National agitation day, February 22nd, 2025

From the beginning of his first presidential campaign, Donald Trump promoted a small-minded, nativist bigotry against immigrants and refugees. His campaigns for office scapegoated migrants, falsely blaming them for everything from crime, to job losses. In his first term as president, he unleashed the vicious bipartisan enforcement and deportation machine he inherited, producing horrors including children in cages, separated from their families, and the racist ban on travel from several Muslim-majority countries. Trump’s new term has begun with shock and awe raids against migrants and the promise of mass deportations against millions of people who have come to the US to find work and a home.

What the rhetoric of Trump and his supporters intentionally obscures is why people are forced to flee their homes in the first place: because US imperialism has ravaged and plundered much of the globe. US imperialism—with its wars of conquest and aggression, sanctions and economic plunder, coups and political meddling, and ecological destruction—forces people around the world to flee their homelands in search not only of economic opportunities, but sometimes merely a life free from destruction and sexual violence.

In Latin America and the Caribbean, decades (if not centuries!) of US intervention have caused mass migration to the US. The mass numbers of Venezuelans who have recently arrived in US cities are fleeing the economic devastation caused by the US’s repeated efforts to overthrow the government and the sanctions regime that shrunk the economy by nearly 90%. The US has treated Haiti as a massive sweatshop, propping up a garment industry that employs people for only a few dollars a day to keep the country destabilized and poor. Across the Middle East and North Africa, US bombs have annihilated millions of people and created tens of millions of refugees.

It is the people fleeing these and dozens of other nightmares created by the United States that comprise the waves of immigrants and refugees who come into the US every year. Welcoming these people is literally the least the rulers of the US could do, yet many immigrants are forced to the shadows, doing backbreaking labor in unsafe conditions, living in tent cities, and in constant fear of the ICE gestapo, La Migra. Ramped up by the Trump government, the deportation machine that selectively kidnaps and deports immigrants has been built over decades by politicians of both parties. While Trump’s rhetoric is more hateful than many of his predecessors’, his actions are the logical progression of the bloodthirsty mechanics of the beast that is US imperialism.

The crisis is not the people fleeing the horrors of US imperialism. The crisis is US imperialism! We welcome immigrants, migrants, and refugees because we don’t respect the borders of this country which were built through conquest and theft, and because we stand with the people of the world, not the rulers of this country. People who live in the US have a responsibility to stand with the people under the gun whose economies have been crashed by trade deals, whose rivers been poisoned by US corporations and the military, whose homes have been decimated by US-made bombs. The bare minimum to stand with the victims of US imperialism now seeking refuge in the US is to reject the anti-immigrant hysteria and bullshit being spewed by Trump and other politicians! But rejecting rhetoric is not enough. In the belly of the beast, we are all obligated to get creative, unite with others, and take the bold and necessary actions to throw sand in the gears of the deportation machine.

Mass deportations are illegitimate because this empire is illegitimate! Smash the deportation machine!