We are publishing here the report to the Ninth Congress of the Socialist Equality Party (US) given by Eric London. The Congress was held from August 2 to 7, 2026. This report introduced the third resolution, “For the defense of immigrants and the abolition of the immigration Gestapo,” which was unanimously adopted.

In the first 18 months of its second term, the Trump administration has continued its efforts to establish authoritarian rule by using immigration as the instrument for dismantling the democratic rights of the entire population. The aim of a powerful section of the American ruling class in carrying this strategy through is to abolish the Constitution and the democratic rights won through the American Revolution and Civil War.

Through this political initiative, the federal government has declared war on the population. Consider the scale of disruption of social life in the working class. Tens of thousands of ICE and CBP agents are presently operating as an extra-legal paramilitary within the state. In cities and towns throughout the country, they are arresting, at present, 3,000 people per day. This means that every day, almost 3,000 families, 3,000 workplaces, 3,000 classrooms are directly impacted by the crackdown. On a given night at present, roughly 66,000 people are detained in hundreds of internment camps, and half a million people total have been in ICE detention since Trump took office.

According to ProPublica, 200,000 children have had a mother or father detained by ICE in the last 18 months—and 145,000 of these children are US citizens. According to the Brookings Institution, 64 percent of high school principals say some immigrant families are pulling their children from schools as a result of immigration raids. And according to the Marshall Project, over 6,200 children have themselves been detained by ICE since Trump came to office at the notorious internment camp in Dilley, Texas.

Legally, through this historically unprecedented campaign against the rights of the population, the Trump administration is working to establish a state of exception. It has taken the executive branch far beyond the outer edges of its legal authority. It has invoked several emergency laws that lie at the core of the American bourgeoisie’s historic tools of self-preservation, laws like the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 and the Smith Act. It has threatened to establish martial law by invoking the Insurrection Act. It has deployed troops to major cities like Los Angeles, Washington D.C., and Minneapolis. It has turned the language and legal tools of the war on terror against the domestic population, the so-called “enemy within,” assassinating American citizens and sentencing young protesters to life in prison for expressing opposition to detention conditions at the Prairieland concentration camp in Texas. It has brazenly attacked the separation of powers principle by violating federal court orders deeming their policies unconstitutional. Its highest officials discussed suspending habeas corpus, concluding that the time was not right, yet.

Whatever remained of American “democracy” is breaking down in real time. No institution of the political establishment is stopping Trump. Trump has been aided and abetted by a Congress dominated by insurrectionists. Whatever opposition exists among district courts is essentially nullified by the compromised Supreme Court, which came one vote away from sanctioning Trump’s attempt to overturn the 14th Amendment by executive fiat.

How could any institution of the capitalist state—any bourgeois political party—be expected to oppose Trump, when they are each and all responsible not only for his political rise but also, in a very direct way, for sharpening the legal and operational implements that Trump and his fascist advisors are now using with all deliberate speed against the domestic population?

For 30 years, dating back to the Clinton administration and continuing on a line through all subsequent administrations, both parties have collaborated to create a massive domestic police force in the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), construct a network of internment camps, arm this apparatus with military equipment, clothe them with immunity from accountability, cover them with the extra-legal authority expanded on a bipartisan basis through the so-called war on terror, and strip the federal courts of jurisdiction to hear almost all constitutional claims against these agents of the president. This is the Guantanamo-ization of domestic political life, where views the executive branch deems “anti-American” make one a “domestic terrorist” who can be jailed or even assassinated in a manufactured state of emergency aimed against the population itself, citizen and non-citizen alike. After decades of unending war on the world, American imperialism, through the person of a flabby, Hitler-admiring, 80-year-old conman, has declared war on the American people.

This initiative, directed by the insurrectionists from the scene of the crime they committed on January 6, 2021, has not only instilled fear, it is also engendering a profound level of hostility against the federal government. But this opposition, redolent of the opposition engendered by the British occupation of Boston, will not organically lead to socialism. The sharpness of the crisis presents the party with immense political obligations. The administration is setting up a social clash of immense historic proportions, for which the party and the working class must be politically prepared.

This report will attempt to detail the main elements of the Trump administration’s political strategy.

