Minneapolis: Paramilitary Groups Hunting Migrants

The economic decline of American imperialism is driving successive Republican and Democratic administrations to resort to military force to maintain dominance over international markets – a dominance that commercial competition can no longer ensure. By now, on many fronts, American warmongering keeps the fuse of military intervention lit, which will soon trigger a far more extensive conflict. 

On the domestic front, despite the protectionist policies undertaken by the government, the U.S. economy is heading toward an ever-deepening crisis; for this reason, the need for increasingly tight social control is becoming imperative, abandoning more rights-protecting methods and adopting those of direct repression. The United States, a nation that originated and developed through immigration, is increasingly working to close and turn away migrants at the borders, but also to deport those already on its territory. The aim is certainly not to deprive itself of that cheap labor, but to scale back its presence in times of crisis.

The campaign against migrants will, however, have the effect of keeping them in a state of illegality and precariousness, with the result of keeping wages low in the labor market—and thus also for American workers. The terror unleashed against migrants is therefore a threat directed against the native proletariat itself in the incipient economic crisis that could draw it back into the arena of class struggle.

It is a large-scale operation carried out by the paramilitary units of ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) deployed by the U.S. federal government. More than the fascist squads recruited from the ranks of the petty bourgeoisie in Italy, they resemble the SS, a direct offshoot of the Nazi state, engaged in spreading anti-proletarian terror back then, in Germany a century ago. Today, the objective is the same in an America gripped by economic crisis.

A special police force, ICE is an offshoot of the DHS, the largest federal police force (250,000 employees) established more than twenty years ago after the attack on the Twin Towers in New York, and kept alive by the various Democratic and Republican administrations that have followed one another. 

Recently, but even before the Trump administration took office, ICE was directed to target immigrants (not just undocumented ones), arrest them, and send them to concentration camps pending deportation (this is the “remigration” that even in democratic little Italy they want to implement). Tomorrow it will be tasked with the direct repression of all expressions of struggle by the American proletariat.

Stephen Miller, a White House advisor, announced in May 2025 the goal of three thousand arrests per day. With recruitment having skyrocketed (it now has 20,000 employees), as well as its budget (eight billion dollars a year), ICE has unleashed a hunt for immigrants across American cities, conducting raids on workplaces and homes in working-class neighborhoods, arresting and deporting entire families.

As in other cities, in Minneapolis, ICE’s federal forces have effectively occupied the territory, revealing—hooded and armed to the teeth—the regime’s ferocious face, persecuting and killing in cold blood anyone who dared to oppose them or simply document their actions.

With the petty bourgeoisie—which certainly fears the loss of the cheap labor provided by immigration—involved, massive demonstrations against ICE took place in Minneapolis and other U.S. cities. Individual workers have also participated in these protests, but the working class as a whole has not mobilized, taking up the struggle on its own initiative in response to the terror waged against migrants, who represent its most vulnerable segment. Until it rediscovers the path to its reorganization as a class, it can only suffer and succumb to the blows inflicted by the state of Capital.