fight: one working class, one Party, one undivided world under the red flag of communism. Smash deportations! Join PLP!