SAN ANTONIO, TX, November 1—“From Palestine to Mexico, These Border Walls Have Got to Go” chanted over 50 public health workers and local organizers at a rally on the opening day of the American Public Health Association (APHA) national conference. Members of Progressive Labor Party (PLP) have provided leadership in the APHA for more than 40 years against racism and police violence so clearly we wanted to mobilize with our fellow public health workers against racist ICE terror. Democrats and Republicans alike have built a deportation machine that has been the tip of the spear for a fascist movement that seeks to divide immigrant workers from U.S.-born workers.  New detention centers and aggressive kidnapping tactics by ICE/CBP thugs have led many workers across the country to fight back and San Antonio is no exception. To this energy we brought in revolutionary communist politics by distributing 450 copies of a special four-page APHA CHALLENGE that explained how important racism is to the capitalist class and how a mass multiracial communist party is needed to destroy capitalism and the exploitation of all workers. 

We met many of the San Antonio fighters by reaching out to groups on the internet and met together to plan the protest to bring public health workers into the struggle.  Workers in San Antonio have been in multiple actions against the infamous Dilley detention center (which holds families and is just over an hour outside the city. But their current fight is against the planned opening of a new detention center in the city of San Antonio. They have organized large marches to the proposed center and have raised legal barriers such as environmental and economic impacts at city board meetings. They were excited to have public health join the struggle. Several sections of the APHA were supportive. Our flier, “Racist ICE Terror is a Public Health Crisis”, included seven local groups, PLP and two APHA sections and was shared electronically. Hand to hand at the conference we distributed 630 flyers to conference attendees before the rally. 

The rally reached over 200 public health workers who listened, cheered, filmed, and joined us in chanting and singing during the rally. Local speakers attacked the 287G  law that is applied throughout Texas and allows local police to act on behalf of ICE and detain workers. They demanded that the city and county act to block the new detention center. They called out the politicians for cutting the health department’s budget by 50 percent. A leading mutual aid organizer spoke about the sexual assaults that happen to women workers who are detained and deported and poignantly asked the audience to think about these women as if they were our own mothers. A speaker for PLP compared ICE with Nazi concentration camps in WWII and showed the similarity of the Border Patrol in the US to the illegal and brutal kidnappings and murder of Palestinians by the Israeli army. He reminded the public health workers of APHA’s own attacks on members who supported Palestine (CHALLENGE, 11/26/2025). Another PLP speaker described the organizing we are doing against ICE and detention centers in other states.  A local minister ended the rally with a powerful summary of the way ICE is destroying individuals, families and neighborhoods.  The grassroots organizers were then invited to join the panel at the Peace Caucus session on “Children’s Health at Dilley Detention Facility”.  Thus, this became a dynamic session with 45 attendees brainstorming on how to fight back.

Building a base in the working class remains critical to a revolutionary party. Dinner with two of the local organizers and a lively “Lunch with Comrades” event gave us the opportunity to socialize and have longer political discussions with eight new public health workers. It is now up to us to keep in touch and make plans for future actions.  

PLP fights for a world without borders and for a communist world of equality. This will require the destruction of capitalism and strong multiracial unity –not voting for capitalist politicians.   Meanwhile, at their official session on immigration, APHA’s executive director started out by saying that borders are needed for security, immigration policies are necessary, and the midterm election outcomes were a big success. As always, the leadership of APHA continues to be obsessed with polite, respectable politics, identity politics, and the Democratic party. It is clear with every conference we attend that the liberals continue to mislead public health workers and students into pacifism and electoral politics. No wonder we consider them to be the main danger to working class liberation, real public health and revolution to fight back and build for an egalitarian communist society. However, clearly this bankrupt system is quaking. Just fighting back is not enough. We must ultimately get rid of the system that allows billionaires to accumulate wealth that is really created by workers and leaves workers in wage slavery with worsening quality of life.

Power to workers, smash ICE and US imperialism. Let’s ally with Jewish and Palestinian workers to smash the racist Zionism of Israel and the U.S. We have a world to win! Thank You! AND CHECK OUT OUR NEWSPAPER: CHALLENGE-DESAFIO.