Tempest Magazine

Years ago I recognized my kinship with all living beings, and I made up my mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest on earth. I said then, and I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it, and while there is a criminal element I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.

–Eugene V. Debs

Six years ago, the racist police murder of George Floyd sparked the biggest uprising in the history of the United States. Across the country, over 26 million people poured into the streets for months in a mass multiracial movement against the police and jails that enforce U.S. capitalism’s class and social inequalities.

Calls to defund and abolish the police emerged as organic demands of the movement. The burning down of a Minneapolis police precinct proved more popular than both presidential candidates. Faced with a profound crisis of legitimacy, the two capitalist parties each in their own way launched a counteroffensive to shore up and expand the police state at the core of our bourgeois democracy.

Tragically, some on the Left have adapted to the backlash. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez recently ridiculed the movement and its demands, quipping “woke 1.0 was crazyyyyy,” while Jacobin writers such as Paul Heideman, Eric Blanc, Ben Burgis, and Dustin Guastella have come out against defund and abolition in the name of what they describe as “mass politics.”

Their position is not only profoundly mistaken, but dangerous. Their echoing of ruling-class attacks on abolitionism and support for the police surrenders the ideological ground won by the 2020 rebellion, undermines the struggle against President Trump’s authoritarianism, and impedes the fight for socialism.

Ruling Class Backlash

Their arguments must be understood in the context of the bipartisan backlash against Black Lives Matter. Each party has played its traditional role. In 2020, President Trump and his Republican Party assassinated the character of George Floyd, demonized BLM activists as terrorists, defended the police, rallied support for racist counterdemonstrations, turned vigilante Kyle Rittenhouse into a right-wing hero, and even threatened to deploy troops to repress protests.

The Democrats, of course, pretended to be the movement’s ally, with lifetime supporters of policing like Nancy Pelosi donning kente cloth and bending her knee in the Capitol building. Mayors painted Black Lives Matter on city streets and enacted corporate Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) measures. They did so to co-opt the struggle and turn Black Lives Matter into Black Votes Matter for Joe Biden. The ruling class demobilized the movement, opening the door for both parties to increase funding for cops, ICE, CBP, and the FBI.

From Compassionate Policing to Authoritarianism

Once in power, President Biden vowed to “fund, fund, fund the police.” He escalated the bipartisan war on migrants–shutting down the border, continuing the construction of Trump’s border wall, and ramping up deportations. Biden and Democratic governors and mayors proposed and, in many cases, passed bills named after George Floyd. These dramatically increased funding for policing and prisons under cover of fake reforms like community policing, body cameras, and professional training. Under Trump and Biden, national police expenditure increased by forty percent.

The Democrats thereby re-legitimized and enacted the right’s law-and-order agenda. This has led to an increase in police murders every year since 2020 and paved the way for the return of the racist-in-chief Donald Trump and his white supremacist Republican Party. Despite the national drop in crime, Trump seized the opening provided by the Democrats, whipping up a racist moral panic over false claims about lawlessness, lies about Black criminality, nonsensical allegations of “reverse racism” against DEI, and a xenophobic assault on immigrants.

Trump has funded, expanded, and weaponized the police state to an unprecedented degree. His “Big Beautiful Bill” poured $75 billion into the coffers of ICE to abduct immigrants and throw them into concentration camps. He deployed the National Guard to patrol Washington, D.C. in search of nonexistent criminals, reducing them to weeding the city’s unkempt gardens.

He deployed his ICE Gestapo in city after city as an occupying army, resulting in the murders of Renee Good, Alex Pretti, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, Johan Sebastian Duran Guerrero, Silverio Villegas González, and Isaias Sanchez Barboza, to name only a few. Many more have died in ICE concentration camps. When the killing of Good and Pretti triggered a city-wide uprising and a national day of protest, Trump unleashed his beefed-up surveillance state to snoop on activists in the name of controlling left-wing terrorism.

His McCarthyite campaign led to charges against the Minneapolis 15 and the conviction of the Prairieland 9. Now, with his popularity plummeting and his party certain to lose the midterms, Trump has taken aim at democracy itself in an attempt to rig the elections. He has gerrymandered districts, his Supreme Court has gutted the Voting Rights Act, and some like Steve Bannon are calling for ICE to be deployed at the polls to deter Black and Brown voters.