Invocation of Alien Enemies Act

In March 2025, the administration invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798. Under the statute, passed by the Federalists as part of the reactionary Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, the government may deport citizens of other countries without any due process whatsoever when the country is at war and subject to an “invasion.” It was first invoked at the time of passage in the panic of the Adams administration’s undeclared war with France and was aimed at the French and Irish émigrés who filled the ranks of the Jeffersonian opposition, immigrants whose crime was their sympathy for the French Revolution and their votes against the Federalists. When the same statute was invoked during the Second World War, it supplied the pseudo-legal authority for the internment of 120,000 people of Japanese descent, most of them American citizens.

Invoking the act here meant claiming that a Venezuelan street gang has engaged in an “invasion” of the United States. This amounts to a legal declaration that the US government is at war with the population, and that immigration constitutes a military “invasion” justifying the suspension of constitutional rights for those on US soil who are unquestionably protected by the Constitution. In many cases, individuals were deported to CECOT without hearings or judicial oversight simply for having tattoos, and the administration violated court orders requiring compliance with the Constitution, as in the case of Maryland man Kilmar Abrego Garcia.

Attack on “anti-American” and left-wing speech

At roughly the same time Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act, the administration launched in earnest its crackdown on speech. In January 2025, the administration had issued executive orders directing the government to strip the visas and residency of non-citizens who engaged in what it called anti-American activity or support for terrorism, language broad enough to reach any criticism of American foreign policy—and it applied this, above all, to those who protested the genocide in Gaza. It set up a secret “Tiger Team” to spy on and monitor the speech of student protesters. Then, in March, it went hunting. Federal agents moved onto the campuses where the protests had been largest and seized students and scholars, claiming their presence threatens foreign policy. It has also detained one DACA recipient for 10 months and counting by invoking, for the first time, a separate statutory provision, this from the bipartisan REAL ID Act of 2005 barring non-citizens from “endorsing or espousing” terrorism based on his social-media posts alone.

This is the method of the Palmer Raids of 1919 and 1920, when foreign-born socialists, communists, and anarchists were seized without charge and deported for their beliefs in reaction to the Russian Revolution and American imperialism’s involvement in the First World War. And now, as then, the censorship is aimed against all, regardless of citizenship, because the right of American citizens to listen to the views espoused by their non-citizen coworkers and classmates is also implicated by this censorship.

As a result of this campaign, targets like Rumeysa Ozturk and Momodou Taal left the United States. Federal courts of appeals have recently ruled against Mahmoud Khalil and Mohsen Mahdawi, finding that a 1996 law passed by Democrats and Republicans and signed into law by Bill Clinton—the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act—stripped federal courts of jurisdiction to even hear their arguments of First Amendment retaliation in the first place. Those issues will ultimately be decided by the Supreme Court, likely next year. But the First Amendment is not a dial, it is an on-off switch. Either speech is free or it is censored and speakers and listeners intimidated through state-sanctioned chilling. However, the policy has failed as a method of suppressing social discontent, and on the contrary has only further engendered opposition.

Invocation of dormant Alien Registration Act provisions

The Trump administration has also invoked the Alien Registration Act, requiring every non-citizen in the United States aged 14 or older to register with the government and be fingerprinted, to disclose membership in organizations, and to report any change of address; during the Second World War some 5 million people were registered under its authority, each issued a numbered card required to be carried at all times. The Act is part of the Smith Act, which, as we know, was passed by a Democratic Congress, signed into law by Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and made it a federal crime to advocate, or belong to any organization that advocated, the violent overthrow of the government. This was the first peacetime federal sedition law since 1798 and it was used for the first time against the Socialist Workers Party (SWP). In this single statute Congress fused the attack on speech with a national registry that made every non-citizen locatable and identifiable, and a criminal prohibition.

The registry was the operational foundation for Japanese internment. And beginning April 11, 2025, the Trump administration invoked its long-dormant provisions, making failure to register or failure to carry proof of registration federal crimes, punishable by imprisonment.

Expansion of internment camps

The Trump administration has also undertaken a historically unprecedented expansion of immigrant internment camps. When Trump returned to office in January 2025, ICE held roughly 39,000 people in custody on any given day. By mid-January 2026 that figure had passed 65,000, an increase of nearly 70 percent in a single year, and Congress had appropriated $45 billion in the summer of 2025 for detention alone—enough to fund an eventual capacity of up to 135,000 beds. By February 2026, ICE was holding people across 456 separate facilities while publicly disclosing only 220 of them.

