Six plainclothes officers ambushed doctoral student Rumeysa Öztürk as she walked down a Somerville, Massachusetts street on March 26. They surrounded her, snatched her phone, cuffed her, and kidnapped her in an unmarked van.
One day later, she was at an ICE “processing center” in Louisiana, where she has been held in inhumane conditions ever since. She had her hijab removed, waited hours for toilet paper, and wasn’t given access to an attorney for 24 hours.
No criminal charges have been brought against Öztürk, a Turkish citizen with a valid F-1 student visa. The only reason given for her detention is that she co-authored an opinion piece in a student newspaper demanding that Tufts “acknowledge the Palestinian genocide” and divest from Israel.
She is one of around 1,500 international students who had their legal status revoked without warning in recent weeks. But university students are just one layer of the foreign-born population facing attacks on their basic democratic rights.
Kilmar Abrego Garcia, an El Salvadorean national, lived in Maryland for years after being granted protected legal residency status in 2019. In March, he was arrested by ICE agents while driving home from work with his five-year-old son. He was transferred to a detention center in Texas the same day.
With zero credible evidence, Garcia is accused of being part of the notorious MS-13 gang’s New York outpost, though he has never lived in that state. Three days later, he was one of 238 migrants forcibly transferred to the infamous “Terrorism Confinement Center” in El Salvador—a high-security prison known for its human rights violations—leaving his wife and two children behind.
Scapegoating immigrants
At the time of writing, Trump has deported more than 117,000 people since reentering office—far below the numbers promised during his election campaign, and fewer than under Biden’s watch at this time last year. The administration is now ramping up the attacks, attempting to kill two birds with one stone by scaring both immigrant workers and Palestine activists into submission, and bringing his deportation numbers up to satisfy his hardcore MAGA base.
They’re going after immigrants, scouring any database they can find—whether it’s known undocumented immigrants or young students with a criminal record, no matter how minor, including marijuana possession, driving without a license, or misdemeanors of any kind. They have also sent ominous letters and emails to hundreds of thousands, telling them, “It is time for you to leave,” hoping they will submit to state intimidation and leave the country of their own accord. Even some US citizens were “unintended recipients” of these emails.
This frantic effort has resulted in other “mistakes.” After a chaotic couple of weeks, ICE reinstated the status of some international students whose records were deleted from a government database. DHS quickly clarified that they “have not reversed course on a single visa revocation.” They are simply developing a new “framework” for carrying out these attacks in a less sloppy manner.
Trump promised “the best jobs, the biggest paychecks, and the brightest economic future the world has ever seen.” He also vowed to deport “millions and millions” of immigrants. As his prospects for delivering on a better economy look increasingly bleak, he is trying to scapegoat immigrants as the real threat to the “American Dream” and “national security.”
At the start of the Great Depression, President Herbert Hoover used the exact same tactic of scapegoating immigrants and increasing deportations, promising “American jobs for real Americans.” Within a few years over a million people were “repatriated” to Mexico. Liberal hero Franklin Roosevelt continued the policy during his term. But this did nothing to alleviate the economic crisis. And although Obama deported over three million immigrants, this didn’t boost the post-2008 recovery or bring back jobs.
An invasion of gangsters?
Immigrant workers are part of the backbone of the US economy and are statistically less likely to commit a crime than the native-born. A majority of the Venezuelan immigrants who were forcibly flown to El Salvador have no criminal record or official charges against them, beyond their undocumented status. In several instances, Venezuelan immigrant workers have been categorized as “gang members” due to their tattoos—such as a soccer tattoo or the word “peace” with a crown on it.
Apparently, a foreign-born worker’s taste in tattoos and clothing is sufficient cause to deem him a gangster. A document called the “Alien Enemy Validation Guide” instructs officials to use a point system to identify members of the Tren de Aragua criminal group. Having tattoos and wearing clothing “associated” with the gang are worth four points each. Eight points makes someone a “validated” gangster—even though Tren de Aragua doesn’t have a signature emblem.
