Struggle Deportation & Police Killings, Same Fight vs. Capitalist Terror

NEW YORK CITY, September 27—Over forty people attended from the different congregations where Progressive Labor Party (PLP) have a base gathered for a revival. We sang songs that called for justice, including the song, “Go Down Moses,” which a comrade rewrote to reflect our anti-racism politics. Some also sang “Ballad of the Deportees” to help inspire our antiracist struggles against deportations and murder by police.
Mobilize vs. Deportation
One NYC congregation holds New Sanctuary meetings and support a Guatemalan family who found refuge in the Holyrood Episcopal Church in Washington Heights after Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) targeted the mother for deportation. As of now, ICE agents (modern minutemen) cannot arrest their targets at churches, schools or hospitals.
At another church, people are mobilizing support for a member who is facing a deportation hearing herself at the end of October. She was brought here legally from the Dominican Republic at the age of seven. She suffered such racist oppression that she fell into substance abuse and was forced into a plea bargain for drug dealing for which she was no way guilty.  Subsequently pardoned for this “crime”, she was on the road to naturalization when, late for work, she jumped a subway turnstile.  Now ICE is using this minor infraction to try to deport her. This outrage began under Deporter-in-Chief Obama.
The real criminal is the United States government that a) creates atrocious conditions forcing people to flee past these fake borders, b) makes life insufferably racist and sexist once workers reach the U.S., and c) exploit them under the threat of deportation while also using them as a scapegoat and discipline the rest of the working class into submission.
Targets of Police Murder
When the capitalist government isn’t out hunting and capturing our class, they are straight up killing us in our homes. Workers are also sharpening the struggle for justice for Muhammed Bah and Debra Danner, two emotionally disturbed targets of police murder in NYC. The fight against racist police murder is a priority.
Bah was a 28-year-old cab driver from Guinea who was shot by the cops when his mother called 911 for an ambulance. One kkkop straddled Bah who was lying on the floor still breathing and executed him with a final shot to the head.  He was murdered in the hands of the capitalist government on September 25, 2012.
For five years an expanding coalition of religious people and community fighters have supported Ms. Bah in her quest for justice.  Repeatedly, rebuffed by the Manhattan District Attorney and federal prosecutor, all that remains is a civil lawsuit and the hope that evidence of the crime and cover-up will finally come to light.
Deborah Danner, a 66-year-old woman, is now part of a harrowing group of Black workers whose mental illness prompted fatal police violence, instead of medical services. When her neighbors called 911 saying she was acting erratically. In response, Bronx police sergeant Hugh Barry shot and killed her in her apartment. They did not wait for psychiatrically trained clinicians. They did not first try to de-escalate or calm her down. She was murdered by the state on October 18, 2016.
Both Mayor Bill de Blasio and Police Commissioner James P. O’Neill were forced to admit that this was unjustified. “Hugh Barry…was charged with second-degree murder, first- and second-degree manslaughter and criminally negligent homicide, and was suspended without pay” (NYT, 5/31).
 The history of these prosecutions is predictably dismal! Members of the congregation are working to build a citywide struggle to covinct cops and to substitute in trained civilian responders to such crisis events rather than the intimidating killers the bosses have created in their police forces. Communists raised chants like “Trump, O’Neil, DeBlasio, this racist system’s got to go” to show how the whole system is rotten to the core.
Art for Class Struggle
During the revival, there was an interactive skit about police harassment. The audience was invited to offer different solutions to this racist violence. People became more confident about church people’s responsiveness to antiracist, pro-communist politics.
Most of the members in this small, multiracial congregation support the fightback. Although many are reluctant to become actively involved themselves. It is an ongoing struggle with friends about the critical need to expand the fightback for survival itself.  The overriding goal is to crush this racist-sexist-imperialist ruling class, and replace it with egalitarian workers’ control worldwide.
Communists in the congregation said the Christians’ first community in Jerusalem was based on communist principles: “All the believers were one in heart and mind. No one claims that any of their possessions was their own but they shared everything they had... there were no needy persons among them” (Acts 4:31ff). Inspiring!