Taking The First Step

Students in the US have organized hundreds of protests in 2026 to speak out against ICE and school boards that allow agents to abduct students. Their mobilization is partly a response to the city deportation sweeps and concentration-camp detentions, not to mention the filmed killings of Minneapolis protesters Renee Good and Alex Pretti. More immediately, these sparks of mobilization come alive out of the palpable concern these students have for their “undocumented” classmates. ICE has kidnapped thousands of children, carrying them off to prison camps away from their families and any sense of enrichment. Families have described moldy, worm-filled food and undrinkable water. The trauma being inflicted against the kidnapped and separated families is unimaginable, and this is transmitted to their friends and classmates. Many radicalized students are now taking their first organizational steps and mobilizing protests against the deportation machine and their complicit schools. USU spoke to students in Connecticut who organized an “ICE OUT” protest from their campus to learn how students are organizing and what Decolonial Socialists can do to support them.

Many radicals can point to one specific world event or personal experience that permanently changed the way they see the world. For several of the Connecticut students, the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti marked a turning point in their consciousness.

“Seeing the murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti was a radicalizing moment for me. It’s clear that ICE is an org that does not even care about the law at all. We have to stick together.“

Even for children growing up in an environment filled with police propaganda, subjected to constant diseducation and adult surveillance, there are moments when the star-spangled banner slips, exposing the true character of the settler police and military. Their violence is classically limited to the exploited nations: the Black nation, the Indigenous nations, Puerto Rico, and the millions of immigrants who came to Occupied North America seeking an escape from their countries even as Amerikan capital attacks them. The law as we know it today is expressly designed to oppress these national groups; not merely for the sadistic pleasure of oppression, but because it allows the white nation and its ruling class to steal more of their labor. The student protester above is correct to say ICE does not care about the law, but they should question what purpose the law serves at all in a settler colony like the US. It is clear that ICE agents are untrained, murderous cowards, but that isn’t really what makes them bad. A hypothetical ICE agency that performs the same tasks, but in a respectable and courteous manner, would still be equally reprehensible. Instead of attacking ICE for being law-breakers, we should attack them for breaking up families to sustain the regime of unequal labor that we have here.

The Protest

The protest was organized over the course of several weeks with social media and in-person conversations. A date and time was chosen and broadcasted. The generalized message of the protest: ICE OUT – Out of campus, Out of (the city), and Out of Connecticut. The students knew that their school would take steps to discourage them from walking out, but they were surprised by the Machiavellian manipulation the administration was willing to engage in. Administrators started off with the typical threats; whispers spread that students would be suspended or expelled for protesting.

“Leading up to the protest, our School Advisory Board announced that students could be suspended if they decided to protest or walk off campus. They definitely scared a lot of people away from protesting with us.”

But their real trick didn’t come until the morning of the protest. Before the first period, the school announced that a two-hour assembly would be happening that same day. They conveniently scheduled this assembly right before the student protest was set to begin. Some students weren’t sure if the protest was still happening. It was a deliberate attempt to corral all the students in the school into one location in order to mis-direct the protest towards a school-sanctioned event. The students knew what was happening, but some who planned to protest definitely got caught in the trap. One student shared their experience of avoiding the assembly police:

“It was bogus that they did that. Before the assembly started I got up and left. I tried to avoid the teachers and walked out. Then, right next to our meeting place, campus security and principals were standing. It felt like they were trying to intimidate us.”

These tactics from the school provide a great lesson for these protesters and all other students: the school will do anything to disrupt your protest if they feel like it could gain steam. They will call their own events at the time of your protest to confuse others, and intimidate you from leaving the assembly hall. They do this to co-opt your message, or destroy it entirely.

The protest itself lasted the entire rest of the day and ended after the sun went down. The students chanted on campus for around 30 minutes, then walked off. They marched down the adjacent streets toward downtown, continuing their chants and waving signs. Many drivers honked in support. One white man revved his diesel truck to blow exhaust at them.

The protesters went to city hall first to speak with representatives of the city. The protesters wanted to know if the city had a plan in case ICE showed up, what the plan was, and if the city had any information they could share.

“The city official we spoke to was very nice. They said they would create a website, prepare some Know-Your-Rights materials, and speak to their boss about releasing more information.”

