NEW YORK CITY, February 16—At least 30 were arrested in Times Square as antiracists protested against Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the tech companies that profit off of the racist terror against undocumented workers.
Nearly 500 antiracists protested in a march sponsored by Close the Camps/Cosecha against the Thomson Reuters Corporation. One protester said, “We will not remain silent as corporations profit from human suffering” (NY Post, 2/16). Such is the nature of a system defined by profit, exploitation, and theft of labor.
They chanted, “Brick by brick, wall by wall, we will make the system fall.” That system is capitalism. It will fall when we smash it with communist revolution under the leadership of Progressive Labor Party.
Passersby looked on; many chanted along. Members and friends of Progressive Labor Party (PLP), some active in Close the Camps/Cosecha in New York and New Jersey, played an active role in the march. Nearly two hundred people took the communist newspaper, CHALLENGE.
The protest occurred just as Racist-in-Chief Donald Trump announced he will unleash ICE SWAT teams, units from the Southern border, on the workers and youth of New York City and other metropolitan hubs across the U.S.
Against such gutter racism, workers can and will fight back. We can beat back this racist attack, as long as we expose both Republican and Democrat leaders for the misleaders that they are.
Tech serves gestapo
Thomson Reuters and its subsidiaries give ICE access to numbers of databases in exchange for tens of millions of dollars. According to ICE, Reuters provides license plate scanning data and “continuous monitoring and alert service that provides real-time jail booking data to support the identification and location” of immigrant workers (VICE, 11/11/19).
This data feeds the gestapo deportation machine that tracks, captures, and terrorizes immigrant workers—many of whom are children—like animals. These are similar tactics used by slave catchers and the Ku Klux Klan who hunted down escaping enslaved workers in the 1800s. What the capitalist state did to Black workers then is what they are doing to mainly Latin workers now.
By collaborating with ICE, Thomson Reuters is following the same grisly racist path of IBM, which powered the Nazis. The U.S. tech company played “a pivotal role in the Holocaust —all six phases: identification, expulsion from society, confiscation, ghettoization, deportation, and even extermination” (Huffington Post, 2/27/2012).
Of course, Thomson Reuters is just one of numerous technology companies using their innovations to serve bipartisan state terrorism. “Hewlett Packard Enterprise…Microsoft, Motorola Solutions…Palantir [Amazon, Dell, Canon, UPS, LinkedIn, and more] all have active contracts with…ICE” (NBC News, 6/20/2018). And yes, IBM continues to upload its legacy as a fascist collaborator, with the Border Patrol this time.  
Capitalism is the crime
The U.S. gestapo criminalizes workers and children, destroys lives, breaks families, and sheds blood. The raids also succeed in terrorizing and pacifying countless more workers.
Workers and children who risk their lives to cross a capitalist-made border are not criminals; they are refugees. They are our sisters and brothers who have the same aspirations as all other members of our class—to get our needs met against an impossible system.
The real crime is committed by the U.S. imperialists who created borders and the economic situation forcing workers to escape in the first place. The countries—Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador—that workers mostly hail from “provide the cheap labor to cut the sugar cane, haul the coffee and bananas, and slave in sweatshops and the kitchens of tourist resorts” (Huffington Post, 6/24/14).
Know your enemy
Workers and youth who stand up to this racism must be encouraged. The challenge is to turn the antiracist rage of protesters into recognizing the need for an international movement and revolutionary Party against capitalism. If the antiracist protesters unite under the banner of the racist Democratic Party, the working class is under greater danger (see page 2). Liberal politicians and bosses are not friends of the working class. They seek to exploit the desperation of workers in order to build allegiance to the very system that oppresses us.
Smash borders and profit
To eliminate racist deportations, we need to abolish borders once and for all and create a society that is run by and for the working class. No politician can do that. Only a communist party, Progessive Labor Party, can.
As Langston Hughes wrote, the fight is the same everywhere (see page 8). PLP fights for multiracial unity among all workers across all borders. Divisions by race and nationality, economically and politically weaken the entire working class. Only a united class under the leadership of Black and Latin workers in the international PLP has the power to break this system, brick by brick. Join us.