On July 17 in Cincinnati, a group of community members, faith leaders, and left groups gathered peacefully to protest the reprehensible detention of Imam Ayman, former Children’s Hospital Chaplain and pillar of the Cincinnati Muslim community. Imam Ayman was detained by ICE after unjustifiably having his asylum revoked last month.

Shortly after the vigil, community members began to march. The Covington Police violently disrupted the peaceful march, physically beating, tasing, and firing rubber bullets at protestors. Police arrested 28 people, and three others were transported to the ER. 

Now, 15 protesters, including two local journalists, have been charged with unlawful assembly, failure to disperse, obstructing a highway, criminal mischief, and even felony charges for rioting. Although some charges have been dropped for the majority of the 15, including the two journalists, there are still four protestors facing felony rioting charges. It’s clear that law enforcement is looking to make an example out of these four people in an attempt to scare others away from taking action in the streets to demand justice. 

This police crackdown in Cincinnati is linked with the recent escalation against anti-ICE protestors in LA and elsewhere. Recently, “threat bulletins” sent by the Department of Homeland Security to local police forces urged officers to categorize common protest activity like livestreaming and skateboarding as violent activity, or precursors to violent activity. DHS also wrote that protesters’ attempts to avoid identification and efforts to identify police should be considered “violent tactics.”

This is a warning, and a threat. Trump has repeatedly said he regrets not calling in the military to violently shut down the Justice for George Floyd protests in 2020, and that he’ll never make the same mistake again. Trump wants to repress dissent against his authoritarian regime, especially after 5-10 million young and working people took to the streets on his birthday for the nationwide “No Kings” protest in June. Police repression can make more people fearful to protest, especially if the left doesn’t fight back against these attacks on basic democratic rights. 

The passing of Trump’s budget bill in Congress put in action his priorities to massively militarize police departments across the country, increase military spending to over $1 trillion and expand ICE’s annual budget to nearly $30 billion dollars—more than the entire military budgets of most countries. A new division within ICE known as the “Tiger Team” has been created specifically to identify pro-Palestinian protestors. In order to pay for all of it, Trump and the Republicans slashed Medicaid and SNAP benefits, meaning millions of people will lose healthcare coverage and the ability to feed their families. In opposition, the Democrats didn’t call for mass protests or mobilize the anti-Trump movement at all—they did nothing except vote no and talk about the midterms. 

We can’t rely on the Democrats to defend us against these attacks on the right to protest, or anything else. Trump’s attacks are not going to stop unless we, working people, stop them. 

Unfortunately, we don’t yet have a working-class party in the US. There is essentially no mass left leadership to point an effective way forward for the movement, independent from the useless, billionaire Democratic Party. While the anti-Trump protest movement has ebbed somewhat since July, there are still millions of young and working people who are looking for a way to get organized and fight back. We need an organized mass movement in the streets against this repression, one that brings together the anti-Trump, anti-ICE, and pro-Palestinian movements with a plan to escalate until we win our demands. This needs to include mass community meetings where young and working people can be involved in discussing and voting on demands and next steps, including planning civil disobedience and building community defense committees to stop deportations and detentions. Critically, the labor movement needs to provide a lead in the anti-Trump movement by organizing coordinated strike action.

If you want to get involved in building the kind of movement needed to defeat Trump and the capitalist system for good, you should get organized as a socialist and join us today!

Socialist Alternative Says:

• Release all arrested protestors! Release Imam Ayman and all other detained immigrants in Butler County Jail!
• End all ICE raids! Immediate legalization and equal rights for all undocumented immigrants.
• Demilitarize the police! Use the billions spent on police budgets to instead fund high-quality affordable housing, healthcare, and essential services for all working people, regardless of immigration status.
• No to capitalist divide-and-rule! Unions must lead the way in uniting immigrants and US-born workers to form deportation defense communities in all workplaces.
• Build a movement independent of the billionaire-backed Democrats against the destructive policies of US imperialism around the world that drive working-class people to flee their homes.