This is not a plan at all. This is a promise to release information that is already publicly available, and will unfortunately not prevent ICE raids. Government officials will often use a bait-and-switch to mislead groups demanding change. A bait and switch refers to an appealing offer that sounds good, but ends up being illusory. Organizers are misled into a sense of comfort, and the sweet-talking local official ends up betraying the cause and siding with the enemy forces. For example, look to the federal government’s shuffling of ICE officials in the wake of the Minneapolis resistance. Officials get replaced, tactics are revised, but their mission does not change. ICE’s new plan for Minneapolis will still require the city to submit to DHS requirements and support more raids. And this is at the time when the city is still in a rebellious uproar. The local government might act like an ally when confronted by dozens of students, but the city would sooner collapse than disobey the ICE kidnappers.

After city hall, the protesters marched to the center of the downtown area, taking position on a roundabout with their signs. The attitude from the community was generally very positive. One driver even stopped so they could give the students larger signs they had sitting in their car. They remained there for several hours in the cold until it got dark. The students reflected on the emotions they felt that day.

“I had never gotten in trouble before, and I knew I would at least get detention. But our message was so worth standing up for that I would risk it for those more vulnerable. It was an incredible feeling to give voice to others who are too scared, and be their voice for the vulnerable.” 

The school ended up giving the students two hours of detention for interrupting the school day and walking off campus. A worthwhile trade off for every student we interviewed. They were proud to receive the consequences of speaking up for immigrant families.

What Comes Next?

The school continues its attempts to divert the students’ protest into a dead end. Less than a week after the walkout, school administrators announced they would be leading their own so-called protest in support of immigrant students. Yes, you read that correctly. The same people who did everything they could to stop the original protest from happening are now giving their “support,” so long as they can control the protest’s environment and limits. The students are facing a blatant attempt at co-optation: to adopt the students’ idea or tactic for the school’s use. This is a classic tactic of counterinsurgency, which we saw deployed time and again during the 2020 June Uprisings surrounding the murder of George Floyd.

People may question, “Why is it bad that the school is leading a protest? Won’t this allow the message to spread further?”

The staff-organized protest would claim the students’ action, strip it of all its radical content, and deploy it themselves for all to participate. The first negative effect is to completely remove the outside community from the protest. The school wants to rob the protest of any visibility off campus, as this would make it look like the school is losing control of its students. Visibility also risks more residents getting involved off campus, especially if the students make connections with outside groups. A social media post of the original protest generated over 600 comments. This kind of publicity is bad for the school; they’d much prefer to keep the protest contained on campus. The students have already shown their organizing capabilities by organizing a successful event on their own despite snares from the school, which can only hold them back.

The second negative outcome of the staff-led protest will be a gross distortion of the original protest’s message. It lets the school paint themselves as allies to the students, rather than their immediate enemy. It lets the same people who would threaten and intimidate students act as if they are on the same side, resisting against the Bad Guys in the federal government. The students’ protest sought to agitate against a complicit school administration and city government. The adult-led protest will be a performance, re-enacting the student-protest with a non-confrontational spin.

What Can be Sustained?

Bonds between students and the community

The students were correct to take their protest downtown rather than stay on campus. Many people in the city certainly heard of the protest and the committed attitude of the students. The next step is to follow up on this initiative by solidifying ties with friendly groups in the community. Immigrant organizations and progressive churches are one place to start.

Bonds with other students

Campus will remain a good place to organize as long as the school does not take any extraordinarily repressive measures. Flyers, speeches, and targeted conversations are some tools students can use. Ultimately, the students are in the best place to understand what works and what doesn’t work on campus. They should “cross the river by feeling for the stones” — take one step and look around before taking another. Don’t be afraid to experiment, fail, and get even better.

Organized Structures

As summer approaches, the students will lose the daily connection that going to school five days a week provides. To make up for this, and to take their organizing to the next level, the students could double down and create a firm structure through which to carry out any work they decide to take on. This would involve defined roles, basic rules, and regular meetings. For more guidance, we recommend Tend the Garden, What is Organizing, and The Study Group.

