SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
immigrants
Immigrant or US-Born, We’re All in the Same Boat
Politicians divide us, but all workers share the same struggles. Only together can we demand dignity and safety at work.
Sep 01, 2025
Every morning, my dad laces up his work boots knowing there’s a chance he won’t come home. A skilled carpenter, he has worked in Los Angeles’ construction industry since our family moved to the US when I was 3. Through years of backbreaking labor, his boss praised his skill, reliability, and loyalty. He not only built this city but also a life for our family in LA. Now, that life is in jeopardy—because like so many undocumented workers, when my dad needed protection from Immigration and Customs Enforcement, he was treated like he didn’t matter.
After 15 years of loyalty, my dad asked for a few days off at the height of the LA ICE raids out of concern for his safety. In response, his boss gave him an ultimatum: Show up to work and risk being taken by ICE or stay home. His employer threatened to replace him with someone “willing to do the job.”
His concern was not unfounded. Since then, ICE has raided my dad’s job site twice as part of the surge in raids across LA and the country. Our family lives in fear of the third time.
Behind these attacks is deliberate policy. The construction industry has become an easy target for the administration’s mass abduction efforts—according to a Stateline analysis this industry employs the most immigrant laborers. And Stephen Miller, a senior White House aide and the architect behind much of ICE’s siege on our cities, explicitly ordered ICE to conduct raids against working families, demanding at least 3,000 people be disappeared a day.
And the administration isn’t stopping there. With the Big Ugly Bill now signed into law, immigration enforcement will receive an unprecedented $170 billion surge to ramp up these mass abductions. This money is being taken directly from our taxpayer wallets and cut from the things we all rely on, like healthcare and education. Whether you migrated here or were born here, we are all being attacked by deadly policies meant to keep us in a cycle of suffering.
While my dad is irreplaceable to my family, it has never been more clear to me that his life, and the lives of all working people, are viewed as disposable in this country. Workers like my dad power this country. But for far too long, politicians have benefited from keeping working people divided, selling the lie that immigrants and US-born workers are on different sides—when in truth, we’ve always been in the same boat.
If you’re a vulnerable worker like my dad and don’t come to work because ICE is there, they’ll replace you. If you’re a US-born worker demanding better pay, they’ll fire you and exploit an undocumented person instead to do the job for even less than they paid you. All workers lose, while massive companies walk away making a buck no matter what.
Now, as we stare down the barrel of a bill that will usher in the largest transfer of wealth to the ultra rich, working families face a choice: Do we come together to build unified labor power or do we let greedy billionaires and politicians divide us?
The path forward is clear. It’s time for workers to band together. We must break the cycle that has long used immigrants like my dad as a cudgel to keep us divided and see that by joining forces, we can unite our demands and grow our power. From demanding no ICE on construction sites to demanding safer working conditions for all employees, it has always been working people who hold the power, not them.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Watching The Trump Administration Violate Basic Human Rights with Impunity
How long it will be before the U.S. does not simply “do deals” with Bukele’s El Salvador, but become Bukele’s El Salvador on a much grander scale?
Jul 23, 2025
“Immigrants at Florida Detention Facilities Faced Life-Threatening Delays, Report Says,” reports the HuffPost.
“Report Finds ‘Dehumanizing’ Conditions in Florida Immigration Centers,” reports the Miami Herald.
“Migrants at ICE Jail in Miami Made to Kneel to ‘Eat Like Dogs,’ Report Alleges,” reports The Guardian.
Pick your headline from yesterday’s news. The story is the same. Every day, the Trump administration is transforming the U.S. government into more and more of a police state. And Human Rights Watch, a long-respected NGO that monitors the most egregious human rights violations throughout the world, from Darfur to Teheran to Gaza to Florida, has just published a carefully documented and judiciously written 98-page report, ’You Feel Like Your Life Is Over’: Abusive Practices at Three Florida Immigration Detention Centers Since January 2025. The report’s summary is worth quoting:
Between January and June 2025, thousands were held in immigration detention at the Krome North Service Processing Center (Krome), the Broward Transitional Center (BTC), and the Federal Detention Center (FDC), in Florida, under conditions that flagrantly violate international human rights standards and the United States government’s own immigration detention standards. By March, the number of people in immigration detention at Krome had increased 249% from the levels before the January inauguration. At times in March, the facility detained more than three times its operational capacity of inmates. As of June 20, 2025, the number of people in immigration detention at the three facilities was at 111% from the levels before the inauguration.
The change was qualitative as well as quantitative. Detainees in three Florida facilities told Human Rights Watch that ICE detention officers and private contractor guards treated them in a degrading and dehumanizing manner. Some were detained shackled for prolonged periods on buses without food, water, or functioning toilets; there was extreme overcrowding in freezing holding cells where detainees were forced to sleep on cold concrete floors under constant fluorescent lighting; and many were denied access to basic hygiene and medical care.