The expansion is not only numeric, it also involves the transformation of the facilities themselves, which are trending toward a level of depravity that rises to the level of state murder. For example, the Everglades Detention Facility in Florida, built on an old airstrip and marketed by the state as “Alligator Alcatraz,” opened in July 2025 to hold roughly 3,000 people. Amnesty International, after a research mission there in the fall of 2025, documented conditions it concluded amounted in places to torture: toilets overflowing with sewage into the areas where people slept, cameras positioned directly above toilets, lights left on 24 hours a day, chronic denial of medical care, and extreme heat with no adequate protection from insects, where disease spread throughout the facility. The facility was finally closed in June 2026, not quite a year after it opened, following massive public outcry.

Camp East Montana, built on a section of Fort Bliss in El Paso, Texas—ground that had itself been used to intern people of Japanese descent during the Second World War—opened in August 2025 with a capacity of up to 5,000, making it the largest immigration detention facility in the country. In less than a year it recorded three deaths. A joint investigation by Human Rights Watch and the ACLU, based on interviews with more than 80 people, documented guards beating detainees in retaliation for hunger strikes and requests for medical care, imposing collective punishment on entire cells, and holding people for months in a facility contracted for stays of no more than two weeks. Across the whole detention system, 2025 was the deadliest year on record, with more deaths than the preceding four years combined.

The two family-detention centers in Texas that the Trump administration reopened in 2025, Dilley and Karnes, were both built and first staffed under the Obama-Biden administration in 2014, in a deliberate expansion of family detention meant to deter Central American asylum seekers. Fort Bliss and other military installations were used to detain immigrant children under Obama in that same year, and again under Trump’s first term. Biden’s own Department of Homeland Security discussed restarting family detention as recently as 2023, before Trump revived it outright in 2025. The camps of the current period are an expansion of an apparatus that both parties funded, sited, and staffed across three decades. What is new, and what marks a break not only in degree but in the character of the thing itself, is the scale of the current build-out, the private-contractor profit built into every bed, and the documented record of torture and death that has followed directly from it.

Deployment of soldiers to American cities

Across 2025 and 2026 the administration federalized California’s National Guard over the governor’s objection and put Marines into Los Angeles, it deployed troops to Chicago, Portland, Memphis, New Orleans, and in January 2026, under an operation the government called Metro Surge, some 3,000 federal agents descended on Minneapolis. In the course of this operation, agents opened fire on civilian protesters, killing two United States citizens: Renée Good and Alex Pretti. These were extrajudicial state assassinations. The administration’s response was to defend the shooters and to turn the label of “domestic terrorism” against those who protested. Subsequently, the DOJ charged 15 anti-ICE activists in the city and is attempting to prosecute them as part of an “Antifa” conspiracy.

These deployments are unquestionably bound up with the upcoming midterm elections and Trump’s plans to steal the election in 2028. Governor J.B. Pritzker of Illinois has charged directly that the troops are being deployed “to ensure Republicans keep control of Congress.” Figures around the president have mused aloud about stationing immigration agents at polling places; the president himself has said he wished he had deployed the Guard in 2020. An administration that has normalized soldiers in the streets under the banner of immigration enforcement, that treats its political opponents as terrorists and their cities as occupied territory, is assembling the means to contest an election by force if it cannot win it otherwise, just as Trump attempted on January 6, 2021.

Evisceration of due process

The administration has eviscerated due process for those trapped in the deportation and detention machine, with implications that go far beyond non-citizens. By executive memo, the government has reinterpreted immigration law to treat anyone who ever entered the country without inspection—including people who have lived here for decades, married citizens, and raised American children—as an “applicant for admission” who may be detained for the entire length of removal proceedings with no bond hearing before any judge, ever. This applies to tens of thousands of people.

The mass deportation process set up by both parties is stacked so completely against the detained person that the word “process” barely applies. There is no right to counsel. Unlike a criminal defendant, non-citizens have no Sixth Amendment right to a lawyer. A non-citizen can be subject to deportation without any hearing at all if they have been in the country for less than two years.

