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!

As sharpening inter-imperialist rivalry leads to larger wars and fascism, the U.S. capitalist rulers are trying to solve the crisis of their failing profit system by attacking the working class. Over the next several issues of CHALLENGE, we will be writing about how these attacks are affecting workers—and how a communist-led revolutionary movement can fight back.

On June 10, New York City settled a lawsuit brought by Federal Prosecutors by admitting that New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) bosses had lied about performing lead paint inspections and directed their building managers to hide dangerous conditions from inspectors.
The problems included rat- and roach- infested buildings, rampant mold from leaking pipes and a winter in which over 300,000 residents went without heat for at least part of the season.
At least 19 children have confirmed lead poisoning and that number is expected to soar as more families have their children tested (NY Daily News 6/11). The settlement includes a court appointed monitor to oversee NYCHA and a minimum of 2.2 billion dollars to be spent by the city over the next five years to make repairs on NYCHA buildings.
NYCHA was built as part of the New Deal to provide affordable housing at the height of the Depression in 1935 while NYC was the largest industrial concentration in the U.S.
Today the local and federal bosses have left the public housing system in a state of disrepair, on the verge of ruin. The decline of public housing shows the limits of reforms under capitalism and the inability of capitalism to meet the long-term needs of the working class.
Built in an industrial city
NYCHA is a series of public housing developments spread across New York City. At the time, New York led the country in building well-maintained, affordable housing for the working class.
NYCHA represented, along with programs like the WPA, Social Security and Unemployment Benefits a social contract modeled after European capitalism’s response to mass uprisings by the working class. In 1941, the over 1 million manufacturing jobs represented 60 percent of the city’s workforce.All this housing was segregated by race or excluded Black families altogether.
Public housing was built with great fanfare. Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia proclaimed in 1936 at a public housing construction site “Down with rotten antiquated rat holes…let in the sun…a new day is dawning, a new life, a new America.” (Guernicamag.com 10/1/2014)
But, NYCHA did not solve the city’s housing problems. Most notably, tenants had to have a job to be eligible for an apartment. For those who could get in, it was a huge improvement.
Today, NYCHA is the largest public housing system in the country with between 400 and 600 thousand residents. The promised $2.2 billion will hardly make a dent as the system has $25 billion in unmet capital needs, “after a decades long decline in federal funding left it unable to cover investments in critical infrastructure”(WSJ 3/6/17).
Two forces of NYCHA
The rulers supported public housing because it served workers’ needs in an era of expanding capitalism. With the City limiting rents to only two thirds of the neighborhood average, it took some pressure off the bosses to raise salaries.
Public housing replaced poorly maintained tenements for the mainly white working class families that made up NYC. “The Lower East Side known as the ‘Lung Blocks,’ notorious for their transcendently high rates of tuberculosis, diphtheria, and cholera” (Guernica, 10/1/2014).
The first NYCHA housing was all white and in the Lower East Side. The second NYCHA housing was opened in Harlem in 1937, which was for Black families only (Bedford and Bowery, 1/2/2015).
Attempt to integrate
The working-class movement was able to have a big effect on the early culture of the projects. NYCHA began as purposefully segregated all-white housing. A strict selection process and minimum income requirements limited the number of Black families who were eligible.
While most of public housing was lawfully segregated in the country, NYC had one of the few examples of housing integration. The left-wing, often communist inspired collective politics of the time, also played out in day-to-day life in the developments.
 “A Tenants’ Association had been established and threw regular parties; residents took trips to the theater and held forums to discuss contemporary social and political issues. There was a daycare center, a sewing group, and a Mothers’ Club” (Bedford + Bowery, 1/2/2015).
Even as late as the early 1970s, NYCHA provided many resources to tenants. A resident of the Red Hook Houses, in Brooklyn, described growing up there.
“We had a stadium, where schools from all over the city would have track meets. We had a baseball field. We had a serious swimming pool. We had a center where we could learn martial arts and play ball (Narrative.ly 4/15/13).
