Murderers in the Metropole and International Class Struggle: For an Anti-imperialist Anti-ICE Movement

Estimated reading time: 15 minutes

On the 13th of July, 26 year old Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero was murdered by ICE in Biddeford, Maine. Only 6 days before, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a 52 year old father, was also shot and killed by ICE pigs in Houston. It has been just under a month since the joint labor and hunger strike at the Delaney Hall concentration camp in New Jersey was broken by ICE and the Geo Group, a prison corporation that runs the camp. The strikers started their struggle to fight against forced labor, sexual assault, rotting food, beatings, and denial of medical care within the facility. Whether it’s murder in the street or a slow death in the kkkamps, the federal government is engaged in a terror campaign against Global South migrant workers living in the imperial core. It is not a terror campaign unique to Trump’s administration and it is not a unique phenomena in amerikan history. This is a core component of global migration under US led imperialism.

I live in the Twin Cities. Most anti-ICE spaces you find here don’t mention anti-imperialism in their organizing. In general, the Twin Cities is dominated by two backward political tendencies. The first is a vague “abolitionist,” anarchistic tendency that lacks principled anti-imperialist analysis — these spaces do not express support for the Iranian government, Hezbollah, the other Islamic resistance groups in Palestine, or any perceived state or state-adjacent entities. Most groups of this tendency simply distance themselves from the responsibility to take a stance, and do not seriously consider the contributions made by the Islamic Resistance groups in the global anti-imperialist struggle, theoretically or practically. The worst will outright slander these movements, if pressed.

The second backwards tendency is led by the Four Opportunists (primarily FRSO in my locale) who largely tail other local opportunist figures of the NPIC in the Twin Cities. What both tendencies have in common is imperial chauvinism. This chauvinism is borne of their class position on the global stage and their programs reflect that. Actually winning a new world would mean they’d lose a lot in the process. How does this play into the general anti-ICE movement in Minneapolis? Why do we need an anti-imperialist, anti-ICE movement?

The principal contradiction of our time is still that between rich and poor nations, parasite nations and nations deemed exploitable and even erasable. Global migration today is a system of restricted mobility that benefits rich countries at the expense of poor countries. This system benefits workers within the core, not just a select few bourgeois. Lorenzo Delgado Araujo, Geraldo Lunas Campos, Victor Manuel Diaz, Parady La, Luis Beltrán Yanez-Cruz, and countless others were murdered by ICE and complicit federal agencies for the maintenance of the global imperialist hierarchy. Global North states and their mostly euro and euro-settler populations seek to cage Global South workers in their home countries where they can be superexploited by multinational corporations, their partner states in the North, and their neo-colonial allies. Deportation, rape, and internment all function to say to these workers, “STAY IN YOUR PLACE.” The miserable wages paid to workers in a country like Mexico, end up subsidizing 25-40% of the wages paid in the North.¹ Pulling from the same source, we can truly see just how much value drain there is from South to North as a result of these massive wage differentials:

“In 2023 alone, a staggering $135 billion was siphoned off from Mexico due to the underpayment of labor in the export sector. This figure is not merely an abstract number—it represents 7.5% of the country’s entire GDP and an astonishing 37% of its manufacturing GDP.”²

There is no productivity difference between a Mexican factory worker and an amerikan factory worker. Why would there be? The notion that there is some inherent value difference between Mexican and amerikan labor is a racist one. This national chauvinism undergirds the global division of labor.³ There is no economic law that says that these two people should earn different wages, it is instead a reality decided by global class struggle.

When compared to remittances,⁴ the $135 billion in drain is more than double what was sent home by migrants in the same year.⁵ The World Bank and other neo-liberal international institutions often claim that these remittances are a key factor in economic development for poor countries, but this is a lie. How can these meager remittances (in total $63 billion in 2023) compare to the amount of value drain in just the export sector alone in Mexico? What these institutions like the World Bank want is to perpetuate the myth that migration is good for poor countries, when in fact it only drains them of their labor force, stunts national development, and keeps them stuck in a cycle of unequal exchange which benefits a bourgeois-settler class alliance in places like amerika. The results of this are higher infant mortality rates, lower life expectancy, little to no government services, and malnutrition in the Global South.

Those who do make it North are sequestered to essential industries where they face horrible working conditions. There is little to no institutional support for migrants during periodic capitalists crisis or pandemics like COVID. Many can’t leave their initial employer due to laws around temporary work visas. This restricted mobility in the destination country allows employers to depress wages.⁶ Those who opt for more mobility without the sanctioned paperwork are put into a dangerous position, only made more visible since Obama left office, but with the same violent border apparatus at work.

