East Boston, October 17–A group of PLers and our base held a bull-horn rally in East Boston, a mostly Central American Latin community that’s being targeted by ICE’s terror campaign. A popular Colombian restaurant in the community has been raided by ICE multiple times detaining restaurant goers, including a friend of someone in our base. We held a banner that said,  “Stop Racist Deportations” and distributed hundreds of leaflets and CHALLENGE and were well received by the community. New members and friends played a leading role in organizing the rally and spoke on the bullhorn in English and Spanish, overcoming their fears in order to meet this new fascist challenge facing the working class. We attacked both the outright racist terror of the Trump administration and explained how during the Obama/Biden administration even more deportations occurred setting the stage for attacks on immigrant workers now.

Why workers must fight ICE

ICE terror is being experienced all over the Boston area. When a bread winner gets detained, it leaves their family in crisis forcing others, often children and young adults, to fill their shoes. Undocumented immigrants are afraid to leave their homes. Hispanic history month at nearby Bunker Hill Community College fizzled as Latin students were afraid to be in the limelight.

As the Donald Trump administration fulfills its cruel and racist promise to deport 3,000 immigrants a day, the working class is rising up to oppose it. Other militant Anti-ICE protests were held in Somerville and Everett, both heavily immigrant communities. The Everett protest followed the arrest and detention of a 13 year-old Brazilian boy, accused of ties to a criminal gang. PLP members need to take the lead on our jobs and communities to defend immigrants against these fascist attacks as well as widen our base for communism.