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Students Protest ICE, Police, Border Patrol

Students Stage 36-day Sit-in at Johns Hopkins University

Until they were arrested on May 8, students at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, MD had staged a 36 day sit-in to protest the school’s contracts with Immigrant and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the formation of JHU’s own private police force. Over this time, hundreds of fellow students and faculty and community members came to the occupied building for screenings, panels, and community meetings.

The students also took up the cause of Tawanda Jones, who for 300 straight weeks, has held a weekly “West Wednesday” march to protest the Baltimore Police’s murder of her brother, Tyrone West. “Tawanda has been working for 300 weeks, she has been struggling to demand accountability—we also will not stop and these are the kinds of actions we are willing to take to be listened to,” Jilene Chua said. “We’ve tried so many ways to be listened to and nothing has really been working. This is the extent to which right now we are willing to go to be heard.”

“We demand the cancellation of the private police force. We demand the end of the contracts with ICE. We demand justice for Tyrone West.”

After chaining themselves to the building, they issued a statement: ”we hope we have shifted the path of this campus. We hope to have changed the history of Johns Hopkins and its relationship with Baltimore and the broader world. We will remain here until President Ronald Daniels negotiates,” a statement from the sit-in read. “We demand the cancellation of the private police force. We demand the end of the contracts with ICE. We demand justice for Tyrone West.”

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Immigrant Rights Benefit U.S. Born Workers, No Rights = Lower Wages for All

With the non-renewal of Temporary Protected Status for some 300,000 immigrants (from Haiti, El Salvador, and Nicaragua) and the cancellation of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, Trump opens the door to deporting 1 million immigrants. That means ripping apart a million families, putting children in prison, and sending some to a country they have never seen. Immigrants don’t want to leave their homes and relatives but are forced to to survive. They come here, pay taxes, get no benefits, are often unpaid, and live in constant threat of ICE.

U.S. government trade agreements, policies and wars are the main causes for the displacement of so many men, women, and children. Death squads funded and trained by the U.S. military have been used to maintain the rule of business oligarchs in Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Haiti while outright devastation has been wrought by US bombs in Iraq, Libya, Yemen, and Syria.

What then do the bosses hope to achieve by ratcheting up deportations and terror against immigrants to the U.S.? Their goal is to drive down the wages of all workers—immigrant and U.S. born. If any group of workers can be paid less, we all get paid less.

Undocumented immigrant workers live under the constant threat of detention or deportation and the devastating toll that this takes on their families. This insecurity is exploited by bosses who threaten to turn their workers in to immigration authorities if they bring attention to workplace safety violations or if workers decide to organize a union. Raids such as the one carried out by ICE at the Postville Agriprocessor Plant in 2008 (resulting in the arrest of 389 workers) have been instrumental in frustrating organizing efforts of unions such as the United Food and Commercial Workers Union. It is not the presence of immigrant workers in the workforce that drives down wages, it is that bosses can take advantage of their “illegal” status and fear to pay less. It’s bosses, not workers that bear the blame.

Likewise, it’s the legacy of legalized racial exclusion—Jim Crow—and current racism that’s to blame for low wages that prevail throughout the U.S. south. When Black and white workers unionized together both saw their wages rise. So, if immigrants had full rights, could no longer be threatened into accepting low wages, all workers wages would rise.

The very bosses and bankers who send run-away plants all over the world to pay pennies a day, who hoard their profits off shore, pay no taxes, oppose raising the minimum wage and all safety laws are telling us workers to blame immigrants. They scapegoat immigrants to disguise their greed and exploitation.

U.S.-born workers should call for the full legalization of the more than 11 million immigrants currently deprived of their full legal labor rights. As the central union, AFL-CIO writes, “history has shown, whenever one group of workers is denied access to workplace protections, all workers’ rights are in jeopardy.”

Workers of all nations must resist the global “race to the bottom” that the capitalists will never cease to egg on with their racist rhetoric. La lucha obrera no tiene fronteras: the workers struggle knows no borders!