Solidarity with protestors facing retaliation for opposing the ICE crackdown in Chicago — Fight the indictments of Kat Abughazaleh and peaceful protestors!
November 1st, 2025 by Kshama Sawant
Workers Strike Back and I stand in solidarity with @KatAbughazaleh and all other protesters who are facing retaliation for peacefully protesting against the horrendous crackdown on immigrant workers by ICE and the Trump administration.
Abughazaleh and other protesters have courageously engaged in civil disobedience to defend against the horrific ICE raids and detentions. Now Trump's Department of Justice has won a federal indictment with criminal charges against them.
Trump is attempting to divide and conquer working people, by pointing the blame for unaffordable housing and low wages at immigrants. But we know who the true enemy is: billionaires like himself and their Democratic and Republican political servants.
We need a united movement of working people, immigrants and citizens, against the rich and their two parties, to fight for our needs. That’s why my independent socialist campaign for the U.S. Congress is fighting for free healthcare for all — regardless of immigration status — funded by taxing the rich. I am calling for national rent control and a $25 per hour federal minimum wage. I am also fighting to end all U.S. military aid to the Israeli state, stop all deportations, shut down the detention centers, and shut down ICE.
Trump's ICE crackdown is in reality a bipartisan project. ICE was originally created by Congressional Democrats and Republicans voting for George W. Bush's Homeland Security Act of 2002. My opponent, pro-ICE and pro-genocide Democratic Congressman Adam Smith, was one of those who voted for this. Since then, the Democratic and Republican politicians including @RepAdamSmith have continued to fund and expand the brutal ICE deportation machine that Trump now commands. They have spent many hundreds of billions of dollars on war, genocide, and terrorizing and imprisoning immigrants instead of on meeting the basic housing, healthcare, education, and food needs of working people.
To this day, no president has outdone deporter-in-chief Barack Obama, with his over three million deportations. Democratic Party Mayors across the country have been cracking down on protests against ICE and against the genocide in Gaza. Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass has led the LA Metro Board in retaliating against unionized bus drivers who have refused to cooperate with ICE, and her police department has arrested over 160 people protesting against ICE.
Shamefully, Bernie Sanders recently praised Trump's immigration policy, saying "I don’t like Trump, you know, but we should have a secure border. Biden didn’t do it". It's stunning that Sanders would decide to toe the Trump line on immigration at a moment when ordinary working people across the nation oppose Trump’s immigration policy and are taking on grave personal risks in standing up to masked ICE agents.
Funding Israel’s genocide in Gaza and the decades-long brutal Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands has also been integral to U.S. capitalism, and has enjoyed full-throated support by both parties. It was Democratic President Biden who led American imperialism’s support for the first 15 of the 24 months of the holocaust, which has taken over half a million Palestinian lives. The United States funds 70 percent of Israel’s weapons, and is decisive to Israel’s military. Democrats like Adam Smith voted along with Republicans to send tens of billions of dollars for the genocide.
As tens of thousands of working and young people courageously protested against the genocide, Biden oversaw the worst police crackdown on protest movements in the half century since the Vietnam War era. Democrats and Republicans in the U.S. Congress and in cities and states joined in the brutal repression of protesters. By the summer of last year, over 3,500 antiwar protesters had been arrested. Democrat Adam Smith called antiwar activists “left-wing fascists”and demanded they be arrested.
Working people will not be able to end the horrors of ICE, deportations and the inhumane detention centers, war, and genocide, let alone win living wages, affordable housing and safe neighborhoods, and free healthcare for all by putting our faith in the Democratic Party. In fact, working people are looking for an alternative to the rotten Democratic and Republican parties. Over 60 percent of Americans want a new party, and moreover, they reject another billionaire-backed party like the new right-wing party proposed by Elon Musk.
What’s been missing is any leadership from the labor movement or the left more broadly. Most of the leadership is tied to the Democratic Party and uncritically cheerleads the Democrats as they sell working people out. A few like Teamster President Sean O’Brien are cozying up to Trump and the Republicans. Both these dead ends are a consequence of business unionism, which means these labor leaders put their careers over the needs of workers, accept the capitalist framework, and seek to make peace with the bosses and their parties. NGO and movement misleaders have had a similar approach, as seen in the selling out of the BLM movement.
We need movement leaders who have the clarity and courage to organize working people independent of the Democratic Party, who understand that the Democratic Party is as much of an enemy of working people as the Republicans. Our movements need candidates who are willing to run independently of both the billionaire parties and who will use their election campaigns and their elected offices to build fighting movements to win victories for working people.
We need such independent fighting campaigns and elected offices as a step towards building a new party for working people and a fighting labor movement, with working-class leaders who understand that we need to fight back against all the attacks on union members and immigrants because an injury to one is an injury to all. We need leaders who will fight the attacks on workers from the bosses and both political parties of the billionaires, by organizing mass civil disobedience and mass strike action.
During my decade as an independent socialist on the Seattle City Council, I used my office to fight for working people, building movements that won the highest minimum wage in the nation, the Amazon Tax that raised hundreds of millions of dollars from the wealthiest businesses to fund affordable housing, and historic renters’ rights laws like the ban on winter evictions and the $10 per month cap on late rent fees. We forced the Democrats on the City Council to vote yes on our demands by overcoming their pro-big-business opposition. That is the kind of fightback we need nationally.
