On Martin Luther King Jr. Day and again the following Friday, New York City workers took the streets twice in determined demonstrations of proletarian internationalist resolve against ICE terror. First hundreds, then thousands marched. These actions reflect a growing impulse among workers to fight back. It is up to the Progressive Labor Party (PLP) to make the most of this momentum by building the communist movement, the only force capable of winning the abolition of ICE and the capitalist system that sustains it.

Both demonstrations saw significant presence from organized labor, with UNITE HERE on MLK day and the United Federation of Teachers on Friday. On Monday workers gathered at Cadman Plaza in Brooklyn and thundered across the Brooklyn Bridge to 26 Federal Plaza. With vigorous chanting PL’ers laid bare the stakes for our class: the necessity of abolishing ICE and dismantling borders with communist revolution as the only solution. Liberal bosses commissioned the march, yet botched the basics: late start times, chaotic coordination, and a press conference were prioritized over building the kind of discipline our class will need to confront rising fascism.  

These bosses present themselves as defenders of “democratic values,” yet when ICE terrorizes immigrant workers, they offer nothing beyond reformist slogans. They call for a kinder, more efficient ICE, not its abolition. This trajectory is the politics of the Democratic Party’s big-wing fascism, which seeks a more legalistic Obama-Biden era deportation machine. The liberals’ reliance on and support of the NYPD—the very force that collaborates with ICE—underscored the hollowness of their values. The bosses will never protect workers, as their power rests on enforcing capitalist rule. 

Growing anger with racist ICE 

On Friday, hundreds of teachers joined a crowd of thousands in a march through lower Manhattan at an even colder after work rally and march. 

PL’ers marched with co-workers but were open about our plan to meet up as a Party to distribute the few papers we had remaining from Monday’s demonstration. This mattered. Co-workers saw communists bringing revolutionary politics directly into the mass movement, not hiding them. These moments open the door to future struggle and recruitment into the Party.

At both marches PLP took a ‘struggle with, struggle against’ stance, uniting with workers we were near while exposing the misleadership of the liberal head honchos directing the day’s events. On MLK Day, our leaflets invoked Dr. King’s Letter from Birmingham Jail to expose the real danger facing our class: that liberals are the main danger since they “prefer order over justice.” The moderate reformist urges perpetual patience and compromise while workers endure austerity, family separation, healthcare denial, and imperialist war. These misleaders lull workers into passivity as capitalism sharpens its claws and drives the world toward World War III and environmental catastrophe.

Throughout both marches, PLP members and supporters raised sharp communist slogans that clarified the political line required for this moment. We linked ICE, the NYPD, and the Ku Klux Klan as different instruments of the same class terror. We demanded the abolition of all borders, because workers have no country under capitalism. We called for workers of the world to unite against capitalist violence and repression.

We also injected a global, internationalist analysis into the march. Imperialist wars, driven by capitalist competition for oil and power, uproot families and create waves of migration. These displaced workers do not cross borders out of choice, but out of desperation created by capitalism’s crisis. Capitalist nations then fortify borders and unleash ICE, weaponizing racism and nationalism to divide the very class that should unite against exploitation. 

Red heat melts ICE

We must learn from 2020 that mass mobilizations co-opted by liberals lead only to cynicism, exhaustion, and defeat. We must expose the liberal bosses’ inability to lead workers. PLP showed the necessity of disciplined, communist, worker-led base building. Workers — whether in hospitals, schools, transit, or neighborhoods — are the only force capable of dismantling the capitalist system that produces ICE, racist policing, war, and exploitation. By building a base in the working class, we can build the capacity to shut this racist, sexist, capitalist system down from Brooklyn to Venezuela, to Iran, to Sudan, Palestine, to Mexico.  Join us, become a member of Progressive Labor Party!