The federal government’s continued murder of migrant workers feeds a bloodthirsty white supremacy born of these global class hierarchies. As imperial countries utilize genocidal terror to enforce these class divisions, the racist superstructure becomes an end in itself, beyond any purely economic motive. Samir Amin explains this as the genocidal solution to the global reserve army of labor.⁷ Pushed off their land in the countryside, displaced to urban centers within their home country, where employment is not guaranteed, many make the decision to emigrate North. Contrary to what liberal yard signs might tell you, migration is not beautiful under imperialism. The migrant worker must leave their home and by foot or boat, make the perilous journey to amerika or europe. Many hundreds of thousands die in transit and all this is by design.⁸ There is a killing for killing’s sake. Without understanding this dimension, we will fail to grasp the totality of the system in power. It operates on both an economic motive and a purely racist, genocidal logic endemic to amerikan and european nationalisms.

Amerika was born as a euro-settler slave empire and no matter how much people (even on the left) want to play 4d chess to recuperate some idealized vision of amerikan “values,” this effort will always be counter to anything oppressed people have actually experienced. This is anti-materialist and revisionist. The amerikan empire has for centuries maintained a system of unequal exchange between North and South, where wages are depressed and governments that seek to undo these unequal relations are overthrown. Resistance movements are ruthlessly hunted by neo-colonial state forces and amerikan backed paramilitaries like the contras in Nicaragua or the Grey Wolves in Turkey. The amerikan empire has never been a “nation of immigrants” or a “grand social experiment” in democracy. It has always been and always will be a settler-empire which sucks the global proletariat of its time, labor, and life. Failure to understand this fact means we will continue to seek false solutions or reforms within the amerikan framework. People will endlessly protest and campaign for things that cannot be achieved because the contradictions at hand are so antagonistic that the level of struggle proposed is wildly insufficient to attain them. Otherwise, they will claim false victories as they continue to underestimate the ways in which the empire can absorb their paltry demands while staying in the driver seat. Therefore, principled anti-imperialism must be anti-amerikan and we should not hide from that, but rather unfailingly push that line forward in mass organizations and pre-party formations.

While continuing to refine our means for resisting the imperial border apparatus (ICE, CBP, DHS, etc.), to make the anti-ICE movement truly anti-imperialist will mean that we Center the South in our organizing. What does “Center the South” mean? No materially backed internationalism is practiced in any meaningful way by USians. Not paying attention to the global situation means we miss the key ways the US empire reproduces itself. In the case of anti-ICE organizing, the situation within migrant’s home countries is only ever a footnote in anti-ICE spaces. When it does come up, its only ever a passing comment on direct military intervention in X country or coups orchestrated by the CIA and State Department. Unequal Exchange is never identified as the primary force motivating migration. This is due to the inconvenient implications such an analysis presents to people with a vested class interest in the amerikan standard of living. Ecuadorians make up the majority of Latin American migrant workers living in Minneapolis, yet there is little to no talk of how we can integrate an analysis of the revolutionary situation in their home country, into our solidarity organizing. Can Twin Cities leftists explain the recent history of Ecuador? Not only does this have implications for our strategy, but it affects the way we engage with migrant workers. You need to meet people where they are at, and part of that is understanding where they’ve been. There are complicated internal contradictions within the home countries of migrants that have implications for organizing with migrant workers in the imperial core. In addition, those workers are still connected to their home countries. Many send remittances home and at the very least they keep in contact with their families who stay behind. They have a vested interest in the well being of their home country and so should we if we are in true solidarity with migrant workers.

We must create a two-pronged approach to anti-ICE organizing. Centering the South in our anti-ICE organizing would look like us making deep, committed relationships with Global South liberation movements and asking them what they need materially to support their movements. I hear a lot about centering the oppressed in Minneapolis organizing spaces, but without any real efforts to practically center the most oppressed, much less the oppressed people geographically distant from people in the room. This must be support without stipulations as to their tactics, but it also needs to be support that is intentional. Understanding that there are likely many different groups trying to bring about a new society in any given country, it makes sense to take the time and effort to evaluate their specific political vision. Solidarity should be scientific, not paternal or savioristic. Therefore it is incumbent that those in solidarity do not shirk their responsibility to do a proper study of conditions in Global South countries, understanding that the best sources will be from these regions. Some questions for investigation might be: Is there a revolutionary situation in this country? What objective and subjective forces are involved? How do the revolutionary forces relate to the masses? What are their programs and general strategy?⁹ The more countries that are able to de-link from imperialism, the weaker the social bribe will be for workers in imperial core countries, creating more potential for a revolutionary situation.¹⁰ Unequal exchange must be addressed on a practical level and geographic distance must not limit the relationships we build.

Of course making a revolution in the imperial core is the most effective way to do internationalism, but that has not been so simple. Part of the reason has been the high living standards of large swaths of the populace. Revolutions do not happen just because someone wants it. People have to need it and simultaneously understand their agency in the matter. The other reason has been the subsequent revisionism which has confused the movement with regard to class struggle in amerika. The original class struggles were that of the slave v.s. the master and the settler v.s. the indigenous. These contradictions remain central antagonisms in the core of settler-empire. The workers movement has always sided with imperialism and yt-settler chauvinism. Ask Samuel Gompers or the CPUSA of the 40’s and 50’s. The principal struggle here in amerika is that over land and autonomy for the colonized. It is essential to develop international support for Global South revolutions, while also remembering that the internal colonies here are some of the weakest links in the imperial chain. As the state and settler masses continue their genocide of New Afrikans and Indigenous nations, we must also center these struggles in our overall strategy, rather than some vague “multi-national working class” struggle.

All who are active in anti-ICE work should make Spanish language learning a matter of organizational policy. There has been and remains a gap between the direct recipients of this pig terror and those in solidarity. Part of this is a lack of commitment towards personal relationships with these people. Something that will help is active work to overcome this language barrier. It will not be the only thing needed, but it will help. Even knowing some Spanish is better than nothing, but I implore you to take study seriously. Language adoption as an organizational policy should help negate the difficulties of language learning access barriers if you were to just go in on it alone. All migrants are under attack, so if your locality seems to have a higher percentage of people speaking something other than Spanish, then by all means dive into that language! Understand it will take a lot of time and you will often plateau, but that is the nature of organizing in general.

We must continue to combat ICE, DHS, CBP, and other federal agencies while understanding the very serious war we are in with amerika as a whole. These agencies play a crucial role in enacting the violence that maintains a global division of labor which creates the amerikan standard of living. This must be a war without terms, not because we want it to be, but because these agencies are essential to the current imperialist order. They will not be disbanded by politicians or well articulated speeches. The progressive aspect of the anti-ICE movement here in Minneapolis has been the elements who have put their bodies on the line to physically confront the enemy forces. While continuing to resist internment, deportation, and murder, we must also develop a holistic strategy to end the united states. The people of Minneapolis should know this from 2020. Politicians who promised to abolish the police were merely trying to demobilize an insurrection, and they fulfilled that task well. The same promises will continue to be made and broken by the settler state until the oppressed take matters into their own hands. The police, ICE, and CBP will exist until they are crushed.

“The rich are only defeated when running for their lives.”¹¹

1. Crossa, Mateo, and Álvaro de Regil Castilla. “Value Transfer and Labor Arbitrage Based on Unequal Exchange: The Case of Mexico–USA”, Journal of Labor and Society 28, 2 (2025): 157-182, doi: https://doi.org/10.1163/24714607-bja10183 ↩︎
2. Ibid. ↩︎
3. I use the term racism and national chauvinism interchangeably here, and while they are related, they are not the same. I merely do this as a colloquialism. Race and nation are important to differentiate because race obfuscates clear political objectives that national liberation demarcates more clearly, i.e. land as the basis of decolonization/economic autonomy and political autonomy. ↩︎
4. Any portion of wages sent by migrant workers in destination countries to their home countries. There is an extensive infrastructure built around fees and services related to sending remittances. This usually degrades the original amount workers send home. ↩︎
5. Ibid. ↩︎
6. In general, wages tend to equalize within countries due to the fact that most citizens can move freely from employer to employer. This is not the case for migrant labor living under a border regime which follows them even once they’ve crossed these fictious borders. Again, restricted movement is essential to global wage differentials. ↩︎
7. Samir Amin, “World Poverty, Pauperization, and Capital Accumulation”. Monthly Review 55, no. 5 (October 2003). ↩︎
8. Iker Suarez, The Migrant Genocide: Toward a Third World Analysis of European Class Struggle. https://anti-imperialist.net/blog/2025/08/15/the-migrant-genocide/ ↩︎
9. Torkil Lauesen, Unequal Exchange and the Prospects of Socialism.1986. https://static1.squarespace.com/static/68ed338d2e083114d762ecb7/t/6970c175092eb26a3852f785/1768997238857/Iskra+Books+-+Unequal+Exchange+and+the+Prospects+of+Socialism+-+w.pdf ↩︎
10. I do not mean to narrowly imply that conditions alone make revolution. I believe that many of the insights articulated by Grace Lee Boggs in Organization Means Commitment still ring true. There is a cultural backwardness in amerika, produced by these parasitic economic relations and white cultural imperialism, that we must fight internally. Objective and subjective forces must align for us to bring about the world we want. ↩︎
11. CLR James, The Black Jacobins. p. 78.1938. ↩︎