In the late 1960s (influnced by the fightback of the time and white flight),NYCHA announced that tenant selection would no longer “deal with the morals of the applicants” and that it would abandon previous requirements of employment, stability, and orderliness. Single-parent black and Puerto Rican welfare recipients replaced white, middle-class tenants.”
Deindustrialization hurt workers
But the “New America” turned out to be relatively short lived. Industrial jobs moved out of the City along with white workers as part of post-war development of the suburbs. Between 1969 and 1976, New York City lost 600,000 jobs, majority of them in manufacturing. Racist housing laws forced Black and Latin workers to stay in the City.
Between 1950 and 1990 the city’s white population went from 6.7 million to 3.1 million. Along with the flight of industry and white workers went the tax base and the city responded by cutting services, putting many public workers on the street as well. The jobs that were left for the working class were mainly low paying service sector jobs. (Monthly Labor Review February 1993)
Instead of maintaining NYCHA at the same level they had been, the city, state and federal governments began to cut back on staffing. There were the first signs of basic maintenance delays. In that period, the projects were almost all Black, Latin and older white residents. Abandoned by the City’s bosses, the strength of the relationships among the tenants showed some the possibilities of a workers led society. “The housing authority’s projects were anchors of stability and safety. They were places that you wanted to get into as the neighborhoods were deteriorating around you” (NY Times 6/25).
Response to Crisis? Gentrification
The ruling class responded to the economic crisis in NYC with gentrification. Without a need to support large numbers of industrial workers, and political pressure to put falling tax dollars into schools and services for the new wealthy white residents, the City all but abandoned the projects financially.
“By the turn of the century, the idea of government as landlord went out of fashion. Suddenly, NYCHA became a victim of disinvestment as all levels of government steered billions of dollars away from the agency” (NY Times 6/25).
In one of the most blatant examples under Mayor Michael Bloomberg, “the New York City Housing Authority and its board members…failed to spend nearly $1 billion that it [had] been hoarding since 2009 to make life more livable for the … residents of its 334 developments” (NY Daily News 8/1/2012). The residents have been paying the price for the resulting extreme deterioration of conditions and services.
“The housing authority’s operating deficits and mounting costs to maintain and renovate its aging 2,462 buildings quickly impacted living conditions. Hurricane Sandy’s wrath and last winter’s frigid temperatures further exposed the buildings’ vulnerabilities…and the authority admitted in June to lying, covering up missed lead inspections and deceiving federal inspectors.”
Residents have been fighting back. The federal lawsuit was the result of tenant protests that forced news media to publicize the horrific physical condition of many of the buildings.
Mayor de Blasio’s response to the conditions in NYCHA has been to intensify the program begun under previous Mayor Michael Bloomberg of selling off project playgrounds and parking lots to private real estate developers. The new buildings are allowed to have 50 percent of the apartments go for market rates, i.e. extremely expensive, the remaining “affordable” units will require a minimum family income of over $50,000, twice the average income of public housing residents.
Most major U.S. cities have leveled their public housing. New York now seems to be following a similar script of letting the buildings decay to the point of being unlivable and then use the residents of the new for-profit private developments as a political battering ram to get rid of the projects.
The tenants are continuing to fight (see page 3). Wherever you live, this is a cause that needs your support. There is no affordable place to go. Beyond this immediate issue, the bigger question is how long will we continue to put up with a system that continually solves it problems on the backs of the working class.
Many white workers who followed jobs and new houses out to the suburbs are now themselves the victims of deindustrialization. Racist divisions built by the ruling class over many years have kept white workers in the suburbs and Black and Latin workers in the city divided.
But we are one class, not just in one city but also around the world, with a united interest in getting rid of this system that has failed. Progressive Labor Party is building a revolutionary communist movement to fight for a society that serves the working class. Join us.