Democratic Party Backlash and Left Accommodation

The Democratic Party’s “resistance” to Trump’s ethnonationalist authoritarianism has been weak, counter-productive, and barely worthy of the name. This explains why the party’s approval rating remains essentially tied with that of the Republican Party at 40 percent.

At best, the Democrats have demanded fake reforms to ICE, like body cameras and more training, which Trump happily enacted to legitimate his escalating war on migrants. Internally, the Democratic Party pressured its candidates to disavow any radical critiques of the police. Rather than stand up against this calumny, reformist politicians have disowned their previous positions.

Their position is not only profoundly mistaken, but dangerous. Their echoing of ruling-class attacks on abolitionism and support for the police surrenders the ideological ground won by the 2020 rebellion, undermines the struggle against President Trump’s authoritarianism, and impedes the fight for socialism.

Zohran Mamdani apologized for calling the police racist during his campaign for mayor of New York City. AOC dismissed the movement and the radicalization it produced as collective insanity. Mamdani defended her, saying people can change their positions, while he himself praised Jessica Tisch, his police commissioner, the law-and-order heir to a billionaire family, for lowering New York City’s crime rate.

These reversals derive from their strategy of prioritizing electoral campaigns within a capitalist party over mass struggle. They wager that by abandoning their previous positions they can win elected office and advance socialist demands. In fact, they are capitulating to a capitalist party well-versed in co-opting and neutralizing the Left.

Reformist Intellectuals Against Black Lives Matter

Several self-avowed Marxists have supported AOC and Mamdani’s abandonment of abolitionism. Eric Blanc dismisses Black Lives Matter’s call for defunding the police and refunding systems of care as ultra-left and an impediment to their idea of “mass politics.” There are two key problems with this argument.

First, as decades of Gallup polling have documented, the demand to shift funding from cops to care is actually popular. As some have pointed out, Jacobin’s own polling data demonstrates that defund is more popular among working-class people than spending on mass transit. And second, even if defund wasn’t popular, raising the demand is both morally and strategically right.

Remember, every major reform we’ve won from the abolition of slavery to suffrage, union recognition, civil rights, an end to the war in Vietnam, abortion rights, and gay marriage were initially unpopular. But a determined minority fought for them, won majority support, and used our collective power to protest and strike to force our rulers to concede them. But Blanc rejects that approach and instead argues for a strategy of reformism in the vain hope of using the capitalist state to enact socialism through legislation.

As a result, he argues that politicians must downplay supposedly unpopular demands of oppressed people like defund in order to win “working class votes.” This class reductionism will backfire. It will shatter working-class unity by selling out oppressed people, lead reformist politicians to adapt to capitalist positions like law and order, lower rather than raise class consciousness and combativity, and thereby set back the very class and social struggles necessary to win reforms on the road to socialist revolution.

That said, the debate about abolitionism is deeper than demands and strategy; it is about the goal. Paul Heideman makes that abundantly clear when he argues against defund and abolition, advocates that socialists adopt “carceral minimalism,” and cites as justification an article by Adaner Usmani and Chris Lewis that calls for hiring 500,000 more cops to control crime.

These reformists believe, despite the mountain of evidence to the contrary, that the state and its police force can be wielded for social good in the present and to achieve socialism in the future. Advocating this position in the midst of the biggest expansion of authoritarian policing in U.S. history and its weaponization against unions, social movements, and the Left is bizarre, counterfactual, and unconscionable. They are empowering the ruling class to bolster a police state it will use to repress us all.

Marxism is Abolitionism

All these arguments are at odds with Marx and socialism from below, which is abolitionist to its core. Marx advocated the overthrow of the capitalist state, the establishment of workers’ democracy, and “the withering away of the state” itself. As Lenin argued, the socialist’s “ideal should not be the trade union secretary, but the tribune of the people, who is able to react to every manifestation of tyranny and oppression” to “ produce a single picture of police violence and capitalist exploitation” to advance the cause of socialism.

Thus, Marxism is abolitionist. The goal of social revolution and abolition shapes our immediate practice. Faced with Trump’s deployment of the government police state, we should be demanding massive cuts to police, ICE, CBP, and the military and redistribution of that money to social programs that provide homes, jobs, education, and healthcare.

