Trump and the Republicans are using the government shutdown to escalate their fascist anti-immigrant campaign, the spearhead of dictatorship and social counterrevolution against the entire working class.
They are seizing on the Democratic leadership’s claim to be defending healthcare benefits to accuse them of using “Americans’ taxpayer money” to fund free healthcare for “illegal aliens.” Democratic House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer are insisting this is a lie, while refusing to defend immigrants, documented and undocumented, who are the victims of mass, illegal raids and detentions, and the hundreds of thousands of immigrants who are being summarily deported.
The Democrats are equally silent on increasingly violent and lawless attacks by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Gestapo on peaceful protesters in New York, Chicago and elsewhere across the US. This is despite mass popular opposition to the pogrom against immigrants.
The attacks are currently centered in the Chicago area, where Trump is seeking to incite confrontations with peaceful protesters in advance of sending troops. On Friday, federal agents who were making an arrest at a Humboldt Park medical center handcuffed a Chicago alderperson when she asked if they had a warrant. Alderperson Jessie Fuentes said the agents refused to answer her question, shoved her and then cuffed her.
This comes as the Department of Homeland Security says it has made more than 900 arrests so far across Illinois in “Operation Midway Blitz.”
As the World Socialist Web Site wrote:
This week federal agents carried out a number of raids on homes and shelters in Chicago, kidnapping those suspected of being immigrants, and traumatizing neighborhoods with armed hostile actions, including dropping onto city blocks from helicopters, using flash-bang grenades and chainsaws to enter apartment buildings, and treating everyone as a criminal, including children.
On Tuesday night after 10:00 p.m. in the South Shore neighborhood, dozens of federal agents descended upon an apartment building supposedly in search of gang members. Thirty-seven people were arrested, as agents sawed through fences, blew doors down, and pulled families with small children in various states of undress out of their homes, zip-tied them and held them in trucks.
In the third week of demonstrations outside an ICE processing facility in the suburban Village of Broadview, Illinois, masked and armed ICE agents in full combat gear are attacking and arresting protesters. ICE is deploying armored vehicles with mounted automatic weapons. It is using pepper spray, tear gas and rubber bullets against the demonstrators. On Friday, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem showed up in Broadview to oversee the repression.
The assault on immigrants and their defenders is an essential part of the establishment of a presidential dictatorship. Trump has dispatched National Guard troops to Los Angeles, Washington D.C. and now Portland, Oregon and Memphis, Tennessee, and promised to deploy troops to Chicago and other major cities. The LA deployment included active duty Marines.
At this week’s unprecedented gathering of some 800 generals and admirals outside of Washington, Trump ordered the military to engage in war against US cities and the “enemy within,” openly declaring war against the working class.
At the same time, Trump, acting on behalf of the corporate oligarchy, is using the shutdown to impose mass permanent layoffs of federal workers and close or gut federal agencies that oversee social benefits or regulations on corporations regarding workers’ health and safety and the environment. He is working with Office of Management and Budget (OMB) head Russell Vought, the co-author of the Project 2025 blueprint for counterrevolution, to carry out a vast restructuring of the state, which can be imposed only by dictatorial means.
The attack on immigrant workers is aimed at dividing and disorienting the working class and facilitating dictatorship and the destruction of all the social gains won by the working class over the past century, including Social Security and Medicare.
Trump set the tone for the Republican Party in the run-up to the shutdown when he canceled a meeting with the top congressional Democrats, writing on Truth Social:
They are threatening to shut down the Government of the United States unless they can have over $1 Trillion Dollars in new spending to continue free healthcare for Illegal Aliens (A monumental cost!), force Taxpayers to fund Transgender surgery for minors, have dead people on the Medicaid roles, allow Illegal Alien Criminals to steal Billions of Dollars in American Taxpayer Benefits, try to force our Country to again open our Borders to Criminals and to the World, allow men to play in women’s sports, and essentially create Transgender operations for everybody.
Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson has publicly stated that the Democrats’ government funding bill “restores and continues $200 billion in American taxpayer funded health care subsidies going to illegal aliens.” He has claimed that Democrats are “holding the American government HOSTAGE so they can give FREE health care to ILLEGAL ALIENS.” Johnson has also accused Schumer of capitulating to the “Marxist, far-left corners” of his party.
Meanwhile, Trump is posting on social media racist AI-generated videos blaring mariachi music and showing Jeffries wearing a sombrero and a cartoon mustache. Next to him is a digitally altered Schumer saying, “we need new voters, and if we give all these illegal aliens free healthcare, we might be able to get them on our side so they can vote for us.”
This is a version of the fascist and antisemitic Great Replacement Theory, which claims that Jews are conspiring to replace white Christian Americans with non-white immigrants.
The working class must act independently of the Democrats and union bureaucracies, which are complicit in this attack, to defend immigrant workers and the democratic rights of the population as a whole. It must forge the fighting unity of workers in the struggle to bring down the Trump government.
Axios reported Friday that the White House is in talks with the Teamsters union over the shutdown, in addition to the US Chamber of Commerce and the Business Roundtable. Such is the level of complicity of the union bureaucracies in the corporate oligarchy’s war on the working class.
The Trump administration is acting on behalf of the billionaire oligarchs who rule American capitalist society. The Democratic Party is complicit and will not oppose the social counterrevolution or police-state dictatorship in the making because it is a party of the same oligarchy. In all fundamentals, the Democrats agree with the class policy of Trump. The Democratic Party fears above all any movement of the working class that could threaten the capitalist profit system. Its primary objective is to cover up the depths of the crisis and suppress popular resistance.
The trade union bureaucracies are the labor police of the ruling class. Their fat salaries and perks depend on their defense of capitalist exploitation.
The working class must forge new, independent organizations of struggle to stop the drive to dictatorship and halt the social counterrevolution. These organizations are rank-and-file committees to coordinate the resistance of workers in every industry and every section of the economy, at the workplace and in the neighborhoods, to defend immigrant workers and unite immigrant and native born workers and youth to bring down Trump and advance a socialist program for a workers’ government.