Based on extensive interviews, the report also draws on a number of other sources, including a 2020 ACLU Report, done in collaboration with HRW and National Immigrant Justice Center, entitled Justice-Free Zones: U.S. Immigration Detention Under the Trump Administration, and an April 2025 report on immigrant detention abuses done by Americans for Immigrant Justice. It notes that two of the three Florida facilities investigated are operated by private contractors under Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) supervision; that all three operate under the public radar and without any regular public oversight; and that all three refused to comment on the extensive abuses outlined in the report.
Human Rights Watch, as its website notes, began, in 1978, as “Helsinki Watch.” Originally centered on human rights abuses in the Soviet bloc—whose countries had all signed on to the 1975 Helsinki Accords yet routinely violated its human rights provisions—the NGO eventually extended its remit to document human rights abuses across the globe, establishing “watch” committees in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East.
Does there exist an organized political force capable of resisting the dehumanization and repression that is spreading before our eyes?
I first encountered the organization in connection with its first offshoot “watch” committee, America’s Watch, which was established in 1981 to document the extensive human rights violations by Central and South American regimes that were strongly backed by the Reagan administration. During those years I assiduously read the organization’s reports on Salvadoran and Guatemalan imprisonment and torture of dissidents, and on the police-and-military-linked death squads that regularly assassinated peasants, workers, Catholic nuns and priests, and solidarity workers. A young assistant professor at Fordham University, I taught courses on the human rights violations in Central America and the Caribbean, and on Reagan-administration support for violent rebel groups seeking to overthrow the very new Sandinista government that has just overthrown the repressive Somoza regime in Nicaragua. And together with a handful of other junior colleagues, I helped to organize teach-ins and special lectures on the atrocious human rights violations regularly documented and publicized by America’s Watch.
A child of the 60s and 70s, during these years I never viewed any aspect of U.S. politics through “rose-colored glasses.” I well understood that the U.S. was plagued by its own forms of injustice. I also understood that much of the U.S. Cold War rhetoric about “human rights” and “defending democracy” was hypocritical, and masked very bad things done both at home and abroad. At the same time, it was clearly abroad—in the American “near abroad,” and well beyond it—that the most egregious human rights abuses were being committed. Groups like Helsinki Watch and its adjuncts, Amnesty International, and others, played an important role in documenting the abuses and in motivating solidarity work intended to end them.
And for Americans, this was primarily a matter of foreign policy.
Obviously, it was never simply a matter of things “foreign.”
Just as obviously, the damage that was done by U.S. foreign policy, especially in the Western Hemisphere, has had enduring effects, for which the U.S. has never assumed responsibility. And the “immigration crisis” at the Southern border is in large part a consequence of the legacies of U.S. foreign policy choices, as millions upon millions of people have fled violent and unjust situations, and headed north, seeking refuge, asylum, and simple opportunity in the U.S. (see the writings of Greg Grandin, especially his 2025 America, America: A New History of the New World; William Connolly has recently underscored the importance of climate change in driving the migration crisis from the South).
And, in a way, what we in the U.S are now experiencing can be viewed as “chickens coming home to roost,” as the awful human rights conditions to our south—the consequence of a combination of U.S. malign intent and benign neglect—are now staring us directly in the face.
And, irony of ironies, the U.S. electorate has responded to this situation by returning to office a man, President Donald Trump, who emulates foreign dictators and is determined to emulate some of the worst forms of human rights abuse such dictators regularly inflict on their populations:
- The suspension of legal due process.
- The disappearing of thousands of individuals by armed, masked agents of “law enforcement” who operate without proper identification and beyond the law.
- Mass deportation, preceded by mass detention under the most cruel and degrading conditions.
- The deliberate promotion of a climate of intimidation and fear that operates indiscriminately in the society at large, rendering precarious the situation of undocumented immigrants, documented immigrants, naturalized citizens, and indeed all citizens—all human beings who reside within the territorial boundaries of the U.S.
Here are a few of the many recent reports documenting Trump’s repressive measures:
- Amnesty International’s April 30, 2025 report, Chaos & cruelty: 10 Compounding Assaults on Human Rights, a Review of President Trump’s First 100 Days in Office.
- Human Rights Watch report, 100 Human Rights Harms in 100 Days.
- Physicians for Human Rights, The First 100 Days: What Trump’s First Moves Mean for Health and Human Rights.
- Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, Trump Administration Civil and Human Rights Rollbacks.
The Trump administration, animated by a White, Christian, ethno-nationalist vision, is currently threatening human rights in every conceivable way.
