The last few months of 2025 were convoluted for Donald Trump. He and his cabinet have poorly navigated the turbulent waters of the Epstein scandal; Trump’s coalition suffered significant internal fractures, such as the public defection of Marjorie Taylor Greene; the economy was (and still is) in poor shape, especially for the working masses whose wages are not rising to match prices; and the Democrats have been gaining electoral ground, all while the president’s popularity is dropping.

Living as we do in Trumpian times, however, the president’s weakness has not stopped him from acting outside the balance of forces. In early January the United States army bombed Venezuela and kidnapped President Nicolás Maduro and Cilia Flores as the first act of Trump’s so called “Donroe Doctrine.” The first demonstrations against this imperialist interference in Latin America had already been called across the United States when an ICE agent shot and killed legal observer Renee Good in Minneapolis.

The invasion of Venezuela and Good’s assassination mark a turning point, both for the administration and for the resistance against Trump’s authoritarianism.

Paths of Resistance

On January 10 and 11, after four days of fury in which the masses of Minneapolis harassed ICE day and night in a constant and massive citizen mobilization after the murder of Good, nearly a thousand demonstrations took place across the country in cities and towns like Los Angeles, Seattle, Detroit, Lansing, Chicago, Houston, Austin, Washington D.C., Portland, Pennsylvania, and New York City.

In all of them, with varying degrees of emphasis, there was a resounding expression of rage against the unbridled and brutal invasion of sanctuary cities by ICE and federal agents, coupled with a strong denunciation of imperialist intervention in Venezuela and Latin America. “Hands Off Venezuela! Hands Off Latin America! No War for Oil! US out of Latin America, ICE Out of Our Cities!” were the slogans repeated at protests convened by the No Kings coalition among other organizations, unions, and the Left all across the country.

The unity of these two struggles — against ICE and imperialism — should not be underestimated. The vast middle classes and blue-collar workers in large sanctuary cities developed a deeply-rooted rejection of police brutality as a result of the Black Lives Matter movement; they have shown tremendous solidarity with immigrants in the face of Trump’s attacks. But what’s new in recent days is a burgeoning yet widespread rejection of imperialist intervention that goes beyond sectors of the Left and particular NGOs. It represents a leap forward from the break with the Zionist consensus among the traditional social base of the Democratic Party catalyzed by the movement against the genocide in Palestine. There has been a spontaneous connection between military violence against oppressed countries and domestic military violence. According to polls, 57 percent of Americans are against the United States “running” Venezuela and most Americans oppose military intervention in Venezuela and Greenland.

Trump, with his strategy of “peace through strength” outside and inside the United States, is openly showing the connections between imperialist aggression and internal repression. In his remarks after the attack on Venezuela, he celebrated the army and federal forces for their efforts in kidnapping Maduro alongside their efforts in cities in the United States, such as Chicago, Los Angeles, and Washington D.C. Both efforts, according to the President, have the goal of protecting “U.S. interests” and are the concrete shape of his “America First” doctrine.

Even though the numbers of the protests last weekend did not match the seven million people who mobilized in No Kings marches on October 18 in 2025, tens of thousands of people took to the streets across the country. Resistance against authoritarianism in the United States is taking complex, diverse shapes. It is growing from below and is organic to the communities of the cities that have faced federal invasion of their streets, from LA to Minneapolis, building off of previous experiences of class struggle and confrontations with the state. It’s no surprise that Minneapolis has quickly become the center of resistance to ICE, given that it was previously the spark that lit the fire of BLM in 2020. As such, it presents particular difficulties for the local Democratic Party government to stifle grassroots organizing against immigration operations simply by force.

Since February, and now in light of the redoubled anti-immigrant offensive by ICE, sectors of the masses have participated in different levels of struggle, using methods ranging from civil disobedience to radical self-defense, including blocking ICE from kidnapping workers and families and organizing citizen patrols to monitor ICE and warn families of their presence. Thousands of people across the country are participating in trainings where volunteers learn how to respond to ICE raids, such as in New York City, where hundreds of people have attended “Hands Off!” seminars to organize to protect their neighbors. Following the murder of Renee Good, hundreds gathered in Detroit to hold a mass meeting to discuss next steps, with Detroit Will Breathe and other local organizations putting forward a fight to unite the struggles against Trump’s xenophobic immigration attacks and imperialist aggression abroad.

Of special importance is the role workers have been playing in combatting Trump’s offensive and the increasingly brutal and wide-reaching forms of repression employed by ICE with the full support of the administration. In Los Angeles, unions mobilized last year to stop ICE raids. Teachers across the country are organizing in their schools to protect their students; as an early example, education workers and families in Chicago organized themselves to walk students to and from school. The teachers union voted to form a “sanctuary team” in every school to defend immigrant students and their families.

