On June 14, Socialist Alternative members from Los Angeles to NYC joined alongside millions of ordinary people to protest Trump’s authoritarian regime and his terror campaign against immigrants. Over 2,000 protests nationwide made for the largest anti-Trump protest ever and almost certainly the largest single day of protests in US history, with reports estimating anywhere from 5 million to 10 million people participating.
The millions that took to the streets stood in stark contrast to the 28 Abrams tanks that rolled through DC for Trump’s birthday that same day. Trump’s nearly $50 million military parade brought in well under the 200,000 that were expected to attend, a mere 4% of those who protested against Trump, at the very most.
While the anti-Trump movement has massive potential to grow, defeating Trump is no guarantee, and will take serious escalation.
Trump has ramped up ICE raids significantly in the last 10 days, with a target of deporting 3,000 undocumented immigrants per day. While Trump’s massively expensive deportation machine is unlikely to meet his aims, it is clear that he will not stop unless we stop him. To Trump, the most important goal is to normalize these brutal raids and instill fear and intimidation into immigrant communities and working-class people more broadly.
Trump’s ruthlessness when it comes to immigration is not coming from a place of strength, but a place of weakness. Trump is now in his weakest position yet during his second term. His foreign policy lies in tatters as his promise for capitalist peace in the Middle East is revealed as a total fantasy and there is no peace in Ukraine. His “Big Beautiful Bill” and economic policy are deeply unpopular among big sections of both the working and ruling classes, and his public breakup with Elon Musk exposed the cracks that exist in the MAGA coalition. Trump sits at the helm of US imperialism which is, in short, up a creek without a paddle. Mass deportations is one way Trump will attempt to strengthen his hand and distract from his failures while putting primarily Democrat-led cities in a chokehold, but so far his plan has backfired.
June 14 signified a potential turning point in the anti-Trump struggle, with hundreds of thousands of working and young people being drawn into the movement for the very first time, with 75,000 people out in Chicago, 100,000 in Philadelphia, and nearly 200,000 across over a dozen protests in LA. 50501, the largely liberal organization behind planning the June 14 “No Kings” protests, had set the national day of protests months ago. The LA anti-ICE protests in response to Trump’s authoritarian attacks—including calling the National Guard and Marines to LA—supercharged the day of action, bringing out more young people and people of color than previous 50501 events. Not only did more people take to the streets, but the high level of energy at the protests reflected a greater level of confidence that Trump can actually be pushed back.
Socialist Alternative members talked to thousands of protestors about the key question—what comes next? Protest movements can motivate and embolden even more workers to join the struggle, and to begin recognizing the role we can play in actually changing the course of events. But Trump won’t go down without an even bigger fight, so how we fight matters.
We need to escalate the movement to take up more militant tactics, like mass direct action and civil disobedience. The labor movement also needs to throw its full weight into the ring with the power of strike action. That’s why Socialist Alternative launched “Union Members Against ICE,” where already nearly 1,000 union members across the country and around the world have signed to demand union leaders immediately begin building for a national one-day strike against Trump and ICE.
It also matters who we fight alongside. Unfortunately, Democrats were given the microphones at many of these protests, seeing a wide-open opportunity to begin their midterm campaigning. But the Democrats are deeply committed to violent deportations—Biden deported far more people in his last year than Trump has been able to so far, and Obama was known in many immigrant communities as “Deporter in Chief.” California’s Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom has had no problem cooperating with ICE, in fact, he bragged about working with them “over 10,500 times.”
They might pose as the anti-Trump opposition, but the Democrats are incapable of stopping Trump—as a capitalist party they’ll never build or support the kind of militant working-class action that can actually stop the far right, because they fear it growing out of their control and turning against the system they too seek to protect. They don’t represent our movement, they just want to co-opt it—just as they did five years ago when over 20 million people took to the streets against systemic racism and police violence. We need a new party of the working class that takes no corporate money and actually builds movements to take down not just Trump, but the rotten system that spawned him.
The June 14 protests were a crucial show of force from working people, plenty of whom had never been to a protest before in their lives but who saw the need for every single one of us to get involved. Unfortunately, though, the organizers didn’t offer concrete next steps to escalate the movement at a key moment when millions were there to hear it. Escalatory action and clear, unifying demands could bring more young people and people of color into the movement, which is urgently needed, and another overstep from the Trump administration can very easily make the situation explosive once again.
If you and your friends and coworkers are looking for ways to keep building the anti-ICE movement, join the Union Members Against ICE national organizing meeting on Sunday, June 22 at 4pm ET to discuss next steps for organizing in our unions against deportations and for a one-day strike (you don’t need to be a union member to attend!). We can defeat Trump and the far right, but only if we get better organized. We need more socialists in our unions and in our movements to push for the strategies and tactics that will be needed to win—join Socialist Alternative today!