Political Education

Most of what we learn in school is either a half-baked truth or an outright lie. In order to unlearn their myths and stand with all oppressed peoples, we need to develop an internationalist consciousness. This kind of thinking ties our organizing to the billions of people living under the shadow of Amerikan domination; it does not come naturally to people living in the US. Anyone who disagrees probably hasn’t studied the material conditions closely enough. Development requires us to actively study political texts from a wide net and share our findings with others, like in a reading group. This is a form of collective learning; it is the mirror opposite of the top-down instruction students receive in school. Internationalism is, of course, already at the center of what the protesters are doing. They are standing up for students made to feel vulnerable by the state. Political development will be absolutely essential for avoiding the many traps that catch organizers seeking to change the world.

We leave you with the conclusion from a student’s speech on that cold afternoon:

“You just need to take one step; people are always saying that, ‘I’m just one person, I alone can’t make a change,’ but if we ever found out we all think the same way just think of the endless possibilities of what we could do. In writing this I am taking the first step for all of us. So now I will say: stay out of our schools, stay out of our communities, and stay out of our states.”

On Friday, ICE made widespread raids across Los Angeles, arresting 44 people with the express purpose of deporting them without offering even the fig leaf of liberal “due process.” By Saturday afternoon, the people of Paramount had had enough. When rumors started circulating that ICE was planning a raid on a local Home Depot, the people of Paramount gathered in force to protect their community.

The revolt began at the Home Depot at 6400 Alondra Boulevard — and was provoked by the police forces themselves. Federal agents threw flash-bangs at peaceful demonstrators to try to scare them off and complete their quota of kidnappings. The demonstrators fought back. Over the course of the day, righteous anger escalated to throwing rocks and bricks, burning cars, and establishing vehicle barricades to stop ICE deportation buses.

As has become typical, the consciousness of the masses is racing ahead of any pretension of an organized revolutionary movement. Our “Marxists” are too busy calling their senators and organizing police-approved parades to get involved, except perhaps to raise their hands in surrender and loudly proclaim a policy of treasonous social peace.

But the “Marxists” who are afraid of the spontaneous wrath of the people are exposing themselves more and more to be nothing more than toothless opportunists of the old regime. Let them show their true colors! The flags they fly look red at first glance, but look at them closely — you’ll see they’re the white flags of surrender; the white flags of reaction.

This spontaneous wrath must be organized, or it will dissolve into disillusionment and defeatism! We cannot let it.

Real revolutionists must not only embrace the spontaneous rage of the people, but give it aid and support. Marxists in the affected areas must form combat brigades at once. They must be strategic, arm themselves, and openly march with the people. “But we’ll be destroyed!” Maybe, and maybe not… but if we don’t stand up, then we deserve to be destroyed. The revolutionary who hides from the people, who insists on remaining underground at all costs, or worse, aboveground but only as spokesmen for cowardly social peace, is nothing more than an enemy partisan.

If your organization forbids you from forming combat units, leave it.

We must build combat brigades! A combat brigade is a Marxist organization, composed of militant cadre, organized along military lines for the purpose of providing support and projecting power on the ground. A combat brigade is not the same as community self-defense. Community self-defense is the construction of mass organizations, with trained Marxist membership, sometimes under the direction of Marxist organizations, that mobilizes the activated masses and forms a central spine for them to act.

Quickly, now, study Mao’s On Guerilla Warfare, the Minimanual of the Urban Guerilla, and the U.S. marines doctrine manual Warfighting.

Popular consciousness admits the need for violent confrontation and struggle against the state. The escalation and ultimate military defeat of the student movement, the breaking of the 2020 June Insurrections, the actions of Aaron Bushnell, the Universal Healthcare executioner, and Elias Rodriguez have prepared whole strata of the masses to act. No less, the obscene public show of the Trump immigration police are galvanizing popular resolve.

If you are a Marxist in an insurrectionary region, form your brigade. Be prepared for community defense. Establish emergency phone trees. Hold mass meetings. Assure the community that you will respond. Distribute flyers and pamphlets.

Contact the All-Empire Worker’s League if you want to help coordinate actions. Contact USU Press for propaganda resources. Join us.

The time has come to fight.

Speakers from teachers’ unions, faith organizations, and care-workers’ unions took the podium to air their frustrations with a government that refuses to hear the cries of a suffering public. This was the “Rally for a Moral Budget,” called by Recovery for All, a statewide coalition of liberal organizations pleading for the lives of working people in Connecticut.