In Abrego Garcia’s case, the Trump administration admitted, after a lawsuit, that his deportation was an “administrative error.” Nonetheless, the US government has refused to bring him back, claiming that he is now under the legal authority of El Salvador and, therefore, it’s out of their hands.
To give legal cover to these draconian measures, Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, claiming that the US is being invaded by terrorists. But the real supporters of terrorism are the American imperialists who bomb, terrorize, and exploit millions abroad, force them to emigrate out of desperation, and brutalize them once they’re in the US.
Immigration officials lie, threaten, and kidnap innocent civilians on American streets. They traffic them across state lines into detention centers before their families are even notified, and shackle them on military planes to be imprisoned in foreign countries, where they perform forced unpaid labor. In an astonishing case, ten-year green card holder and Columbia Palestine activist Mohsen Mahdawi was ambushed and detained at a fake citizenship test appointment in Vermont.
New McCarthyist witch hunt
Trump speaks of an “invasion” of “illegal alien gang members and migrant criminals” released from “prisons and jails and insane asylums” to “prey upon innocent American citizens.” What do most Americans picture? Probably not a kid who got caught smoking pot, nor a student who forgot to declare frog embryo samples required for her research project.
In theory, student visas grant international students many of the same basic constitutional rights as citizens—including freedom of speech and assembly, and due process. But, as Secretary of State Marco Rubio bombastically declared in a Fox News opinion piece: “US visas are a privilege, rather than a right, reserved for those who make the United States better, not seek to destroy it from the inside.”
To justify deporting green-card holder and pro-Palestine activist Mahmoud Khalil, Rubio cited the McCarran-Walter Act of 1952, which gives the secretary of state sole power to decide whether visa holders are allowed to stay in the country. The law was passed to target communists and communist sympathizers during the McCarthyist Red Scare.
Then, as now, “free speech” is permitted—but only if the ruling class doesn’t consider your ideas a threat. The courts recently ratified the government’s decision to deport Khalil on grounds of “promoting antisemitism”—i.e., of opposing Israel’s genocidal slaughter of innocent Palestinians.
The majority of these deportations are completely “legal,” because bourgeois law is fundamentally unjust. The courts are not impartial; they are part of the same state that upholds the capitalist system and defends the interests of private property.
Even when there aren’t any laws on the books allowing mass relocation, the president can sign an order to make it happen. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, also in the supposed interests of “national security.” This allowed the detention of over 120,000 Japanese-Americans in prison camps, citizens or not. Two years later, the Supreme Court upheld the order as constitutional.
How to fight back
Trump aims to divide the working class along lines of nationality, pitting us against each other by blaming immigrants. We must be clear: attacks on the democratic rights of one layer of the population will pave the way for broader attacks against the entire working class.
All workers share a common desire for safety, jobs, higher wages, healthcare, quality education, and freedom of expression. These basic rights are impeded neither by immigrants nor by availability of material resources—but by private ownership of the means of production.
Two-thirds of Americans support giving undocumented immigrants a “path to citizenship,” and only 33% are in favor of mass deportations. Thousands of people have come out in protest on the campuses and neighborhoods where Mahmoud, Öztürk, and others were taken. The huge crowds mobilized in the recent “Hands Off” protests and at Sanders’s “Fighting Oligarchy” tour show the potential for a mass fightback.
Unfortunately, Sanders voted along with the entire Democratic Party caucus in favor of appointing Marco Rubio, the man leading this onslaught! The movement cannot trust the Democratic Party, the courts, or any other capitalist institution to lead a serious struggle.
What we need is a party that expresses the real historic interests of the working class, native-born and immigrant alike. One that can lead the working class to fight against these injustices. One that can link up and synchronize the scattered protests, give them ideological cohesion and a concrete program to fight for, including the demand for the immediate release of all those abducted by ICE. This is the party the RCA is building, as part of the Revolutionary Communist International.
