We are publishing here “For the defense of immigrants and the abolition of the immigration Gestapo,” the third of six resolutions adopted unanimously by the Ninth National Congress of the Socialist Equality Party (US), held from August 2 to 7, 2026. The resolution was introduced by a report to the Congress, given by Eric London.

1. The construction of a dictatorship in the United States is centered on the escalating assault on immigrant workers. ICE, transformed into a paramilitary force, is carrying out a mass deportation operation. Armed agents stalk the cities, seizing workers at workplaces, schools, hospitals and courthouses. More than 10,000 were seized in the first week of July alone, as the White House ordered stepped-up worksite raids. Hundreds of thousands have been detained and deported since Trump’s return to power.

2. A nationwide network of concentration camps has been constructed across the United States in which men, women and children are held without charge. A staggering $45 billion has been appropriated for the camps alone, part of nearly $250 billion committed to ICE and CBP through the end of Trump’s term. Under the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, immigrants have been seized without hearing and rendered to foreign prisons, including hundreds deported to the CECOT concentration camp in El Salvador. The administration has openly threatened to suspend habeas corpus—the right to challenge one’s imprisonment before a court, enshrined in Article I of the Constitution—for immigrants. A right abolished for immigrants is abolished for all, and its destruction is the spearhead of the assault on the democratic rights of the entire working class.

3. The state kills, and no one is held to account. Fifty-two immigrants died in ICE custody in the first 500 days of the second Trump administration. In Minneapolis, federal agents gunned down Renée Nicole Good, a mother of three, and Alex Pretti, a nurse and union member who stopped to film an arrest, after which Vice President JD Vance declared the killer “protected by absolute immunity.”

4. On July 7 in Houston, ICE agents shot down Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a 52-year-old construction worker who had spent 35 years building houses in the city, as he drove in his work van on the way to a job. The witnesses to his killing, including his brother, were thrown into detention, while the government shields the name of the killer and the FBI investigates the victim. Six days later in Biddeford, Maine, agents fired seven shots into the car of Joan Sebastián Guerrero, a 26-year-old Colombian worker with a valid work permit and a pending asylum claim, then dragged him from the wreckage and handcuffed him as he bled to death in front of his wife and daughter.

5. The regime’s war on immigrants has provoked the most significant eruptions of opposition in decades. The killings of Good and Pretti brought 100,000 people into the streets of Minneapolis and set off mass protests and high school walkouts against ICE across the country in January and February 2026. In city after city, ICE raids have been met by crowds confronting the agents and neighbors organizing to protect one another. This movement against ICE fed directly into the “No Kings” demonstrations, among the largest in American history.

6. The Minneapolis events were a strategic experience for the entire working class. Out of the mass protests against the killings came growing calls from below for a general strike. The trade union apparatus rejected these calls. Confronted with a movement demanding the mobilization of the full power of the working class, the union bureaucracies refused to organize even a single work stoppage. The state’s Democratic governor deployed state troopers and the National Guard not against the raids but to shield the agents from the population, hailed a “partnership” with Trump’s border czar and presented as a “retreat” what was in fact a redeployment of ICE agents to other cities.

7. In Congress, the Democrats staged performative “no” votes, dropped every proposed restriction on Trump’s ICE Gestapo agents, and cleared the way for tens of billions in new funding for ICE and CBP. The deportation machine Trump wields was built and expanded under Democratic administrations. Obama, the “deporter-in-chief,” expelled more than 3 million immigrants, more than any president before him, while constructing the detention infrastructure and surveillance systems that ICE now employs. Biden maintained the camps, used Title 42 to carry out millions of summary expulsions, unleashed mounted Border Patrol agents against Haitian refugees at Del Rio, and deported more people in his final year in office than in any single year of Trump’s first term.

8. The war on immigrants is the spearhead of the construction of a police state directed against the entire working class. A force that can murder a construction worker on his way to work and face no consequences can and will be turned against strikers, demonstrators, and every form of popular opposition. In the Prairieland case in Texas, 15 protesters against ICE were sentenced to a combined 556 years in prison on charges of “material support for terrorism”—sentences of a length reserved for serial murder, imposed by the same government that pardoned 1,600 participants in the January 6 coup, including the fascists who assaulted police. The Prairieland defendants are political prisoners, punished for their opposition to the attacks on immigrants, not their conduct. The fascistic incitement against immigrants serves both to divide the working class against itself and to habituate society to state violence. The assault on immigrants at home is also inseparable from the eruption of imperialist violence throughout the hemisphere. Indeed, many of those targeted for deportation have fled the catastrophic conditions produced by American imperialism in Latin America and internationally.

9. The assault on immigrants and refugees is international in scope. Behind the ramparts of “Fortress Europe,” the European powers have turned the Mediterranean into a mass grave, in which tens of thousands of refugees have drowned over the past decade. They finance the Libyan militias that intercept survivors and return them to torture camps, imprison asylum-seekers in island camps, and adopt, one after another, the deportation policies once associated only with the far right. From the United States to Europe to Australia, the ruling classes answer the movement of workers with razor wire, detention and death.

10. But the division that the ruling class seeks to impose collides with an objective fact: globalized production has created a single international working class. Since 1980, the development of the world’s productive forces has added more than 2 billion people to its ranks. For the first time in history, the majority of humanity lives in cities, and the labor of workers on every continent is bound together in production chains that span the hemisphere and the world. Every commodity is the product of this collective international labor. There is no “American” economy apart from the labor of workers born in Mexico, Central America, the Caribbean, Asia and Africa, and the immigrant worker in an American plant, warehouse, or field is the living embodiment of the international unity of the working class. The nationalism directed against immigrants is a reactionary revolt against the objective structure of modern economic life. The unity of the working class is not an aspiration; it is an objective reality, which the party fights to make conscious.

11. This Congress reaffirms the resolutions of the party’s 2014 and 2016 congresses on the defense of immigrant workers and the unity of the workers of the Americas and renews their call under conditions of the greatest assault on immigrant workers in American history. The workers of North, Central and South America—exploited by the same transnational corporations, confronting the same oligarchy—must be united in a common struggle against imperialism and its border regime.

12. This Congress advances the following demands:

• The immediate and unconditional abolition of ICE, the Border Patrol and the entire Department of Homeland Security—the police-state apparatus constructed on a bipartisan basis after 9/11—and the dismantling of the entire machinery of deportation, surveillance, and detention
• The shutdown of every concentration camp, the immediate and unconditional release of every detainee, and the return, with full restitution, of all who have been deported, including those rendered to CECOT
• The freedom of the Prairieland prisoners and all those jailed for opposing ICE
• The repeal of the Alien Enemies Act and every statute of the police-state framework and the inviolability of habeas corpus
• The withdrawal of the National Guard and of ICE from every city
• Full accountability for the killings of Renée Good, Alex Pretti, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, Joan Sebastián Guerrero and all those murdered by ICE and the Border Patrol—from the agents who pulled the triggers to the officials of both parties who built and direct the machinery they serve
• Full citizenship and democratic rights for all workers, regardless of where they were born, and the right of all workers to live and work in whatever country they choose

13. These demands will not be realized through the courts, nor through the Democratic Party. They will be realized through the independent mass mobilization of the working class: the defense of immigrant workers by their coworkers and neighbors, organized through rank-and-file committees in every workplace and neighborhood, and the mobilization of the full industrial and social power of the working class against the police-state buildup. The defense of immigrants is the defense of the working class as a whole, and a component of the fight for the unity of the workers of the Americas in the world socialist revolution.