Trump’s Latest Target

On May 2nd, ICE agents stopped a bus of farm workers near Rochester, NY, detaining 14 individuals on their way to work.

Similar incidents have unfolded in recent weeks across Washington, Vermont, and California.While the sheer volume of deportations under Trump mirrors that of his predecessors, the attacks on migrant farm workers at their place of employment is a calculated change of the US’s tactics of splitting up and destroying families. Trump’s administration line on immigration seeks to cause chaos and fear. Whether it be the targeting of people at work, to stripping legal protections from hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers, or kidnapping students for speaking out against the US sponsored genocide of Gaza. These tactics reflect how US imperialism operates seamlessly across borders, destabilizing lives abroad and within the belly of the beast.

Why are migrant farm workers being targeted?

The US has always used migrant labor as a cheap and expendable resource to exploit. Without legal status, migrants are forced to seek out whatever work they can get, even if it means making poverty wages in unsafe conditions. Owing to the parasitism of imperialism, all of us benefit from the exploitation of these workers to get our food, creating a stable form of exploitation many of us tacitly approve.

All over the world, US imperialism ruthlessly exploits people producing the things that many of us rely on and take for granted. Like a snake eating its own tail, it discards those workers once it becomes no longer profitable to employ them.

Recently in Panama, US fruit company Chiquita fired 5,000 of its workers after a month-long strike that cost the company an estimated $75 million. Fruit pickers joined other workers around the country protesting a pension reform law the government is trying to pass to cut spending.

What if within the belly of the beast, we took collective action on the scale that workers in Panama have taken to stop the deportation machine and end the cannibalism of imperialism?

Even “doing things correctly” won’t stop the deportation machine

We must reject the imperialist plunder that fuels this empire and expose the system tearing families apart and exploiting workers. The only answer is resistance: fight the empire until it falls.