Chicago Airport Anti-Deportation Protests Take Flight

INDIANA, October 6–Confronted by a fascist police force in military gear, Progressive Labor Party comrades joined over 200 multi-racial anti-deportation fighters today in a demonstration at the city’s airport. Our communist contingent made progress in sharing our revolutionary line that safety for our immigrant sisters and brothers won’t be achieved through another reform, but only by the destruction of capitalism and its borders, through international working-class revolution.
It’s Not Just Trump—It’s Capitalism
The Gary/Chicago International Airport has been a site of racist mass deportations of workers for years. Since June 2013, more than 12,000 immigrant workers have been bused to this site in order to be shipped as prisoners to the Texas/Mexico border (Chicago Tribune, 10/7). Today’s rally was another effort made through various regional community organizations, churches, and labor unions to stop the weekly arrival of buses full of immigrant workers slated for deportation.
There were some speeches made linking the attacks on immigrant workers with the attacks on all workers’ rights, but the main message was one of support to reinstate the liberal bosses’ Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) policy, recently revoked by Trump. Although pro-immigrant rights groups have been stirred to action by the Trump administration’s openly racist hate speech, the fact remains that mass deportations were taking place well before his election. During eight years of Deporter-in-Chief Barack Obama and Democrats holding majority in office, over three million immigrant workers were shamelessly deported from the U.S., violently uprooted and ripped away from family and friends.
The PL’ers in attendance worked to push the political tone of the event more towards communist politics and workers’ power. We made signs in Spanish and English that read “Smash All Racist Borders” and “Working People Have No Nations,” in order to confront the poisonous nationalism being promoted at the rally and get others thinking about the power of the international working class. We distributed CHALLENGE, along with a Party flier that called out DACA as a liberal reform scheme of the bosses, its main goal being to get undocumented workers to fight and die for U.S. imperialism (See CHALLENGE, 9/27). We reunited with fellow fighters and made even more contacts through these efforts.
Anti-racist Workers Fight Back
About an hour into the rally, someone called out, “the buses are here!” The 200-plus fighters quickly ran to the side of the fence closest to the runway, pressing close so that our chants could be heard by the immigrant workers inside the vehicles. The kkkops, determined not to let us anti-racists block the buses and interrupt their fascist terror, had sectioned us off in the parking lot behind barricades, barbed wire fences, and officers with assault weapons. We chanted even louder in support of our undocumented sisters and brothers, while blasting the kkkops for being racist and sexist murderers for the bosses.
Pressed against the fence, we got in more discussions about the need for communist revolution. While hearing chants of “Not One More!” we pointed out that putting faith in the bosses’ political and legal system will never get us to a world free of racist deportations. We explained the need of the capitalist class to divide and terrorize the working class. Through fascist terror like deportations and killer cops, the bosses try and prevent us as workers from uniting worldwide to challenge their brutal profit system.
Workers’ responses make it clear that many see through the bosses’ lies, understanding the connections of all these problems to capitalism and rising in multi-racial fightback against the divisions and state violence. It’s on us, PLP, to continue to deepen our roots in the working class to win them to the fact that only a communist world offers an existence free from exploitation, profits, sexism, racism, and war. Only by workers running society based on their collective needs guarantees the right for all working people to lead healthy, productive, and meaningful lives.
The Struggle Continues
Inspired by the growing fightback of workers all over the world, these local struggles show no sign of dying down anytime soon. We look forward to continue organizing and struggling with our fellow anti-racist fighters. With each struggle, more workers can be won to rejecting the bosses’ deadly reform bait and build PLP for the permanent solution of communist revolution.