“La migra, la policía, la misma porquería!” It means, “ICE, the cops, same shit.” There’s a reason these chants have been popular at protests from Black Lives Matter to today’s anti-ICE protests around the country; it recognizes the shared characteristics of the two institutions as, in Lenin’s words, “special bodies of armed men” that the capitalist state has at its command.

As protests against ICE and the killing of Renee Nicole Good and Keith Potter continue around the country, the Trump administration is sending an additional 1,000 ICE agents to Minnesota and threatening to use the Insurrection Act as he prepares to send in the military.

In response, many moderates in the Democratic Party and in the media have proposed using local police to try to protect residents and rein in ICE. For example, on Morning Joe, just a couple days ago, Democratic Senator Chuck Schumer said Democrats have talked with “police officers around the country and they know that ICE is “…so totally untrained in police doctrine; they don’t know what to do or how to do it.” He went on to say, “We need our police officers around the country to tell ICE, ‘You don’t know what the hell you are doing, you need real police training.’”

We can all agree that Jonathan Ross, the ICE agent who viciously murdered Renee Nicole Goodman, should absolutely be in jail. But the idea that the police can be used to protect people against federal agents like him is a fantasy. Though they wear a different uniform, their goal is the same: to repress, control, and contain the power of the working class through violence and intimidation.

But this fact has not stopped many from pretending that the police are on our side when it comes to ICE. Philadelphia Sheriff Rochelle Bilal, for instance, denounced the murder of Renee Nicole Good, calling ICE “made-up fake wanna-be law enforcement” and saying “what they do is against not only legal law but the moral law.”

We need to be clear, the laws that Bilal is referring to are the laws of capitalist democracy — laws designed to protect the interests of CEOs and landlords, not the working class, people of color, or immigrant communities. The police are state agents of terror that only serve to protect private property and capital. Whether the police or ICE, no amount of training will change the fact that those agencies are irredeemable organizations of state violence.

Of course, there are differences between ICE and the police. In his podcast Empire City, Chenjerai Kyumanika presents the history of modern policing as a history with roots in slave patrols, kidnapping liberated enslaved people and forcing them back to enslavement. ICE, established in 2003, has a much shorter history. From its genesis, ICE was an agency of dehumanization and oppression created as part of the Homeland Security Act in the wake of September 11. Indeed, while U.S. troops were devastating the Middle East, the government was unleashing a wholesale assault on human rights and civil liberties in the United States — which included the creation of ICE. Under Trump’s second term, its violent role has been multiplied. With the help of tens of billions of dollars in public funding for new hires and signing bonuses that could have gone toward health or education, Trump has transformed the agency into his own armed militia accountable only to him.

These differences are important to note in analyzing the political power dynamics — especially as the cracks grow between the local and federal levels of armed bodies. However, we should not be fooled by glossing over their common functions: maintaining a violent, racist, exploitative system — the same system that exploits workers, oppresses people of color, and dehumanizes immigrants.

Bilal attempts to distinguish local police from ICE by claiming that “real” law enforcement “don’t wear masks.” However, they do wear a figurative mask: claiming to be an agency that “protects and serves.” The narrative that police serve to protect communities obscures whose side they’re really on — and which side they’ll ultimately take in a confrontation between the working class and the state.

Two Sides of the Same Racist Coin

Cops are there to quell protests challenging this system and in many cases are regularly working with and helping ICE in their crackdowns. In the case of the courageous anti-ICE uprising in Los Angeles over the summer, the LAPD worked to disperse protesters so that ICE could “do their job” despite being a sanctuary city. Such cooperation is happening all over the country including in Florida, Texas, South Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Indiana, to name just a few.

The most recent expression of this effort to paint the police as a means of defending the public against the abuses of ICE came on a podcast managed by The New York Times. The Daily interviewed Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara about the increasing pushback against ICE in the city.

As they discuss in the interview, O’Hara became the Minneapolis police chief two years after Derek Chauvin murdered George Floyd (just a few blocks away from where ICE murdered Renee Nicole Good), which resurrected and globalized the groundbreaking Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, in which the demand “abolish the police” became a rallying cry. Let’s not forget that in 2020, burning the Minneapolis police station had higher approval ratings than Trump.

In his tepid critique of ICE’s attacks in the city, O’Hara engages it from a framework of “police reform” — trying to gain the Minneapolis public’s trust again — while saying that ICE is disrupting that process. He frames his criticism around the way ICE is acting and their lack of training in deescalatory tactics. He even tries to sound progressive by calling out their racial profiling.

For O’Hara, the issue comes down to the supposed differences between the levels of “training” of police versus ICE agents, whom he claims are “forced into situations they are not ready to deal with.” And while no one is disputing that ICE agents are a bunch of mediocre bigots who crawled out of their mommies’ basements covered in Cheetoh-dust looking to hurt people (whose screening and training is actually pitiful and whose requirements for enrollment basically encompass being able to breathe air), no amount of training or preparation could help them to more “humanely” carry out the task of kidnapping immigrants and ripping families apart.

O’Hara goes on to paint the Minneapolis Police Department (the same one that murdered George Floyd) as the real “victim”, “stuck in the middle” between ICE and protesters. He said, for example, “officers try to restore the peace where often they become the target of people’s frustration” and “the minute we step in we are the problem.” He speaks as if people are just misplacing their anger for ICE onto the police, when in fact they too are agents of terror who regularly harass, intimidate, and murder working-class and oppressed people with impunity.

He affirms his position that BLM protests were, in so many words, destroying the city, which is why he’s asking to have the National Guard available as soon as possible. That is, he sees the conditions for another intense wave of protests that would overwhelm the MPD immediately. This view is a recognition of not only the current wave of anger toward ICE, but also the deep mistrust of the police. It should come as no surprise to O’Hara, or anyone else, when people get angry when the national guard shows up to quell protests. Contrary to what governors like Tim Walz try to claim, the National Guard aren’t coming into any city to help “protect” protestors or “maintain the peace” — they’re coming into cities to repress people as the state does not want protests to grow.

It’s important to underscore that Minneapolis was at the center of the BLM movement in 2020 and it is now at the center of the fight against ICE. What keeps both O’Hara and Democratic politicians alike awake at night is not the kidnapping and brutalizing of immigrants by ICE, but the echoes of 2020 — a fear over another BLM in the streets. This is why we see the likes of O’Hara and Schumer desperately trying to cynically place themselves on the side of those criticizing the training of ICE.

This is why from copaganda TV shows to New York Times podcasts, there is an effort by the capitalist media to relegitimize institutions such as the police, framing themselves as the best “trained” to humanely “uphold people’s rights” against the excesses of ICE. But we know that they are two sides of the same racist coin; both the cops and ICE are part of the same violent capitalist state apparatus: “La migra, la policía, la misma porquería.”

We can’t expect the same police force that violently repressed the Black Lives Matter movement, brutally repressed the pro-Palestine movement, and that continues to enact violence in our communities to be an ally in the fight against ICE. We can’t stand on the same side as those who are constantly repressing protests and brutalizing those who dare stand up to the various forms of violence this capitalist system throws at us.

That’s why our movement needs to be uncompromisingly rooted in the working class and oppressed with complete political independence from the capitalist state, its parties, and its institutions. We need to continue organizing ourselves independently while also calling on institutions of the working class, such as our unions, to join in democratically organizing the fight against ICE.

The police are not and can never be allies in our struggle against ICE. Instead, we, the working people and the oppressed, need to organize ourselves independently to fight to abolish ICE, the police, and the rotten capitalist system that they protect and defend.

The post The Police Can’t and Won’t Protect Us From ICE appeared first on Left Voice.

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