Will Lehman is a Mack Trucks worker and former candidate for UAW president.

On Thursday, nearly 500 workers at Hyundai’s Metaplant America complex in Ellabell, Georgia were seized in a massive raid by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and other federal agencies. 

This was the largest single-site raid in ICE history, carried out as a state-sponsored act of terror against the working class, justified with anti-immigrant lies. Hundreds of workers, most of them from South Korea, were rounded up, hand-cuffed, and transported to an ICE detention camp in Folkston, Georgia. This action was focused on criminalizing workers while shielding the corporate entities that exploit us.

I denounce this barbaric raid and demand the immediate release of all detained workers. What happened at Hyundai is an attack on the entire working class. If the government can seize 475 workers under a warrant naming only four individuals, it can and will use the same methods against all workers who resist attacks on jobs, living standards, or democratic rights.

This raid is part of the Trump administration’s ongoing efforts to establish a presidential dictatorship. Seven months into his second term, Trump has deployed the National Guard into Washington D.C., is threatening Chicago with “war,” signed executive orders to build a nationwide “quick reaction” force, essentially a paramilitary under his command, and expanded ICE raids and deportations to levels not seen in decades.

On Sunday, Trump border “czar” Tom Homan said there will be “a lot more worksite enforcement operations” like the one at Hyundai. Obscenely, Homan sought to present the raid as in the interests of American workers, stating that companies that hire immigrant workers do so in order to “drive down wages.”

The Trump administration is a government of, by and for the corporate-financial oligarchy, which is dedicated to ratcheting up the exploitation of the working class to unprecedented levels. The methods being tested today on foreign-born workers will be turned tomorrow against strikes, protests, and all opposition to the ruling class. The target is the entire working class, whether born in the US or elsewhere.

Ford has already established its own undercover police force of agents, showing that corporations are preparing alongside the state to repress resistance in the factories. Defense contractor Boeing is bringing in strikebreakers to replace 3,200 workers on a six-week strike in the St. Louis area.  

The response of the union bureaucracy has been pathetic and complicit. Three days after the raid, the UAW issued a perfunctory statement, which downplayed the attack as “unfortunate” and presented it only as a safety issue. It said nothing about Trump, dictatorship, or the urgent need to defend the seized workers.

The AFL-CIO’s Georgia president even reduced the attack to the “workload burden” left behind for other workers. This is disgusting. Hundreds of men and women have been abducted into detention camps, families torn apart, and entire communities terrorized. To speak of “workload” under these conditions exposes the union apparatuses for what they are: not defenders of workers, but arms of the corporations and the state.

The claim of the UAW that it “stands with immigrant and native-born workers alike” is a fraud. This is the same bureaucracy that has supported Trump’s nationalist tariff program, helped companies like Stellantis cover up the death of workers such as Ronald Adams Sr., and worked to smother strikes in auto, education, and logistics. Its role is to divide workers, enforce concessions, and keep the working class tied to the Democratic Party, which is just as complicit as Trump in the war on immigrants.

The attack on immigrants is the spearhead of a much broader assault on the entire working class. Trump has already stripped union protections from nearly a million federal employees. Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid are on the chopping block. The government is preparing massive cuts, repression, and war, and it is building the machinery of dictatorship in advance to suppress inevitable opposition.

The raid at Hyundai is one front in this war. Other raids have already swept up meatpacking workers in Iowa, construction workers in Florida, and day laborers outside Home Depot in California. The same police-military apparatus that now occupies Washington and is being deployed against Chicago will be used to criminalize strikes, demonstrations, and resistance.

Workers cannot rely on the union bureaucracy, the Democratic Party, or any section of the ruling class to defend our rights. The defense of immigrant workers must be taken into our own hands.

I call for the formation of rank-and-file defense committees in every workplace and neighborhood, composed of workers themselves and independent of the union apparatus. These committees must demand the immediate release of the workers arrested at Hyundai and an end to the campaign of terror against immigrant workers, organize mass demonstrations, prepare solidarity strike actions, and link up with workers across industries and borders.

The International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC) provides the framework to organize this struggle. Its purpose is to unite workers internationally on the basis of our common class interests.

The American working class is made up of workers from around the world. The capitalist class has always sought to divide and weaken the working class by promoting national, ethnic and racial divisions. History has proven that every gain ever won has been accomplished by rejecting this divide-and-conquer strategy and uniting all workers in a common fight.   

Workers must reject the poisonous lie that immigrants are to blame for declining living standards. The real enemy is the corporate-financial oligarchy that exploits immigrant and native-born workers alike while looting society for its own enrichment. Dividing workers along national lines is a deliberate strategy of the ruling class to weaken us.

The defense of the immigrant workers is a test for the entire working class. Will we allow the government to abduct hundreds of our brothers and sisters, or will we mobilize to free them and stop this assault?

There is growing anger among workers and a developing mood for a fight. But this by itself is not sufficient. A serious struggle, including preparations for a general strike, requires a clear political perspective and organization. To make this a reality, workers must consciously take up that perspective, uniting us across industries and borders, rejecting the sabotage of the union bureaucracy, and preparing a coordinated offensive against the dictatorship of the corporations and the state.

I call on workers everywhere—autoworkers, teachers, logistics workers, service workers, immigrant and native-born—to join in this fight. Demand the release of the Hyundai workers! Build rank-and-file committees! Join the IWA-RFC!