the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
Jun 19, 2017
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents arrested more than 100 Chaldeans in the Detroit area, threatening them with deportation to Iraq because of past criminal convictions.
Chaldeans are Iraqi-American Christians. They likely face persecution, perhaps including torture or death, if sent back to Iraq, now the scene of violence between various sects within the largely Muslim majority population.
The Chaldean community in Detroit is large, and many have lived and worked in the U.S. for decades.
Chaldeans are not the only group recently singled out for the threat of deportation in ICE’s latest ramped up campaign against immigrants. In the Nashville, Tennessee area, members of the Kurdish community have spoken out about the recent harassment of dozens of Kurds by ICE officials, with six people being detained.
These detentions look like ICE’s attempt to appear "equal opportunity" in its attacks. It is using the pretext of detainees’ past criminal convictions to justify the deportations to the American public. But many of the convictions against the detainees are very old, and those arrested had paid their debts to society long ago.
Whether the attacks by the politicians and the immigration agencies they use are carried out against Christians, Kurds, Muslims or any other community, they are being conducted as a way of dividing the working class. It’s simply a way to convince us to see immigrants and people in other countries as our enemies.
Our true enemies are the politicians themselves leading the charge, and the wealthy class that stands behind them.