Individuals are increasingly being deported to third countries not their own, in one case to South Sudan on less than 16 hours’ notice. People like Kilmar Abrego Garcia were essentially disappeared under the Alien Enemies Act and sent to the torture chamber at CECOT in El Salvador. Those who do get hearings face an entirely rigged process. The immigration “courts” are an office inside the Department of Justice and Trump has purged the immigration judges and the Board of Immigration Appeals of any judge who does not deny all asylum claims and other claims for relief from removal.

The Constitution does not confine its protections to citizens, and the framers chose their words with care. The Fifth Amendment forbids the government to deprive any “person” of liberty without due process, and so the attack on a non-citizen’s due process is an attack on everyone’s due process rights.

Breakdown of separation of powers

While enforcing these measures, the Trump administration has also crossed into systematic, open noncompliance with federal court orders deeming their policies unconstitutional. When a federal judge ordered planes carrying men removed under the Alien Enemies Act turned back mid-flight, the administration let them land anyway and later called the episode an error it would not correct. In Minnesota, a federal judge found that 96 separate court orders had been violated in his district in the month of January 2026 alone, and in a related case ordered the acting director of ICE to appear personally and show cause why he should not be held in contempt.

Judges reviewing these patterns have, in some cases, stated plainly the government has “taken the presumption of regularity ... and destroyed it,” and that in a matter of months it may have forfeited a trust “earned over generations.” A Reagan-appointed appellate judge said in one case: if the executive may today deport without due process and in disregard of court orders, “what assurance will there be tomorrow that it will not deport American citizens?”

The administration has launched an unprecedented campaign against the Article III courts. Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche told the Federalist Society in November 2025 that the Department of Justice is effectively at “war” with the federal district courts, accusing judges who ruled against the administration of being “rogue activist judges” abusing their office. Stephen Miller has referred to any judge who rules against the administration as part of a “judicial insurrection.” Trump himself has called judges “monsters,” “lunatics,” and “communist radical left judges,” and in at least one case demanded a judge’s impeachment on social media for ruling against him; congressional Republicans have followed with impeachment resolutions filed against at least eight sitting district judges, each grounded not in any misconduct but in disagreement with a ruling.

The US Marshals Service, which is responsible for protecting the roughly 2,600 active federal judges, recorded 564 threats against judges in fiscal year 2025 and had already logged 324 threats against 253 different judges by early June of fiscal year 2026. Chief Justice John Roberts, who rarely comments on current controversies, has twice felt compelled to warn publicly that personal attacks on judges are “dangerous,” even while ruling in favor of the president responsible for this and denying that the threats are primarily the responsibility of any person or party.

Invocation of Alien Terrorist Removal Court

Just last week, the administration invoked, for the first time, a secret immigration court called the Alien Terrorist Removal Court created by the bipartisan Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996, signed into law by Clinton. This special tribunal is unlike anything in American history, giving the Attorney General the power to expel non-citizens on the strength of evidence they are never permitted to see. The government lays its classified case before the judge in secret; the target and their lawyer are not allowed to confront witnesses, have no right to hear classified argument, cannot apply for asylum or most other forms of relief from removal, and there is no right to challenge the constitutionality of how the evidence against them was acquired—i.e., through illegal searches or even testimony elicited through torture.

This represents the machinery of Guantanamo Bay brought onto American soil and turned against people living in the United States, perhaps for decades, to whom the Constitution unquestionably applies. The commissions of the war on terror tried non-citizens designated as enemies before special tribunals, on secret and classified evidence, outside the ordinary courts and stripped of the rights of confrontation and disclosure that define a fair trial.

But this is happening on US soil to deprive individuals who are unquestionably protected by the Constitution of their most important liberty interest—their freedom from federal custody. This is the classic organ of dictatorship. That a bipartisan Congress built this machinery and left it ready in the drawer is another confirmation of the criminal role of both parties in paving the way for Trump’s operation dictatorship today.

