We must prepare for the long struggle ahead against ICE

The fight against ICE has galvanized millions of people in the US into what some have called its first general strike since 1946. People are rejecting this invading force en masse, asserting in the streets that an attack against one is an attack against all. 

But the struggle is far from over. In 2025, Trump added $75 billion to ICE’s previous $10 billion budget, which, if spent evenly across a four-year period, would amount to tripling its annual funds. This makes it better funded than “all other federal law enforcement agencies combined.” The plan is thus for ICE’s operations to undergo a drastic and rapid expansion. Meanwhile, Democrats have repeated their tired act: opposition for show and enabling on the low. And white supremacist elements, embedded at the highest levels of the administration, are intent on ramping up ICE power to realize their vision. 

In other words, the struggle has only started. The stakes will only increase. It is of prime importance for us, then, to develop an analysis that allows us to effectively counter the escalation. Otherwise, the prospects are bleak. 

Where to start? This short piece situates the role of ICE in the broader world-system and gives some directions for effective struggle. It is meant to be circulated in the context of growing popular mobilization, as a primer that can both provide some clarity and guide our actions. To understand and effectively fight ICE, we need to understand its structural function and tie our struggle to the broader fight against imperialism. As Malcolm X once said: “the only way we’ll get freedom for ourselves is to identify ourselves with every oppressed people in the world.”

ICE within US-led imperialism

Superficial accounts of imperialism often understand it simply as explicit aggression by imperial powers: military intervention, occupation, targeted assassinations, kidnappings, etc. But imperialism is much more than that. At root, it is a political and economic structure which produces and reproduces the dominant position of the West over the global majority.

As part of this, it attempts to ensure not only that its elites and corporations have the best conditions for accumulation, but also that its populations enjoy privileged living standards relative to the rest of the world. In other words, imperialism is neither simple aggression nor just higher profits for Western elites. It is also the enormous difference in real wages and life chances among world populations, which make up the real conditions of everyday people across the world. 

Superior living standards in the global North are crucial because they enable Northern elites to appease their populations—to buy them out of their real discontents while their living conditions steadily deteriorate and even begin to envisage a fast-approaching expiration date. The US public might be nearly completely dissatisfied with a system that alienates, overworks and impoverishes majorities more and more, but comparison to people suffering under war, violence, or deprivation in the global South provides some relief. This placating effect is what political economists have long registered under the concept of “labor aristocracy”—a working class that labors to survive but that also enjoys a privileged position relative to workers elsewhere in the world (or within), making it invested in some form of imperial rule.

The premise of this arrangement, however, is that such “privilege” is reserved for Northern populations—a small segment of global working people. The rest of the world’s peoples are to be squeezed as much as possible to obtain the highest profits and abet the global accumulation of wealth. This means that the relatively privileged position of Western populations has to be kept from the rest. Expanding it to other populations would undermine the very basis of the wealth-making that makes the system run. In short, the arrangement keeps the “peace” at home while ensuring accumulation across the globe. 

Maintaining this division between a pacified and a squeezed sector was relatively straightforward during colonialism, where explicit racial hierarchy kept entire regions and populations subjugated. But after the global de-legitimation of racism during post-WW2 decolonization, the division is harder to keep. The system has to find new ways to sustain this key pillar of its rule, or else its global profit margins (or its domestic peace) will be threatened.

Here is where borders come in. The main function of borders is to regulate access to that same labor aristocracy. They are, in fact, the precondition for its existence. People turned away at the border or deported are not only kept physically out of the US—they are kept from accessing the privileged position of populations in the global North.  Without border enforcement, this stratification of the global working class would tend to disappear, endangering the premise of imperial profit-making. Maintaining that stratification, then, becomes a crucial function for imperial rule. 

