In his second term, President Trump has forged and wielded ICE as his own army, with brutal ICE raids in LA, Chicago, and Minneapolis. Mass abductions at the hands of federal agents moved millions of working people to fight back and win limited but important victories, including an end to “Operation Metro Surge.” However, ICE’s extreme violence and Trump’s threats to crack down on what he calls “domestic terrorism” compel working-class movements to grapple with the best ways to fight government repression. Some in the movement advocate for a highly secretive “security culture” around small groups of activists. But the intensity and sophistication of the state’s attacks will require a defense that is more politicized and collective. Repression is a fundamental part of this new brutally reactionary era and will require the broadest possible working-class movement to fight back.
New Tech & Surveillance
ICE and Border Patrol are using much of their money from Trump’s Big “Billionaire” Bill to weaponize new technology against working people and the movement against deportations. During “Operation Metro Surge,” ICE was already using facial recognition apps based on officers’ phones. Though such apps provide a sheen of tech sophistication, they are actually incredibly unreliable, resulting in indiscriminate detentions. License plate readers have been used by local police for years and have restrictions on their use by ICE. But now there are tens of thousands of corporately-owned readers available for the federal government to use. The all-seeing digital camera array called the Gorgon Stare was first deployed on drones in the imperialist battlefields of Afghanistan and Ukraine. Now, ICE likely deploys it in US cities. Perhaps most significantly, ICE contracted with Peter Thiel-owned Palantir to develop an AI tool called ImmigrationOS to comb through all the terabytes of raw information collected and identify “targets” for deportation. Much of this surveillance technology has been in use for a decade or so. However, artificial intelligence radically changes the battlefield because it enables ICE to review, organize, and weaponize much more data than was ever possible before AI. How can working-class movements fight these new threats?
The Courts Aren’t On Our Side
We can’t expect the law and the courts to protect working people from the dystopian Robo-Cops at ICE. Last year, the reactionary Supreme Court allowed ICE to detain people on the basis of their accent, ethnicity, and perceived occupation. When stretched by federal agents, it is conceivable that ANYONE can fit their target descriptions. These blatantly racist “Kavanaugh stops” have empowered ICE to directly terrorize and detain US citizens both involved in anti-ICE movements and not.
Trump’s “Justice” Department has also been busy prosecuting the movement, going after 30 people protesting ICE agents in Minneapolis. The recent convictions of 9 organizers loosely connected to a demonstration outside an ICE detention facility included charges stemming from traveling with political zines in a car. While courts occasionally rule in favor of working people, these instances are increasingly rare and judges are drawn from the same millionaire class as other politicians. Our movement cannot afford to rely on shaky legal loopholes and years-long court battles when new attacks are launched on us nearly every day.
Mass Movements Make Us Safe
With all of these threats to our movements, it’s clear that we need to defend ourselves. But much of the secretive “security culture” that has developed among some left activists in the movement will simply not be enough to withstand the onslaught. Relying only on security “best practices” is like putting up a plastic shield against an army tank. For instance, using Signal gives us no protection if ICE can hack your phone without a warrant. Wearing masks and all black gives us no anonymity if the state criminalizes conspicuous clothing and the skies swarm with Gorgon Stare-enabled drones. Carrying firearms and body armor to a protest needlessly exposes us to harsher prosecutions and likely cuts our movements off from the wider working class. While we support the right for the working class to defend itself and absolutely believe we should take basic safety precautions, these things alone are not enough.
Instead of a “one quick trick” approach to security, we need to base ourselves on the political strength and popularity of our movements. And in this case, the best defense is also a good offense. When most working people support abolishing ICE and thousands march in the streets against deportation terror, we have no need to work in the shadows. Security culture’s real weakness is that it often points in the opposite direction of what is needed—building mass movements. Instead, it points towards small, unaccountable groups often isolated from the broader working class that end up less safe in the face of repression.
Labor unions must play a central role in movement defense; they have many of the basic protections non-union workplaces don’t have, the capacity to organize workers across sectors, and crucial offensive weapons like the strike. Building the broadest possible movement of ordinary people with the power of the labor movement behind it is essential in protecting our movement as a whole—if the billionaire class tries to come for one of us, they will have to get through all of us. Standing our ground politically, exposing the alleged conspiracies of “domestic terrorism” as fever dreams of the right-wing billionaire class, can strengthen our movement even as we fight the repression.
Stand Up, Fight Back!
What the Trump administration fears more than anything is a mass movement taking up the tactics of class struggle, like the Minneapolis general strike on January 23, and expanding it nationwide. They hope that by surveilling and repressing us with the technology of Silicon Valley billionaires, they can push working-class movements into the shadows, separating us from our communities, and locking us up with their courts. We must and can stand up to them, by not giving in to fear which makes us the villains. Instead we must rely on the power and truth of our politics: no person is illegal, working people of all national origins share the same interests, and it is the billionaire class that truly threatens our society and world.