Attack on birthright citizenship

The single most important element of Trump’s attack on democratic rights, however, is the effort to abolish birthright citizenship. On the first day of his second term Trump decreed that children born on American soil to undocumented parents, or to parents on temporary visas, are not citizens. The principle of jus soli, the right of the soil, is the democratic principle of the New World, set against the old European rule of citizenship by blood, under which legal belonging descends by lineage and a person is fixed at birth in the caste of his ancestors. The principle of citizenship by birthright was written into the Constitution after the Civil War to destroy forever the doctrine behind the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision, which had held that slaves born in this country possess no rights the government was bound to respect.

Trump made this the backbone of his legal and political strategy. He attended Supreme Court oral argument in person, the first time any president has done so in US history. And the Supreme Court came one vote away from ruling that the president can overturn the cornerstone of the 14th Amendment by executive fiat.

Four justices—Kavanaugh, Gorsuch, Alito, and Thomas—held that the Constitution does not provide birthright citizenship to non-citizens born on US soil. Their rationale is fascistic. They argue that non-citizens lack complete and exclusive allegiance to the United States such that the child of a foreigner, who owes allegiance elsewhere, may be excluded from the nation of his birth. This theory revives the logic of Dred Scott itself by asserting that ancestry, not birth, determines one’s access to the rights of citizenship, and that a class of people may be born within the country and condemned by descent to permanent exclusion—a hereditary caste of the stateless, a condition passed from parent to child.

That the Supreme Court came one vote away from abandoning one of the central democratic achievements of the Civil War is a remarkable testament to the rot that pervades all of the institutions of American capitalism. Recall that one of the grievances listed against the King enumerated in the Declaration of Independence was that “He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners.”

But alongside its attack on citizenship at birth, the Trump administration has moved to strip citizenship after the fact, through an accelerating campaign of denaturalization aimed at people who became Americans through the naturalization process. A Justice Department memorandum in June 2025 made denaturalization a top enforcement priority; by the end of that year, internal guidance was reportedly directing field offices to supply 100 to 200 denaturalizations.

The reactionary crescendo of four decades of political reaction

Every legal instrument now being used to advance Trump’s plot for dictatorship was designed, built, and defended over the last 30 years, by administrations of both parties, and the Democratic Party played an active role at each stage of the construction.

In 1994, Bill Clinton launched Operation Gatekeeper, militarizing the border at San Diego under the doctrine of “prevention through deterrence”—adding agents, checkpoints, walls, and detention beds, and deliberately funneling migrants into the deadly deserts, where thousands would die. Two years later Clinton signed the two laws of 1996 that remade American immigration into an engine of mass repression: they created the very secret court now convened for the first time, made detention mandatory for broad classes of immigrants, invented the expedited removal that deports people without a judge, gutted judicial review, and drew the hundred-mile enforcement zone that now blankets most of the population.

After September 11, a bipartisan Congress expanded the so-called “anti-terrorism” apparatus, adding the “endorse or espouse” provisions that punish non-citizen speech and association—and the Bush administration built the machinery of indefinite detention and secret evidence as a permanent feature of the law. Then the Obama administration deported more people than any before it, earning its president the title of deporter-in-chief, opening the family-detention centers at Dilley and Karnes, and industrializing the detention system to a scale none of its predecessors had imagined.

After Trump’s January 6 plot came inches short of success, the Biden administration spent four years dismantling the right to asylum and normalizing the fascistic language of the Trump administration. It deployed CBP agents to whip Haitian immigrants crossing the Rio Grande. It kept the Trump-era pandemic expulsions in force for more than two years. In June 2024 it issued a proclamation that all but shut the border to asylum seekers, suspending the right whenever crossings passed a threshold. It expanded expedited removal, continued to build the border wall it had promised to halt, and carried out more removals in a single year than any administration in a decade. By the time Biden left office, the Democratic Party had carried out much of Trump’s anti-immigrant policies.

In 2024, Kamala Harris ran to the right on immigration, campaigning on her support for a border-security bill that would have raised the asylum standard and hired thousands more agents, and promising “tough, smart solutions to secure the border.” In this campaign Harris was promoted by the Democratic Socialists of America and figures like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, while the nationalist Bernie Sanders has since praised Trump’s border policies, denouncing immigration for taking American wages, and dismissing open borders as “a Koch brothers proposal” that would “make everybody in America poorer.” And during the massive protests that developed in the aftermath of the state murder of Renée Nicole Good and Alex Pretti, the Democrats and the union apparatus worked to prevent a movement from developing toward a general strike.

