By worker-correspondent Mike Roark
On September 3rd, VACPUSA joined a coalition of organizations that took part in an anti-ICE demonstration in Chantilly, Virginia, along Route 50, which sees an average of about 70,000 commuters every day. The demonstrators were protesting the inhuman conditions at the nearby ICE facility and the disappearing of our neighbors, friends, coworkers, and families. Bearing signs that read “It’s a Beautiful Day to Melt Some ICE” and “ICE is the New Gestapo”, gatherers listened to speakers organized by SURJ NOVA who described firsthand accounts of the detention center. The cells where they were held are so crowded that there is not enough room for detainees to lay down to sleep. The next speaker cogently drew a line through Hispanic migrants being a surplus population, the cruelty of the prison industrial complex, and the cowardice of elected Democrats. Calls to defund and abolish the police were met with cheers from the crowd.
A near continuous procession of dump trucks all honked in support as they drove towards the ICE facility. Hundreds of landscaping trucks, with their cabs full, honked and waved. Beyond the obviously visible working class, thousands of others showed their solidarity as they passed. It was a joyous atmosphere, and the community support was tangible.
What led us to this point, starts with the Global War on Terror (GWOT), and creation of the Department of Homeland Security. In 2001, it was the largest expansion of the federal government since the second world war, and its unchecked powers led to dirty wars across the world and an erosion of civil rights at home. Currently ICE is the largest federal enforcement agency, with more than 200 million people living within the 100-mile “border enforcement zone”. The same imperial tactics of disappearance and brutal detention of the GWOT have been turned inward, as ICE now terrorizes large swaths of the working class. ICE’s terror is currently racialized, but history has shown that whiteness is a constantly shifting category, and the United States has a long history of using state terror against the working class.
The entirety of the labor movement and the working class is under threat with these raids. While writing about the French in 1878, Engels described our situation today, “the working class, disabled for years in their fighting power, had but one immediate interest: to avoid the recurrence of such another protracted reign of repression, and with it the necessity of again fighting, not for their own direct emancipation, but for a state of things permitting them to prepare for the final emancipatory struggle.” In 2025, the American working class has suffered decades of defeats, and now it’s fighting for the basic rights of existence. Until the immediate threat of repression has been neutralized, the fight for liberation cannot begin. The lesson that the capitalist class has taken from the uprisings of 2020 is that increased brutality from the security state can maintain their position in society. This has lulled them into believing that they can increase repression without consequences, however these crises are unavoidable under capitalism, and the contradictions that create them cannot go unresolved forever. As the hegemony of the American Empire declines, alongside the acceleration of climate collapse, these moments of revolutionary potential will become more frequent. Our response is clear: community based organizing and mutual aid. As Marx wrote in the Communist Manifesto: “What the bourgeoisie, therefore, produces, above all, is its own grave-diggers”. As the last speaker at the Chantilly demonstration said, this is just the beginning. It will get worse.
Will you be ready to fight harder tomorrow?
Citations
- VDOT, “AADT – Fairfax County”, 2023, https://data.virginia.gov/dataset/aadt-2023-fairfax-county
- Friedrich Engels, “To the Working Men of Europe in 1877”, 1878, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1878/03/03.htmKarl Marx, The Communist Manifesto (1848), 29
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