Nevertheless, the intervention of the labor movement has been timid. Several unions have put out statements against ICE operations in their cities and across the country; some have even denounced Trump’s attack on Venezuela and the kidnapping of Maduro. But these statements must transform into action, joining forces with the millions of working-class people who have taken action in recent weeks. Mobilizations and civil disobedience are incredibly important but cannot ultimately defeat imperialist attacks on Latin America and the militarization of our cities. Alone they cannot put an end to ICE terror in our communities, or stop it from murdering and seriously injuring immigrants, activists, neighbors, and anyone who protests against their brutality.

So far, the labor movement has not acted to nationalize the fight back with the firepower of the working class; however, Minneapolis is once again going against the current with a call for unions and social movements to participate in a strike on January 23 to demand justice for Renee Good and ICE out of our cities.

Unions have begun to take up the call, facing pressure from the rank and file. Among the unions endorsing the action on January 23 are: Service Employees Local 26, UNITE HERE Local 17, Communications Workers Local 7250, the St. Paul Federation of Educators Local 28, Minneapolis Federation of Educators (AFT Local 59), the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees Local 13, Graduate Labor Union, United Electrical Workers Local 1105 at the University of Minnesota, the Transit Union (ATU) Local 1005, the Committee of Interns and Residents (SEIU), and the Minneapolis Regional Labor Federation, AFL-CIO.

This call has already ignited a significant response in other cities, such as New York, where UFT, PSC-CUNY, and UAW locals who are planning solidarity actions on Friday, alongside high school students who are also planning to march.

To grow and to unite our struggles, this call must include a strong opposition to U.S. intervention on Venezuela and to demand U.S. imperialism out of Latin America. Further, building on actions already being planned in cities across the country, the call to stop work, school, and to shut it down must be taken up by the labor movement nationwide.

We are Under Attack: We Cannot Wait for Congress or the Courts

Mainstream media reflects the sentiments of millions of people who are aghast at the extraordinary, almost “paramilitary” nature of ICE’s operations, which have been given the blessing of the executive branch. It is taking on the role of a police force with special powers to arrest, beat, and torture immigrants and human rights activists or supportive neighbors — called “radicals” and “domestic terrorists” — who oppose them. After Good’s assassination, the repression led by ICE have escalated, especially in Minneapolis.

With full immunity agents are arresting people to lock them up in detention centers where the mortality rate and reports of human rights violations are rising scandalously. Black and Brown people are openly targeted — not only immigrants, but also Indigenous people, Mexican Americans, African Americans, and everyone whose “ethnicity” is a perceived threat for Trump’s new gestapo. ICE, which now has the largest budget of any other federal agency, has effectively functioned as a means of institutionalizing far-right, white supremacist militias by aggressively recruiting from the MAGA sector that has nurtured the Proud Boys and other groups.

There are already hundreds of testimonies denouncing the fact that after the murder of Good, ICE agents have been using Good’s murder to threaten other protesters. “You did not learn from what just happened?” one agent threatened in Minnesota. “Have you not learned? This is why we killed that lesbian bitch!” yelled another ICE officer in a protesters’ testimony posted to social media. This comes on top of hundreds of well-documented instances of ICE brutality in recent days. As James Dennis Hoff writes,

Just as Trump used and continues to use federal agencies like the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to carry out an extra-judicial and extra-legislative agenda to dismantle and hobble government agencies that stand in his way, he is also increasingly turning to the use of armed federal forces and the threat or actual use of state violence to carry out a reactionary political program of intimidation, repression, retribution, and the consolidation of power that goes far beyond the bounds of the executive.

Such unbridled coercion, however, risks further enflaming the situation in cities like Minneapolis, where working people are already living under the constant presence of federal forces and are learning to fight back. That’s why Trump has walked back his threats to enact the Insurrection Act to stamp out dissent, and why the courts in Minnesota have nominally ordered federal agents to check their use of force against protesters.

But these small checks ultimately serve to normalize the vast majority of Trump’s onslaught, rather than opposing it. The level of the attack demands unity and action. Trump has already threatened to deploy similar federal operations in cities like New York City and Chicago at the same time that he revokes federal funding for these and other “sanctuary cities.”

The unity we need has to involve the organized labor movement and social movements. Union leaders and the leaders of the social movements in the United States are good at talking about unity but not that good building unity in action. Today such unity concretely means supporting Minneapolis with all our forces on January 23 and unifying the struggle against ICE with the struggle against U.S. imperialist aggression in Latin America.

Teamsters, SEIU, UFT, healthcare workers, and so on must mobilize their members to strike in the rest of the country. The UAW has a central responsibility to build this fight, having a particularly crucial role in organizing the working class across the country and strategic sectors in the midwest. UAW president Shawn Fain must call all union members to support Minneapolis on January 23 by shutting everything down, just as workers in Italy did to protest the genocide in Gaza last year.