But at the heart of its authoritarian agenda is the idea that many millions who live among us are “illegals,” rightless individuals whose presence and thus very existence is in question, and that these millions of human beings, and the scores of millions of citizens who offer them sanctuary or support or who merely defend the constitutional rights of all, are under suspicion as “enemies of the people” and haters of “American Greatness.”
How far will this go?
Regarding Trump’s illegal deportation of immigrants to El Salvador, where they have been detained in the country’s maximum security Terrorism Confinement Center, human rights experts recently wrote forThe Guardian that “Trump’s lawlessness is emboldening El Salvador’s brutal regime,” noting that the detention of a leading Salvadoran human rights lawyer “is part of a wave of repression sweeping the country under Nayib Bukele.”
That Trump likes and admires Nayib Bukele, the brutal and autocratic elected president of El Salvador, has long been a matter of grave concern for those who care about human rights and constitutional democracy. That Trump has enthusiastically made “deals” with Bukele to turn El Salvador into an offshore detention facility for “illegals” represents a real synergy of lawlessness that accentuates the concern.
As I read the new Human Rights Watch report about Florida’s ICE facilities, and as I think about Trump’s new “Alligator Alcatraz,” and his so-called “Border Czar’s recent comments on how ICE officers don’t need probable cause to detain people and how he plans to “flood the zone” in “sanctuary cities,” and about the Trump administration’s recent deployment of National Guard troops and active duty Marines to suppress Los Angeles protests, I wonder how long it will be before the U.S. does not simply “do deals” with Bukele’s El Salvador, but become Bukele’s El Salvador on a much grander scale.
Things would of course look and feel very different here in the U.S., given the country’s overall wealth, consumerism, and at least the patina of “democracy.” But how different would it really be, especially in a political sense? Does there exist an organized political force capable of resisting the dehumanization and repression that is spreading before our eyes? Can such a force be mobilized? Will it be mobilized? Or will the U.S. become the El Salvador of the North?
Keep ReadingShow Less
The Big Bad Trump Refugee Machine
U.S. President Donald Trump's climate denialism produces the refugee drives he publicizes and punishes.
Jul 22, 2025
The Big Ugly Trump Bill has received a lot of critical attention, deservedly so. In time, it will curtail Medicaid, cripple essential health research, increase inequality even more, and blow up the debt. Many low-income citizens will suffer while multibillionaires gain another tax break. Delays in its implementation express sinister Republican tactics to hide its worst results from voters until after the 2026 election. This is vintage Trumpism in action.
One item that has received less attention is the legislation's wholesale attack on efforts to curtail climate wreckage during a critical world historical moment, through cuts in subsidies for electric cars, solar panels, wind turbines, along with new fossil fuel extraction in previously exempt zones. Some little attention has been paid to how this new regime will both create more climate wreckage and leave us with fewer resources to address it—think of cuts to weather forecasting amid the new and more devastating storms spawned by human induced climate wreckage.
But an even more dramatic result has so far escaped widespread attention. The American return to fossil fuels exacerbates the very refugee streams from south to north that U.S. President Donald Trump campaigns so viciously against. We have seen how he has captured and dehumanized refugees, breaking laws with impunity as he does so; commentators have also tried to show, with so far limited success, how this stream of refugees is not the source of low wages for the American working class. American corporations leaving the country and weakened labor unions better help to explain that.
Trump campaigns to make workers hate migrants while hiding his contributions to the migrations they have come to hate.
Today, it is essential to expose how the very immigrant drives Trump castigates and uses to mobilize his base are in fact increasingly a product of the climate priorities and policies he enacts. What's more, the stream of refugees he deploys to incite the working class will reach yet higher levels in the near future because of the energy policies he so belligerently enacts today. Trump is the architect of the immigrant problem he purports to cure, with his fascist policies of cruel refugee exportations and internal concentration camps. Those forcibly cowed heads marched off by masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents you see on TV are designed to infuse migrant dehumanization into your psyche.
Trump, U.S. CO2 Emissions, Planetary Distributors, and Refugee Flows
As the United States now returns with new fervor to fossil fuels, higher levels of carbon dioxide and methane accumulate in the air. As these new concentrations trap more atmospheric heat, a series of impersonal, planetary amplifiers and distributors are also set into motion; the latter both increase the heating effects beyond the level created by the emission triggers alone and distribute many of the worst, initial effects to tropical and semitropical zones, the very zones from which migrant flows originate. One simple but powerful planetary amplifier, for instance, emerges when higher CO2 atmospheric concentrations melt more water on glaciers. Since the absorption rate of the sun's heat by water greatly exceeds that of hard ice, a self-propelling spiral is now set into motion: More water absorbs more heat, creating more melts. The planetary effect greatly exceeds the emission triggers that launched it.