Enter ICE: the vanguard enforcement mechanism of the US border regime, dutifully fulfilling its function. Born out of the post-9/11 establishment of the draconian Department of Homeland Security, ICE —under and before Trump— violently ensures that global stratification. And its function goes well beyond those it actually deports, enforcing a regime of fear on all migrant peoples that makes them work for less and tolerate more. Thus, it enforces the racialized class structure of both US and global society—imperialism, in one word. A key cog of the imperial mechanism, ICE is the organized mercenary of US elites.

The flipside of creating a labor aristocracy, of course, is that the manufactured poverty and violence imposed on countries of the global South pushes people to migrate North. This violence can take many forms, from structures of unequal exchange that shortchange Southern economies; to deadly sanctions regimes (which every year kill half a million civilians, especially children and elderly); to the imposition of economic underdevelopment, which precludes sovereign planning and employment-generation for broad swathes of people in the South. 

In short, the same structure that fuels ICE’s growth and its increasing brutality is at the root of people coming North in the first place. The problem has a common root. 

Opposing ICE, opposing imperialism 

Indeed, it is not a coincidence that ICE’s growth parallels the long-term growth in military expenditure. Populations must be controlled at home and abroad—both immigrants and the global South have to provide cheap labor and resources, lest the system collapse. 

As argued, this structure needs to stratify populations worldwide, and as long as that need persists, so will ICE. To effectively oppose it, then, we must struggle against the conditions that make it necessary: a system that needs profound global inequality to balance its political and economic acts—its “peace” and its profits. If we want to be effective, we need to strike at the root. Otherwise, the demand for an institution like ICE will remain—and with it, its unrelenting violence. 

This means that to be anti-ICE is to be anti-imperialist. Without imperialism, ICE would not only cease to have a function, but the phenomenon of South-North immigration would most likely decrease. It is only in the absence of such a structure, then, that ICE can cease to exist.  

Any anti-ICE effort that does not confront imperialism will simply postpone the problem. It will (1) maintain the unequal structures that force people to migrate North and (2) not challenge the dual system of rights between citizens and migrants, which is the condition of ICE’s existence and the root of its violence. Opposing anything less will simply provide ground for ICE to continue growing. 

In this context, simply denouncing ICE’s “reign of terror”, as most progressive leaders have done, will not only do little to stop the terror in the short term—it also provides little in the way of a solution. By excluding the root of ICE’s existence—imperialism—from both conversation and policy, this position ensures the continuation of the problem. 

Any serious opposition to ICE, then, must oppose imperialist economic extraction, murderous sanctions and military interventions, and any other imperial violation of the sovereignty of global South nations. Foremost, the anti-ICE struggle must align itself with the struggles of the rest of the global South in achieving liberation from US-led imperialism, from armed resistance to genocide across West Asia to developmental efforts in West Africa or China. To be truly effective, we must realize that these struggles make enormous contributions to weakening the unequal US-led global order that produces and necessitates ICE. 

Only thus do we stand any chance at winning. The only way we’ll get freedom for ourselves is to identify with every oppressed people in the world.

Organizing this time

The question confronting the anti-ICE struggle today is whether it will be sufficiently organized to face the coming offensive by the state. Even if bouts of confrontation recede, they are likely to reemerge and recur. And if ICE triples in size, are we ready to match that growth with collective organization? 

In this moment of escalation, we need to build sustainable structures that develop the operational capacity to act and respond to the coming assault. This goes well beyond marching or protesting—it demands of us that we can do stuff, step by step. And this is above all a practical problem. Not one based on complete ideological alignment, but on a shared recognition of the impending threat posed by the state. We must also let go of hasty reflexes against discipline or structure and not repeat the mistakes of the last 15 years, which have left us impotent and without any results to show for.

We are at a time when it is becoming increasingly clear that ICE can and will be used against anybody significantly opposing the white supremacist plan. ICE can and will be weaponized against “citizens”. Under these conditions, what recently appeared as a distant need to most becomes an imperative. And on it depends not just self-defense but the prospect of any liberated future. 

This commentary appeared first in the Black Agenda Report. For the full piece, visit www.blackagendareport.com.