Imagine what would happen if UAW called meetings at workplaces to organize active solidarity for their brothers and sisters in Minneapolis. It could change the tide in the fight to kick ICE out of their cities, even as the Trump administration sends more agents to the area and promises immunity to agents who use brutal, even deadly force. Active solidarity in someplace like Detroit, where the UAW has a particular influence, would be an incredible boost to the fight against ICE in Minneapolis, and throughout the country.

The socialist Left — including DSA and PSL — should be loud in clear in the schools, workplaces, and unions where they have weight to demand that their leaders mobilize to strike on January 23.

The Chronic Illness of Social Democracy: Too Much Faith in Democrats, Too Little Trust in Class Struggle

Writing for Jacobin, Meagan Day states that ICE is “a domestic army dispatched by the Trump administration to terrorize vulnerable people and violently intimidate political enemies into submission” and must be abolished. Day continues:

It seems impossible to imagine that the administration’s outright despotic behavior in the last week won’t come back to haunt them in Novembers 2026 and 2028, provided our democratic institutions remain functional. Still, the administration must face forceful opposition immediately. We can’t endure another week of this, much less another several years.

There is confidence among Jacobin and sectors of DSA that the Democrats will win the midterms and the presidential election. That is very possible. What is striking is the confidence of Jacobin’s writers that if the Democrats win in 2026 and “the institutions of democracy survive,” we will be better off. This is in itself an acceptance of the idea that the Democrats will defend and respect democratic institutions. They seem to have forgotten, however, that we got here because Biden and the Democrats orchestrated a genocide, repressed the pro-Palestine movement with McCarthyist methods, and dragged the working class to inflation and austerity. Even the progressive wing of the Democratic Party is complicit.

The Democrats did nothing to stop the rise of the Far Right. They actually took up some of their politics, before and after the 2024 election. They backtracked on “reforming” the police, they backtracked on defending immigrants after pretending they wanted to shut down detention centers, and they absolutely backtracked on any defense of trans rights. It was under Biden that the Right grew its influence and that SCOTUS decided to uphold absolute presidential immunity.

These are not normal times. If the offensive against Venezuela goes unanswered, all oppressed peoples south of the United States are in danger, from Mexico to Argentina, Bolivia, and Colombia.

If the anti-immigrant offensive becomes normalized, the attacks against the Left go unchecked, the Neo-McCarthyist offensive is allowed to proceed unabated, and Good’s murder goes unpunished, the state apparatus and the bipartisan regime will be in a better position to advance imperialist plans and domestic discipline. In this context, the recent court decision to overturn Mahmoud Khalil’s release from detention (effectively opening back up the possibility of his deportation) threatens to walk back the gains of the pro-Palestine movement and set precedence for extraordinary criminalization of protest.

The Right is trying to prevent the growth of the resistance to its agenda by repressive and institutional means. Meanwhile, the Democrats fear the working class and the oppressed more than they fear Trump. U.S. imperialism requires stability at home to function; the Democrats work to control class struggle, tying the working class to the anchor of voting for the lesser evil to fix their problems.

We need to fight back now. DSA just announced that they reached over 95,000 members. This force should be organized for struggle, on the streets from the workplaces, schools, and communities. In Teamsters, UAW, and every union where DSA has weight, members should be organizing the resistance and demanding action from their unions.

The call to stop work, school, and business as usual on January 23 is an opportunity to take the initiative and begin to construct the unity we need. To become a strike that lasts and grows — and is capable of defeating the attacks of the Trump administration on the working class in the United States and internationally from Iran to Venezuela — requires the active participation of the labor movement, overcoming its passivity.

While we must unite and take to the streets and militant action in the broadest possible way — through the coordinated action of unions, social movements, community organizations, neighborhood organizations, feminists, environmentalists, migrant organizations, and even progressive politicians who are openly opposed to the aggression against Venezuela and against ICE — the working class must also organize and raise its program independently of the Democratic and Republican parties, winning political and organization independence to fight for our own interests. This is essential if we aim to expand and fuel our struggle, including fighting alongside our class siblings across borders who are fighting Trump’s reinvigorated imperialist ambitions.

The best way for our movement to grow in numbers and independently is for it to be made up of the rank and file of unions, social movements, and community organizations — by real people like those who are already defending immigrants from ICE.

To make this happen we must have spaces for self-organization where we can discuss and make democratic decisions about the goals and platform of our movement. These must be democratic spaces open to all left political tendencies and communities — assemblies of teachers, students, and parents; popular assemblies or mass meetings like those in Detroit; action committees; or whatever creative forms the communities themselves discuss and resolve to put forward democratically.

The post January 23 Is a Call to Nationalize the Fight Against ICE and Imperialism appeared first on Left Voice.

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