A similar process erupts in the Gulf of Mexico. American fossil fuel emissions increase the surface temperature of Gulf waters, which in turn provides more fuel to intensify and lengthen hurricanes after they form. These more intense hurricanes, joined to a corollary slow down of trade winds, now distribute more severe and longer lasting damage to Caribbean islands, northern Central American States, Mexico, and the Bible Belt of the U.S. Coffee, banana, and sugar corps in states such as El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras now become severely damaged, facing residents with new pressures to join the difficult trek north through the dangerous Darien Gap toward the U.S. border. Countries that create low levels of planetary emission thus suffer disproportionate damage from those who emit higher levels, once these impersonal planetary forces are set into motion by enhanced U.S. fossil fuel extraction. As temperate zone state climate emissions increase—the U.S. being a growing emitter again under Trump—the severity and duration of El Niños in the Pacific grows. Severe El Niños through prevailing winds then distribute dry conditions to northern tier Central American States, exacerbating dry conditions already there. Once again, new pressures unfold for disrupted residents to join the long migration trek from south to north.
He acts very much like a man who wants to get his now before the regime over which he presides falters big time.
So, as these planetary effects become concentrated in northern tier Central American regimes—Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras—crop failures there combine with other forces such as political instability and gang violence to foment desperate refugee drives north. Similar effects unfold in some Caribbean islands, such as Haiti and the Dominican Republic. Refugee numbers grow. But the combination of Trump's vitriolic rhetoric, focus on concentration camps, and denial of climate wreckage encourages his MAGA base at home to ignore the domestic sources of the demonized constituencies they condemn.
Trump campaigns to make workers hate migrants while hiding his contributions to the migrations they have come to hate. Trump then blames the increase migrant flow both on the regimes themselves and former President Joe Biden's policies, veiling how his own demands to increase fossil fuel extraction help to fuel the desperate migration marches he purports to hold singularly responsible for the decline of American greatness. The same Trumpian policies also splash back on the U.S., especially in the Bible Belt. This cruel strategy is thus good for his fascist agenda but very bad for the border states he campaigns so actively to capture. We can take the recent Texas flood—ill predicted because of Trump meteorological budget cuts—that killed over 130 children and adults, to serve as an indicator of how this double game works.
The Self-Perpetuating Production of Enemies
Does Trump—or some of his advisers—grasp at least the vague outlines of this complex process, even as his policies accelerate it? A few signs suggest this may be so. He regularly pretends in public that human induced climate wreckage is "crap," for instance, even as he seeks new mining rights in Greenland and extends mining into previous Alaskan reserves. But those rights will be much more valuable if and as the Greenland glaciers melt and the Alaskan fields do too—even as the people living there will suffer immensely. He ignores and deflates long-term investments in the infrastructure of the United States, even as he uses every legal and illegal weapon at his disposal to magnify his own wealth while in office. And he aggressively interrupts, diverts, or attacks anyone who tries to inform him about the rudiments of climate wreckage, doing so before they can get any key facts out. To invoke climate after the Texas deluge, he says, is "evil."
The very character of his aggressive climate denialism may thus suggest he knows better. He acts very much like a man who wants to get his now before the regime over which he presides falters big time. An agent of public collapse and rich private escapes.
Either way, it is time to inform domestic workers and other citizens about the truth: Trump's climate policies help to foment the refugee drives from south to north upon which his recipe to introduce a fascist regime into the United States depends.
But perhaps the above description applies better to his ambivalent hi-tech bros than to Trump himself. Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, for instance, focus intently on both augmenting their vast wealth fast and ignoring the civilizational effects of climate wreckage. Musk, when Tesla was his main concern, professed to be worried about climate change. Today, though, he says it proceeds very slowly, while it actually accelerates at a breakneck pace. He now seems more focused on organizing an escape to Mars than coping with climate wreckage on Planet Earth.
So maybe Trump's rich benefactors know the truth while he—much less intelligent than they—continues to wander in the desert of his own corrupt grievances. It is obvious to those who watch him, for instance, that the famous Weave—where he wanders from one topic to another in public speeches only to return later with dramatic effect—has now become reduced to the Cruel Meander.
The Cruel Meander is a wandering speech, replete with innumerable imagined grievances and retribution themes; it wanders aimlessly rather than returning to the point from which it started. Soooo, maybe Trump is innocent of what he is doing—namely, producing the refugees he condemns, while these very cruel climate policies keep feeding him campaign fodder. Maybe his recent cognitive decline combines with an astounding absence of empathy to make him an even more dangerous force today than before.
Either way, it is time to inform domestic workers and other citizens about the truth: Trump's climate policies help to foment the refugee drives from south to north upon which his recipe to introduce a fascist regime into the United States depends. They also foment wreckage in Bible Belt states.
By focusing on these connections, we may encourage more Americans to respond more actively to two issues at the same time: the manufactured "immigrant crisis" and an astounding acceleration of climate wreckage that places civilization at risk.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular