When it comes to ICE deportations, we must ask the question: Cui bono?

Who benefits?

Who benefits from ICE rounding up and deporting US citizens? Into whose pocket do those benefits flow?

Ask any liberal, and they’ll tell you there’s only one person: Donald J. Trump. “This is irrational, destructive ideology at work! It’s Trump setting himself up to become a dictator!” They want you to believe — they need you to believe — that there’s no world in which someone is making a profit off of the ICE deportations. Ask any chauvinist “Marxist” and they’ll tell you the same thing, but about some “faction” of the “industrial bourgeoisie.” They both need you to believe that ICE deportations don’t play a role in maintaining the social and economic order. The reason is that they need you to believe in the existence of some “good” civil society, in this myth of the “good” America counterposed to the “bad” one.

We cannot afford to be confused, we cannot afford to be misled. We must make a sober and scientific analysis that will tell us who our friends are and who our enemies are. Those “Marxists” espousing the liberal platitudes about the good America, the “good” civil society, have put themselves in the camp of the enemy. Unless and until they perform a real analysis, unless and until they examine the question from the point of view, not of what is comfortable for Western dilettante socialists, but what is necessary for the liberation of the entire world, they will remain our enemies.

We cannot espouse return to the status quo ante. That would be fighting on the side of the liberals, for a liberal victory. We fight, not for comfort, but for liberation.

Without the myth of good civil society, these chauvinists and liberals are rightly afraid of mass insurrection. They are selling you this line because they are trying, whether they know it consciously or not, to forestall a social revolution.

But we aren’t afraid of asking.

So, who benefits?

The white settler population benefits from mass deportation.

A Penn Wharton Budget Model study does in fact warn that overall GDP will fall – over 4-years, by 1 percent, and over 10 years by nearly five percent. But the impact on wages varies by skill class. Wages for high-skilled workers (which Penn Wharton says comprise 63% of the working population, placing a huge group in the petty bourgeois or technical specialist class) fall by 0.5% over four years and 2.8% over ten years. Wages for low-skilled US-born workers increase overall; by 1.1% under the 4-year deportation policy and by 5% under the 10-year deportation policy. ICE allows the white declassed labor aristocrat to work their way back into economic positions similar to those of their hated rivals in the liberal professions (who happen to be petty bourgeois).

The prison-industrial complex, which elevates its employees from proletarian to labor-aristocratic or petty-bourgeois status benefits. Private prisons owned by CoreCivic and the GEOGroup partner with ICE and have received huge investments from expanding ICE contracts ($2.1 billion for GeoGroup, $653.5 million for CoreCivic). CoreCivic employs over 13,000 people across 70 facilities and GEOGroup employs about 20,000 people across 98 facilities. (Because they aren’t obligated to report their total employment numbers, these are estimates). Every single person employed by these corporations benefit from deportations.

The tech companies benefit. Palantir, AT&T, and Deloitte have significant ICE contracts and provide the data systems that underlie the new deportation machine.

The banks benefit. Banks and investment firms such as Citizens Bank, Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, and Wells Fargo have all financed ICE contractors and see significant returns on their investment.

If the banks benefit, the imperialist bourgeoisie benefit. Wage theft in the US is highest among industries with high concentrations of undocumented immigrants (restaurants, landscaping and building maintenance, hotels, garment manufacturing, and gas stations). In the initial surges in ICE repression of undocumented immigrants, when sections of the bourgeoisie complained and petitioned that the raids had gone too far and risked hurting their bottom line, the regime relented. At the time, the consensus was towards “immigration policy” under the prior Democrat administrations: just enough repression to terrify the hyper-exploited workers into compliance, but not enough to damage productivity. The calculus has changed.

The imperial extraction machine is not running as it once did. Superprofits (and hence, superwages) are down. The empire’s managers, that section firmly in command of Washington, has made it clear. The empire is striking back. The time of neoliberalization has ended, and the managers are returning to the jodhpur and the pith helm. This year, Marco Rubio told the countries of Europe, “[W]e in America have no interest in being polite and orderly caretakers of the West’s managed decline.”

Mass deportations – White Terror – breaks unionization efforts, destroys solidarity among workers, and ensures that people paid under the table remain at the razor’s edge of desperation. This lowers their wages. It is the manner by which superwages, those wages paid by the imperialist bourgeoisie out of the suppressed wages of the third world, those wages garnered through the arbitrage in unequal exchange with the colonized periphery, are controlled and distributed in the center. For the white worker, yes. For the undocumented immigrant or for anyone who might look like they’re undocumented, no. Superwages are not for you.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics data for February of this year shows that Hispanic workers have higher unemployment (4.4% US-wide average vs. 5.2% for Hispanic workers), and Hispanic women are at the bottom of the US pay scale, earning some 53 cents to the white man’s dollar.¹ “Latinas remain lowest-paid group in U.S. workforce, despite historic gains in education.”² In California, home to the largest Hispanic population in the US, Hispanic women earn 49 cents on the white man’s dollar, according to data collected by UCLA in 2025.³

Will there be a bill to pay for the big imperialist bourgeoisie? Certainly, when the labor markets collapse in the sectors most heavily dominated by undocumented immigrants. But who will be hurt? Who benefits? This strategy will line the pockets of the big imperialist bourgeoisie. The ideology they peddle has enraptured the little bourgeois business owners, and will continue to strike sparks in the flinty hearts of the white US settler population… but only up to a point. Because the bill will come owing first to the petty bourgeoisie, who depend on exploiting undocumented immigrants to manage their bottom lines.

In the end, the big capitalists believe they can manage the terror. They believe they can weather the economic storm.

Amidst these sweeping shifts, these systematic injustices, lie endless individual cruelties. Yes, like Michael Parenti said, there were far more “Good Germans” who simply kept their heads down and followed the law, avoided the trouble that comes with justice; but there were the Patriots too. Those who met the jackboots with a smile and a wave, who industrially sought to use the circumstances to stuff their pockets, they’re everywhere in colonial history — they define it. From the blood-dripping “heroes” who fill the history books, to the businessman who reports his competitor, to the housewives who pick through dresses torn from the bodies of the dead, to the woman that gleefully watches her domestic house-cleaning slaves cower under her gaze. These cannibals, these flesh-eaters are the poster child of mass deportation. But the Good American who believes in a fairer settler-colony and the virtuous “work ethic” of their underclass and the Patriot who will send workers to the concentration camps and man the cells with equal glee, are two sides of the same coin.

Both sides are the face of the enemy.

1. Bureau of Labor Statistics. “The Employment Situation — February 2026.” Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2026. Latino Policy and Politics Institute, UCLA. ︎
2. UCLA, 6 Oct. 2025. ︎
3. Id. ︎

On May 12, the Baltimore Student Union received word through a secondhand source that we had been invited to a town hall to be co-hosted by WJZ, the Baltimore Banner, and the University of Baltimore Law School where some of Baltimore City’s top political leaders — Mayor Brandon Scott, State’s Attorney (DA) Ivan Bates, Police Commissioner Michael Harrison, and City Schools Chief of Staff Allison Perkins-Cohen — would be present to engage in a conversation about what could be done to curb the rising tide of youth violence. 

In response, we issued the following public statement outlining that we would be boycotting that forum, and any such forum where student voice was an afterthought rather than a deliberate, centralized goal:

This week, Baltimore Student Union received a secondhand request to participate in a so-called “youth violence” forum hosted by WJZ, UBalt Law, and the Baltimore Banner to be aired live next Thursday. Also in attendance will be mayor Brandon Scott, police commissioner Michael Harrison, City Schools chief of staff Alison Perkins-Cohen, and state’s attorney Ivan Bates.

We want to be clear — “solutions” to youth killings will not be found in BPD, who allowed the death of Donnell Rochester, and just last night allowed the shooting of a 17 year old, or in district board staff, who are authorizing Evolv, or in the mayor, who has accelerated the police budget & eschewed every promise that got him elected.

As community organizers, we understand that political “solutions” to the deaths of young people in Baltimore will not be found through the theatrical exchange of ideas on live radio, but through a comprehensive mobilization of civil society & community residents in Baltimore fighting in one motion for true community safety.

As such, we will not legitimize the authority of city officials who have failed to act in arm with the demands of the community, and we certainly will decline to participate in any event where youth voice is an afterthought; these events must be after school hours and easily accessible to student attendance.

If the press wants to hear from us, they know how to reach us. Solidarity.

Indeed, there is an epidemic of youth violence in our city. On the very first Friday of the school year, a Mergenthaler High student was killed amid a dispute between several people on the street. Only four days later, a Carver High student was killed, and Baltimore students were thrust into a fever pitch of fear and mass panic as the school year kicked off in early September.

Then, in January, a student at Edmondson-Westside High was killed, followed by a nonfatal shooting at Ben Franklin High only two days later, setting students into a spiral right after a return to school from the December holidays.

In March, gunshots afflicted Baltimore students yet again with a mass-shooting ‘false alarm’ at Digital Harbor High, resulting in a school lockdown and a SWAT team being sent in. Students, already on edge, then watched as a Patterson High student was shot and killed, and only three weeks later, a mourning Baltimore City went aflame with rage and grief as the Covenant School mass shooting in Nashville made national news.

The school year is now approaching a close, but it has been a year bereft with loss of life, and a city already weary of ineffective government has only grown more discouraged by the embarrassing missteps made by various government institutions in response to this epidemic of violence in the school system.

In response to the Edmondson-Westside High shooting, Councilman Kristerfer Burnett introduced legislation to the Baltimore City Council to raise fines on businesses that serviced minors during school hours — say, students going to the mom & pop shop on their lunch break for a coffee — and Mayor Brandon Scott announced that new youth curfews would be imposed over summer break, prohibiting students under 16 from being alone in public after 11pm. On the part of the school district, the School Board moved forward with a $300,000 new weapons detection regime pilot program from Evolv — a manufacturer that is notorious for producing ineffective, shoddy equipment that has been pulled out of numerous school districts in the last 5 years for ineffectiveness, most recently in Utica, NY. And the City Council, which unanimously passed resolutions asking the School Board to adopt restorative justice practices in all schools and institute trauma-informed training for teachers and staff, has seen their pleas ignored by the school district. Meanwhile, the Baltimore Police Department has been embroiled in scandal over the cops’ murder of Donnell Rochester, an 18-year old who was shot and killed during a traffic stop in 2022.

The Scott administration, like all others before them, has continued to offer nothing to the city’s youth but condescension, disdain, and harm. It is no coincidence that the city has selected Inner Harbor, Fells Point, and Federal Hill as their “primary static locations,” stationing police around the sites of the greatest class privilege in the city. The message sent is clear: the mere presence of working class and racialized youth is offensive to bourgeois interests, and must be met with the full force of state repression. The young people of this city are not so easily placated by facile promises of an “exchange of ideas” or fooled by empty gestures that hint toward reform. They demand — and deserve — justice, dignity, and an end to the policing of youth.

Water is the most important resource on the planet. The need for water is one of the only material needs common to all living things. This fundamental need has driven all patterns of human migration and settlement throughout our history. Civilizations across the planet have, without exception, organized themselves around their ability to collect, transport, and use water. 

Innovation in water infrastructure has been the driving force that opened up new lands for human settlement. Irrigation technologies have allowed people to feed themselves farther and farther away from sources of water, and to produce greater surpluses of food to support expanding populations. Canals, wells, reservoirs, sewage lines, treatment facilities: these are all ancient technologies that have been improved and expanded throughout the millennia, giving us living conditions far beyond the “natural” limit. Water infrastructure is the bedrock of human civilization.

And yet, all around us, this crucial infrastructure is crumbling. The Flint water crisis highlighted a rampant problem in the US: lead leaching into the water supply and poisoning residents —  for years. Lead poisoning isn’t some distant Roman curiosity, it’s something that’s happening every day here in the United States Empire. In Hawaii, a military fuel storage facility leaked hazardous levels of contamination into the local water supply. Jackson, Mississippi has been quietly facing unsafe water for years, culminating in a boil water advisory that’s been in place for weeks. Recently, my hometown of Baltimore faced its own boil water advisory following contamination with E. coli in the poorest areas of the city. Ravaged by Hurricane Fiona, Puerto Rico is now staring down weeks or months without power or running water. Countless other failings of crucial water infrastructure continue to fly under the radar as we speak. It’s only a matter of time before they explode into the national consciousness, but only after these systemic failures ravage, sicken, and possibly kill entire neighborhoods.

Why do we see our most critical infrastructure failing? Why is this most basic necessity of life being left to the ravages of time? This is an ongoing pattern of abdication by the US government, intentionally removing itself from the role states have always played as the builders and protectors of infrastructure. Past infrastructure projects, such as the mass installation of sewage systems and water mains, were built with efficiency in mind, at a time when it was inconceivable that the maintenance of those systems would ever be abandoned by governments. And yet, abandon it they have.

For centuries, our water infrastructure has served us dutifully and invisibly, but decades of neglect are confirming a classic maxim of engineering wisdom: good engineering should go unnoticed. When you turn on the faucet, you expect clean water to immediately come pouring out. When you flush the toilet, you expect everything to be swept away in an instant. As long as everything is working as designed, you notice nothing. The second something goes wrong, the problem becomes the most obvious thing in the world. We only take note of the crucial role of our infrastructure once it starts to fail.

There are many ways for failing water infrastructure to impact us. The most obvious we tend to think of is a lack of water: reservoirs run dry or the water mains fail, and nothing comes out of your tap at home. It becomes impossible to drink, to bathe, to wash clothes and dishes, to even flush your toilet. This is often the result of natural disasters, such as earthquakes, hurricanes, or droughts. A more common disaster is water contamination, which tends to go unnoticed, and to persist for far longer. This can take the form of old pipes degrading, allowing heavy metals to dissolve into the water, or it can come from outside contaminants getting into the supply. Whether it’s lead, industrial waste, microorganisms, or any of the many other dangerous contaminants, these failures are becoming increasingly common as outdated water lines start to break down.

It is often said in engineering circles that the goal of the engineer is not to make the most sturdy, long-lived infrastructure possible. The goal is to make the most efficient infrastructure by balancing cost, labor, and longevity. This isn’t simply a case of engineers being cheap and trying to save the most money in the short term: it simply doesn’t make sense to spend ten times as much to build something that lasts twice as long. As long as there is a commitment to continuously maintain and upgrade the infrastructure, it is worth it to do so efficiently.

The US state has, since its beginning, always served the interests of the wealthiest: the landlords, the slavers, the industrialists, and the financial elite. At times, those interests have lined up with the needs of the people. The maintenance of infrastructure is one such need. The capitalists want to be free of cholera and tainted water as much as the workers do, and it helps them to maintain their workforce if they aren’t dying of preventable diseases. However, over the course of centuries, the power and greed of capital has expanded, and those interests have shifted. More of the responsibility for public works has been offloaded to the private sector. Rather than hiring their own engineers, municipal governments give sweetheart deals to private contractors. Publicly-owned infrastructure is sold off to private corporations with the intention of raiding the public coffers. New infrastructure, such as telecommunications, is simply presumed to belong to the free market from the start.

The social context behind this shift is complex, but it can be summarized as a direct reaction to labor activism and socialist organizing. In the early 20th century, labor was ascendant in this country, especially among the sectors necessary for the construction of infrastructure: mining, processing, manufacturing, construction, and so on. The crucial nature of infrastructure for the functioning of society gave these workers tremendous leverage at the bargaining table, which made industrial capitalists very nervous. They began a protracted campaign of culture-crafting; a full scale assault on the public perception of unions. They smeared unionists, captured governments, laundered anti-worker policies through the media, and successfully turned the tide against organized labor. In the process, privatization became the law of the land, and our country’s infrastructure was stolen from us.

All of this privatization has been sold to the public as a way of enhancing these vital services, since private corporations are presented as being able to get the job done better and cheaper than governments ever could. (This, they attribute to the mysterious and illusory “market pressures”). In fact, the exact opposite is true. The only purpose of private industry is to produce profits, to give a return on investment in whatever way it can. It is possible for profit to be extracted by providing a public service that is efficient, cheap, and reliable, but this is not the rule. The most common way for a company to increase their profits is not by providing a superior product, but by cutting costs. This can be done by mistreating their workers, using cheaper materials, and neglecting maintenance, all of which the major infrastructure companies are constantly guilty of, and all of which lead to failing infrastructure. Because of the massive amounts of capital they control, as well as regulations and contracts from the governments they control, they cannot even be outcompeted by “more ethical” corporations.

The worst failures of water infrastructure have one major factor in common: they disproportionately impact the poorest sectors of our society, living on top of the oldest infrastructure. This is the result of decades of neglect, due to the perverse incentives listed above. The poorer a population is, the less profitable it is to install, upgrade, and maintain infrastructure for their use. This is the same reason it took massive government investment to get electricity and telephone lines to rural areas, the reason broadband internet is still unavailable in many parts of the country, and the reason giant shipping firms subcontract the USPS for many of their “last mile” needs. This ethos of private companies laying claim to the most profitable roles of infrastructure ownership while offloading the more costly features onto the state has created a system in which vast swathes of the country are left completely abandoned. When the water system fails, it’s the working class that shoulders the burden.

After extracting these massive profits, when these giant companies fail to fulfill their end of the bargain, what happens? Are they punished for the death, disease, and economic injury caused by their neglect of vital services? Are their ill-gotten gains seized and returned to the people they scammed? No. Instead, the government is tasked with picking up the slack, using money raised from the working class. Corporations retain their profits, retain their market share, and retain their iron grip on the infrastructure we need to live and thrive.

This fundamental failure of capitalism to provide vital public services is replicated across all sectors: healthcare, transportation, housing, energy, education, food, and especially water. The scam takes many different forms, but at its core it stays the same. There is massive profit to be made by promising the necessities of a functioning society, with none of the risk. Governments subsidize these sectors to keep society functioning, or they simply ignore the fallout of their failures. Increasingly, the ideology of the free market has shifted public policy towards the latter “strategy,” leading to a steady decline in every form of infrastructure. And we are positioned for this situation to only ever get worse.

Climate change is often presented simply in terms of rising temperatures, but the impact it is having is far more widespread, due mainly to water. More violent and unpredictable weather systems, caused by changing patterns of temperature and humidity, in turn cause unprecedented flooding. Floods wreak havoc with water infrastructure, drive people out their homes, and alter entire landscapes. Warming climates open up new aquatic breeding grounds for pathogenic bacteria, which contaminate downstream water systems. Higher temperatures encourage evaporation, leading to tinder-dry conditions that exacerbate wildfires.

The same perverse incentives that make corporations unsuited for maintaining and upgrading our infrastructure also make them wholly incapable of addressing the climate crisis and its many downstream effects. Their only role in society is to generate profits, and it is more profitable to degrade the natural world and imperil our society, rather than pay the costs of clean, sustainable infrastructure. Left to its own devices, capitalism will continue to poison our water and choke off the lifeblood of civilization itself. We leave this power in the hands of capitalists at our own risk.