A Working-Class History of Fighting Deportations

Migrant farmworkers, domestic workers, and their supporters marched through San Francisco’s Mission District to call for passage of the Registry Bill in June 2024. (Courtesy of David Bacon)

​​BY
DAVID BACON
 
The US working class has a long tradition of standing up against immigrant repression. This history is a reservoir of inspiration and strategic thinking — and it can help immigrant workers and communities confront Donald Trump’s promised wave of repression.
 
The history of working-class organizing in the United States is full of examples of immigrant resistance to mass deportation, sweeps, and other tactics. Time and again, immigrant worker activity has changed the course of society. It has produced unions of workers ranging from copper miners to janitors. It turned the politics of Los Angeles head. And it is this tradition of worker resistance that is the real target of immigration enforcement waves, both current and threatened by the incoming administration.
Organizers of the past fought deportation threats just as we do today, and their experiences offer valuable insights for our present situation. Not only did they show tremendous perseverance in the face of direct threats to migrants, but these organizers also envisioned a future of greater equality, working-class rights, and social solidarity — and proposed ways to get there. Increased immigration repression has a way of making the bones of the system easier to see and the reasons for changing it abundantly clear. These organizations and coalitions defending immigrant workers, their families, and their communities have often been building blocks for movements for deeper social change.
The rich tradition of worker organizing against immigrant repression is a story of courageous struggle and a reservoir of strategic thinking that can help immigrant workers and communities confront the promised MAGA wave of repression. It involves far too many organizations and fights to list here. This article aims to show what people faced, how they fought, and what kind of future they fought for.
The Old Threat of Mass Deportation
In the outpouring of fear and outrage over Donald Trump’s threat to deport millions of undocumented immigrants, many have drawn parallels to the mass deportations of 1932–33. At the height of the Great Depression, with hunger haunting the homes of millions of working-class people, relief authorities denied food to Mexican and Mexican American families. Racist bureaucrats appealed to the government to deport them, claiming that forcing them to leave would save money and open up jobs for citizens. These age-old lies have been recycled over the last century, repeated most recently by the MAGA campaign.
Hunger was the most powerful weapon used to force people to leave. Thousands were swept up in street raids, and many more fled because of the terror these raids produced. Voluntarily or not, people were loaded into boxcars and dumped at the border gates. The euphemism of the ’30s was “repatriation.” Today’s immigration enforcers call it “self-deportation.” The idea remains the same, and Trump and J. D. Vance are only the latest proponents of this inhumane policy.
People resisted deportation through the radical organizations of the era, from the Congreso de Pueblos de Habla Española to the unions formed in bloody strikes in mines and fields. The largest farm labor strike in US history, the Pixley cotton strike, erupted in 1933 across the barrios of California’s San Joaquin Valley during that peak deportation year. Radical activists were singled out for deportation and defended by communist and socialist defense organizations, including later the Committee for the Protection of the Foreign Born. The Mexican government of the time, only a decade after the revolution, also protested and tried to help deportees.
This history of resistance is as important to remember as the history of the deportations themselves. The organizations created by resistance, and the larger working-class movement of which they were a part, survived the deportation wave. While many groups were put on the attorney general’s list of subversive organizations during the Cold War, others emerged during the civil rights era. When the immigrant rights movement peaked again in recent decades, it inherited this legacy.
​More: 
 
https://jacobin.com/2024/12/deportations-unions-immigrants-organizing-trump
 

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