NEW YORK CITY, June 15—In a march yesterday meant to disrupt Governor Cuomo’s “Master Builder” award ceremony, 1,000 working class-tenants and youth—Black, Latin, Asian and white—marched against high rents and homelessness.  They chanted, “What do we want? Housing! When do we want it? Now! If we don’t get it, shut it down” and “This is class war. Tax the rich and house the poor.”
As capitalism continues to decay, housing for the working class is getting more and more scarce.
Cuomo continues Moses’s racist legacy
As the marchers turned onto super exclusive Park Avenue in Manhattan, militant youth led us into the street. We took over the entire uptown side of the street, stopping traffic.
Finally we moved onto the sidewalk as the police threatened to arrest us using their high decibel system. We later again poured into the street as we reached our destination, a luxury building where Governor Andrew Cuomo was receiving the Building Trades Employers Association first ever Robert Moses Master Builder award. It may be fitting since both Moses, the shamelessly racist architect of NYC segregation, and Cuomo are displacing the Black, Latin, and Asian working class by the thousands. Because of Moses and the City politicians, more than 250,000 people were displaced in the construction of New York City’s highways in the 1930s and ’40s.
Under Cuomo, who is up for reelection this year, there has been a “36 percent increase in homelessness, up to nearly 90,000 people statewide since his Cuomo 2010 campaign” (Patch, 6/15). The housing court has churned out thousands of evictions. “About 232,000 cases were filed last year against tenants, roughly one for every 10 city rentals. Most tenants were accused of owing back rent. But in many cases, tenants were sued for rent they did not owe” (NYT, 5/20).
Cuomo was the target of the community groups who sponsored the event, saying it was “Cuomo’s housing crisis.” A member of Progressive Labor Party carried a sign that said, “It’s not just Cuomo, it’s capitalism.” Another comrade distributed 120 Challenge newspapers.
Of course, opportunists like actor-turned-politician Cynthia Nixon criticized Cuomo for taking sides of the real estate bosses. Nixon is a challenger of Cuomo for the Democratic nomination for governor. She said she was proud to stand “renters not developers, with people not with wealthy corporate donors” (Patch, 6/14). Workers know a politician “cannot keep profits out of politics” and in the event that Nixon does become governor, she too will be reigned in by the billionaires.  
Rent is killing us
Anger is growing as the housing crisis worsens in NYC (see page 8).
89,000 people are in shelters and thousands more live in the streets, including families with children.
100,000 rent stabilized apartments have been lost, especially as racist real estate developers and financiers rapidly gentrify neighborhoods.
As one tenant said, “The rents are killing us!”
Another said “The politicians? The landlords have bought them.”
Real estate developers move in like vampires and finance high-rent housing. Government officials claim the new housing is “affordable.” But this is based on NYC’s “median income,” approximately $55,000 a year for a family of four. In working-class neighborhoods where many tenants are Black, Latin, or seniors, it is common for almost half of the tenants to have incomes of about $28,000 a year.
Bushwick tenants fight racist displacement
In the Bushwick neighborhood of Brooklyn (which is 65 percent Latin and 20 percent Black), tenants are fighting the Camber Property Group developers’ plans to build two nine-story buildings with 122 apartments. Only 27 would be “affordable,” for families whose income is at least $51,000 a year. This development would kick out existing tenants, a boxing club, a restaurant, a laundromat and a parking lot used by workers at a nearby hospital.
On June 11 several members of PLP participated with others at a local hearing for people regarding the development. The misleaders of Local 32 BJ, the largest union of property service workers, spoke in favor because the new owners had promised maintenance jobs for mere a 12 union members. Everyone was shocked that a union “ally” would support a project that would eliminate 50 jobs in the community.
PLP says that the working class must never allow ourselves to be divided and pitted against each other by capitalist opportunists and sellouts. We need to fight for more jobs for our class.
The fight goes on. PLP is gradually building in the community organizations we’re participating in. While the leadership of these groups calls for reforms, in lock step with the Democratic Party, PL’ers call for communist revolution as the way to free our class from the chains of capitalism.

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!