Political conclusions

To summarize, the Trump administration is using immigration as the basis of its strategy of establishing a dictatorship. It is doing so through legal tools sharpened over the years—and in particular the last 30 years—by the Democratic Party. While non-citizens may be the immediate targets and feel the impact of the policies most bluntly, each element of Trump’s campaign is directed not only against non-citizens but against the population as a whole and specifically against socialism, about which Trump rants with increased regularity and hysteria.

The Trump administration’s policies have engendered deep social opposition, but immigration is also the issue upon which Trump is attempting to build a mass base for his reactionary program, taking advantage of the confusion caused by decades of national chauvinism promoted by both parties and the trade union apparatuses. Marx, in an 1870 letter to Sigfrid Meyer and August Vogt, discussed the antagonism fostered between the English and Irish working class. He wrote:

This antagonism is artificially kept alive and intensified by the press, the pulpit, the comic papers, in short, by all the means at the disposal of the ruling classes. This antagonism is the secret of the impotence of the English working class, despite its organisation. It is the secret by which the capitalist class maintains its power. And the latter is quite aware of this.

And for the American ruling class, the attack on immigrants has always been the keystone mechanism for the suppression of communism, socialism, and revolution. This has been constant from the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 and the deportation of French immigrant supporters of the French Revolution, the first speech-related immigration restrictions imposed after the assassination of President McKinley, the Palmer Raids, the national origins quotas of the 1920s, the Smith Act, the Clinton and Bush-era laws, and the crackdown on socialist and left-wing speech today.

Perhaps no ruling class recognizes better than the American ruling class that the objective process of international migration and international integration contains a revolutionary kernel, that the flow of people and the flow of ideas are inextricably linked, that nationalist reaction and restriction are the antidotes, because experience has taught the ruling class that blocking the unity of the working class by forging racial and national division is a necessary component of its strategy of self-preservation.

The decisive question now is the subjective question. Whether Trump’s strategy succeeds or not will depend on the intervention of the party. Trump is not a mastermind, he is an improvisor who is searching, with difficulty, to build a mass base. His strategy is the product not of strength but of weakness, and it reaches more and more feverish dimensions as workers come into conflict with the oligarchic character of his rule.

This places the resolution’s importance in full focus, and in particular on the need to develop opposition to this initiative among rank-and-file workers. It is necessary that we intervene forcefully to forge the unity of the working class of all national backgrounds, to mobilize the working class in defense of basic democratic rights, and to root the democratic struggle in the fight for the urgent economic needs of the masses of working people of all backgrounds.

Our Resolution calls for full rights for all workers regardless of where they are from, to travel the world as they see fit. In a world comprised now more than ever before of immigrants, including immigrants from the country to the cities of the global south, this demand is necessary. The resolution concludes by referencing the call for the abolition of ICE and CBP and says:

These demands will not be realized through the courts, nor through the Democratic Party. They will be realized through the independent mass mobilization of the working class: the defense of immigrant workers by their coworkers and neighbors, organized through rank-and-file committees in every workplace and neighborhood, and the mobilization of the full industrial and social power of the working class against the police-state buildup. The defense of immigrants is the defense of the working class as a whole, and a component of the fight for the unity of the workers of the Americas in the world socialist revolution.

We are not making an appeal that the ruling class change this or that policy, or try to make things slightly better for those that must be detained and deported. This resolution recognizes that in the 21st century, the right of a worker to travel the world freely without fear of criminalization, death, or detention is a fundamental one. It is not an American phenomenon, as the response of the governments of Europe to the events in Morocco and Spain show. The defense of immigrants must serve as the spearhead of the defense of the democratic rights of the entire working class in the global counter-offensive against social counterrevolution. No genuine defense of immigrants is possible without opposition to imperialist war and to the reactionary nationalist climate that war inevitably fosters.

I will conclude by stressing one imperative point: The defense of immigrants is not merely one important democratic question, among many. It is a strategic one for the revolutionary movement—a necessary prerequisite for reviving socialist internationalism within the working class and for forging the political unity of the 21st century international working class.