Immigration Raids or a Mega-Operation of Structural Racism?

Over 142,000 individuals deported in the first hundred days of Donald Trump’s administration; the establishment of concentration camps for detainees at U.S. military bases both domestically and abroad; forced imprisonment in maximum-security prisons in El Salvador of Venezuelans declared guilty without evidence or due process; overcrowding and mistreatment in 140 detention centers holding 48,000 people incommunicado (the highest figure in the past five years, 17% above the system’s actual capacity); and 1.4 million immigrants with active deportation orders.

These are some of the public statistics of a racist, arbitrary, and widely criticized immigration policy, both within and outside the United States, aiming for one million deportations in its first year. This policy is structured as a politico-military mega-operation, a large-scale persecution that was a cornerstone of Trump’s electoral campaign and his team’s fascist narrative, manipulated with pretexts filled with lies and baseless accusations against individuals and governments.

This policy also wields blackmail as a coercive weapon against U.S. institutions and in bilateral and regional “diplomatic” relations, punishing those who do not submit to the Yankee emperor with legal, economic, and other measures.

The government and its repressive apparatus make no effort to conceal this, in a renewed display of brutality steeped in violence and racism, from which women and children are not spared—mothers forcibly separated from their children, families torn apart by detentions and deportations without judicial orders or any legal process.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the Department of Homeland Security, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Homeland Security Investigations Agency, state and city police forces, and Border Patrol, among others, are the protagonists of what they themselves call the “war on sanctuary cities.”

They carry out raids and persecution operations everywhere, with a particular focus on working-class migrant neighborhoods, commercial establishments, streets, and workplaces, continuing to generate fear, uncertainty, and even panic, compounding pre-existing anxieties.

However, U.S. and international media have denounced the opacity and lack of transparency in the actual statistics provided by immigration agencies, which are no longer reported monthly as they once were, in an effort to evade scandal, protests, or exposure of complaints from humanitarian organizations, legal institutions, lawyers, judges, and prosecutors who have issued orders against the President’s excessive measures.

What they have not been able to hide is the public outrage and massive demonstrations condemning the flagrant violations of the human rights of migrants and their families by the Trump administration. These intensified on Monday, June 9, when new protests erupted, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth publicly announced the mobilization of 700 Marines from a military base near Los Angeles, joining approximately 4,000 California National Guard members that Trump ordered deployed without the authorization of the state’s governor, Gavin Newsom.

From the United States, there are reports of media manipulation of events on social networks, disinformation, and the demonization of protesters to reinforce, through distortion and lies, Trump’s claims that the city had been overtaken by “violent and insurrectionist mobs” or “paid insurgents.”

In reality, hundreds of people were detained; police used high-pressure water jets to repress protesters, who were swept away by the force of the water; others were subjected to stun grenades and tear gas to disperse the crowds.

The Governor of California himself stated that he would sue the Trump administration over the National Guard deployment, which he and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass have described as incendiary. He called it a “deranged” and “dictatorial” decision.

According to U.S. sources, the trigger for the protests is the administration’s aggressive push to increase arrest and deportation numbers, which, on June 4 alone, set a record of 2,200 detentions in a single day, according to NBC News—a figure close to the White House’s target daily average of 3,000, with plans to increase further.

The demonstrations have been led by migrants, their children, and Latino communities denouncing structural racism, police repression, and a policy of migrant criminalization.

Recently, the executive director of the network of Latin American organizations serving immigrants, Alianza Américas, Dulce Guzmán, stated that the establishment of a mandatory migrant registry “is not merely an administrative measure; it is a dangerous tool of surveillance and criminalization that recalls some of the most harmful chapters in history, including the tactics used by Adolf Hitler to register, track, and ultimately persecute entire populations. We must all fight against this persecution,” she urged.

Various sources confirm that protests against immigration raids in the United States have spread beyond Los Angeles, the initial epicenter of the mobilizations, and are now expanding to cities such as New York, Chicago, Austin, San Francisco, Dallas, Atlanta, and Seattle, where thousands of people have taken to the streets to reject the racism fueled by the anti-immigrant policy of the emperor, along with the violence, injustice, and flagrant violation of fundamental rights.

Translated by Amilkal Labañino / CubaSi Translation Staff