Right now, even after the devastation of a global pandemic, Connecticut has an unprecedented 3 billion dollar surplus. Instead of investing this surplus into much needed social programs, Millionaire Governor Ned Lamont is absolutely giddy with his plan to start cutting taxes across the board. The state government claims that the tax cut will “provide tax relief to working men and women and families across the state.”

It won’t.

Any money going back into the pockets of working people will come right back out again as payments to the wealthy ruling classes. Tax cuts are fantastic propaganda. Yes, the government is going to take less of your money! But that’s all we heard from Lamont. What didn’t we hear?

There is no talk from the state house about the housing crisis. Not a word about the sudden and ignominious discharge of a huge number of the state educational workforce. Lamont has nothing to say about families who can’t afford food or the fact that Connecticut is the state with the highest income gap between the poor working class and the rich ruling class in the entire United States Empire.

As the rally began, each speaker rose to vent their suffering. They shouted the frustration of the working people at the uncaring marble edifices of Connecticut’s halls of government. It wrenched the heart to hear the cries of the working masses, thundering to their supposed representative that they were not only forgotten, but drowning. Even more heartbreaking, however, was the fact that not one of those speakers recognized why their cries fell only on deaf stone walls, on ears that will never hear them. The cause of their sorrows, the origin of their misery, is, of course: Capital.

As long as the working class is forced to sell its labor to the capitalist class in order to survive, we will be reduced to begging them on hands and knees for our survival while they grow rich from the fruits of our labor. They will continue to string us along by occasionally instituting reforms (that will be quietly rolled back) and convincing us that we have a say in this farce of a democracy. 

In order to make real, lasting change, there needs to be an understanding that the liberal strategy of reform can only ever take us so far. 

One of the primary flaws of liberal ideology is the inability to understand that the purpose of the state, i.e., the government, is to advance the interests of the capitalist ruling class. The plea to inject “morality” into a budget fundamentally misunderstands the nature and function of a system that can only ever work for the benefit of the wealthy and the powerful. 

Capitalism is not an apolitical, amoral tool. It is a system driven by the need to maximize profit above all else: above justice, above freedom, above life itself. The capitalist is driven to expand profits, to accumulate and hoard more and more of the wealth of the earth. It reduces all things to commodities — products to be bought and sold at a profit. It transforms every relationship into a profit-generating opportunity. Policies for the safety of the working class, social safety nets, are temporarily won by the victories of an organized working class — or they are implemented as a stopgap to delay social revolution for another week, another month, another year.

These social safety nets cut into the profits of the big capitalists. They will never voluntarily reduce their own income without something in return, so instead they siphon off the wealth of the entire world to make sure the U.S., their “home base,” the central bastion and bulwark of the world-imperialist order, is safe. They send the military to bomb and destroy other countries and raid them of their wealth, to force them into economic subjugation so cheap goods can flow back to the U.S. working classes. But this devil’s bargain can only work for so long. Eventually, even those benefits will be sacrificed on the altar of profit. There is no way to satisfy the insatiable hunger of Capital.

Liberal idealism imagines a world in which the lofty goals of justice, equality, and freedom are the driving force behind legislation and enforcement. This is not how the world works.

Historical materialism, in contrast to liberal idealism, analyzes the world on the basis of what actually happens in material reality. By studying history, even the recent past, we can understand that the wealthy capitalists make and enforce laws that maintain their power over us and make them even wealthier. 

For too long, the ruling class in the U.S. Empire has successfully suppressed the ideas of socialism and communism. They rightfully fear what will happen if these ideas proliferate. They rightfully fear what will happen if the masses look to the material reality of the world we live in, and understand the power of the people to take control of the means of production. They rightfully fear the truth that a Historical Materialist analysis reveals: we neither need nor want their chains.

The power of ideology is strong. The media, educational system, and legal system only speak the language of liberal idealism. It’s no wonder that the language of socialism and communism has been absent from popular discourse for so long. 

This is starting to change. Polling shows that, especially among the youth, capitalism is losing people’s approval while socialism is being seen in an increasingly positive light.

As the horror show of neoliberal capitalism spirals into greater and greater contradiction, the drive towards freedom and equality must take a path of freedom and equality. This path can only be tread by a united working class that stands guided by the roadsigns of historical materialism, scientific socialism, and Communism. Even now, that path is being paved by the workers who refuse to be hoodwinked by liberal reformism — our class is uniting. 

In Connecticut, the misery of the working people has a voice. Soon, it will have a name.