Since September, President Trump has stepped up the militarization of Washington, D.C. with the deployment of the National Guard and an intensified ICE offensive on migrant workers. In an interview with Partisan, an activist from People’s Defense D.C. spoke about the ICE abduction of one of his coworkers and the next steps in fighting against State terror.
What was the reaction to the news about your coworker?
When my coworker got picked up, everyone I work with was scared obviously, since we are all immigrant workers. They’re all very sad because they knew him for a long time. There’s also a general concern about their own safety and what this means moving forward for them.
How has this changed how you and your coworkers behave at work?
Everyone is trying to take precautions in terms of how to avoid ICE. It’s definitely been really a big fear for a lot of coworkers, like they are not leaving their houses anymore. There’s not a lot of people going outside of their homes. It’s also like been very slow at the restaurant. For me, it just highlights that it is very urgent to organize neighborhood defense together both inside and outside the workplace.
How has People’s Defense D.C. responded to ICE repression?
PDC is integrating with the current ICE work that’s going on in DC, especially in Columbia Heights, a Latino majority neighborhood. Since it’s already winter and has gotten cold again, people are not really going to want to be out, and we are finding creative ways to try and connect with people, like talking to co-workers. With that in mind, as ICE knows that more people are staying home because it’s cold, they might try to do more house raids. In DC, ICE has tried to do house raids before in Columbia Heights, but it’s only happened once or twice. It’s possible that ICE will try to do more intense raids. I would characterize the type of raids that ICE was trying to do here during summer and fall as generally the same type of kidnapping that happened to my coworker. It’s generally going after people who are isolated and not well protected. They’re doing it individually, early in the morning or at night when they know that a lot of people are not watching them. We have been taking part in multiple copwatch groups and rapid response networks to stop kidnappings from happening, as well as organizing US citizens and migrants alike to form new neighborhood defense units. Recently, we have held a demonstration in Colombia Heights to demand ICE and other State forces to leave DC attended by members of the community.
How can PDC differentiate itself from other groups like grassroots mutual aid and copwatch organizations?
There is an urgent need to group together the people who are the most agitated. People are fighting back. Whether there are organizations or not, the masses will always rise up and they will always fight back, but they will suffer defeat without a clear vision of what’s going on. Chairman Mao wrote a report on the peasant movement in Hunan, where he talks about how even though the party does not exist in large parts of the country and the countryside, the peasants already are organizing peasants’ associations in order to defend themselves because the situation requires them to fight back against their landlords, because there’s poverty, there’s oppression, there is a need to cultivate the land, there’s a need to do things. It is possible. These forms of organizations exist right now among the undocumented groups amongst the masses because they have the same situation; different problems, but same situation: where ICE is coming into the neighborhoods, they’re trying to attack them, they’re trying to take away their livelihoods, they’re taking away their work, they need to fight back.
As immigrants, workers, but most importantly, mass activists, we are fighting alongside the masses and showing them the necessity of organization guided by a class-conscious line, because the problem with spontaneous mass uprisings is that there is that there’s no long-term solution, or there’s no long-term thinking. It’s like, what is this fight going towards? What is the protracted process of the fight that we are doing right now? What could be something that helps us make sure that each battle that we fight helps us gain some sort of experience? It requires us to be class-conscious and militant, to link these little struggles to the struggle against capitalism and imperialism, and without being scared or retreating when fighting and defeating the class enemy. That is the role that PDC is trying to fulfill, but it still needs to be done in a way that is linking up with the masses who are fighting back, and able to concretely show, for example, for people in my workplace, that something like this is possible and can exist, and that it’s not just something that they just have to be scared of.
At the same time it is important to have this class perspective both in the long-term and concretely in every struggle. The masses are already rising up and fighting back, and it is the duty of activists to come to their defense and raise it to something more. For example, what is the root cause of migration? It is because US imperialism has been exploiting and oppressing the countries of Latin America for more than a century, and there is no stability or job prospects for a lot of people. Even here, we are treated as cheap labor because of our status and skin color. The opportunist left that tails the Democratic Party can’t answer this question, and it is reflected at my work as well. For example, the state unions are unable and unwilling to protect our coworkers, despite a long process of “unionization” that actually got their support.
Look at the people in Chicago and Los Angeles, they have fought with a lot of bravery. That shows we need to be militant in our response, fighting ICE with fire, even if it means taking risks so our undocumented neighbors can face less risks. But also, there needs to be a mix of various organizational forms, build solid ties with the community by showing we are on the same side, but also, we can’t let the momentum get away like how it did previously from 2016 to 2020, but use it to build up the forces of all revolutionaries, linking it to the workers movement, the students movement, and all the other trenches of struggle. Otherwise, our efforts will lead to nowhere. There are some groups that are showy and sectarian, who refuse to confront the State but also put the masses in danger, because they put up a show of being revolutionary without doing the actual work to build ties and structures among the masses, or show up when the masses are being attacked.
What are the current challenges facing PDC DC from integrating with the masses?
We are in need of a greater consolidation of our current forces, and greater concentration in trying to actually talk with the masses in our area about what is going on and assessing the situation in order to figure out what is it that they actually need. After having gone through this prolonged period of struggle against ICE, it seems like things are now calming down a little bit, just on the surface. National Guard presence in the city has actually gone down. It may seem like things are calming down a little bit, but we are actually not sure if this is really the case, because we haven’t actually done the investigation part of actually talking to our masses. There needs to be greater unity of all the progressives and revolutionaries in the city to fight imperialism on different fronts, especially among the working class.