In these struggles, socialists must reject the argument that police solve social harm. They don’t and never will. As the enforcers of class and social inequality, they are one of the main causes of social harm, as their skyrocketing record of brutality and murder demonstrates. Instead, we must combat the carceral state and all its ruling-class violence, racism, and dehumanization.

We should therefore reaffirm our dedication to Marx’s abolitionist call at the end of the Communist Manifesto. “The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.”

Opinions expressed in signed articles do not necessarily represent the views of the editors or the Tempest Collective. For more information, see “About Tempest Collective.”
Featured Image credit: Chad Davis; modified by Tempest.

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The ecological crisis is upon us. It touches everywhere on the planet. Its character is complex, manifesting in floods, fires, disease, eradication of forests and fisheries. Interacting factors worsen globally connected catastrophes.

Ian Angus’s Metabolic Rifts: Capitalism Assault on the Earth System makes an important contribution to understanding and guiding a socialist response to these compounding ecological crises.

Angus is an ecological Marxist scholar and founding member of the Global Ecosocialist Network. Metabolic Rifts connects modern science, history, and Marxism’s metabolic rift theory.

Angus says that our ecosocialist politics

must be based on a concrete scientific understanding of how our world has evolved, how it is changing today, and where those changes may take us. The way we build socialism, and the kind of socialism that can be built, will be profoundly shaped by the state of the planet we must build it on. If our programs and activity don’t have a scientific basis, all our efforts to change the world will be in vain. (5)

The book accessibly explains metabolic rift theory, the key insight of Marxist ecology. For Karl Marx, Frederick Engels, and subsequent Marxists in this tradition, the Earth’s metabolism is not a metaphor but a material reality. Interacting social, biological, chemical, and geological processes make life possible.

Metabolism

Marx used the concept of metabolism in three related ways. First, there is universal metabolism, Earth’s life-support system. This refers to the biological, chemical, and geological cycles on which all life depends.

Social metabolism is the way human society relates to the rest of nature. Social orders change over time, and class society—and then capitalism marks a significant historical shift.

Finally, metabolic rift is capitalism’s tendency to disrupt Earth’s cycles. The key factor driving this disruption is the subordination of human needs to capitalism’s drive for profit and accumulation. This process breaks the metabolic connection between humans and the rest of nature. Capitalism cannot change the natural laws governing life itself.

Drawing on soil science, Marx first analyzed the rift between town and country. In England, working-class urbanization and the separation of agricultural production and people meant that the food and human wastes previously returned to the soil flowed as pollution into rivers. This process broke the nutrient cycle and undermined soil fertility.

The metabolism of the earth includes material and energy cycles operating on time frames ranging from hours to hundreds of millions of years. These include the water cycle, the carbon cycle, and the nitrogen cycle.

With the attention rightly given to global heating and disruption of the carbon cycle, which is mostly caused by fossil fuels, other disruptions, like with the nitrogen cycle, are less appreciated, although no less important. A handful of healthy soil contains hundreds of millions of microorganisms. Soils are the most species-rich habitat on Earth. Healthy soil is necessary for fertility and absorbing carbon, and for nutritious food.

Angus traces the history of soil destruction to the town-country rift, which then led to imperial struggles to secure nitrogen-rich guano deposits to restore fertility. Ultimately, there was the development of industrial production and its complex of cash crops and fossil-fuel-derived nitrogen fertilizer. Farmers grossly over-apply nitrogen fertilizer, wasting two-thirds of it, polluting water and air, and disrupting a key Earth System metabolic cycle.

Capital versus the Earth System

The main part of Angus’s book is titled “Capital versus the Earth System.” It traces the ecological revolutions, including photosynthesis and land-based organisms, through which life and the rest of the planet historically co-evolved. This evolution created the conditions for more life and, ultimately, the stable equilibrium of the Holocene epoch over the last 10,000 years. Historically, relatively small changes in temperature or oxygen levels supported large changes in the biosphere. This insight is important for understanding ecological tipping points, when incremental change exceeds a threshold and may cause major changes in the Earth System.

Holocene chart in Metabolic Rifts (108).

Angus summarizes the distinctive anti-ecologic logic of capitalism as being characterized by “generalized production of commodities: profit maximization; competition among multiple capitalist; short-termism, and unending accumulation” (115).

These are inter-related dynamics that, among other outcomes, lead to uncontrolled growth. Ecologically, this means an ever-increasing linear flow of material and energy through the system that is in direct conflict with the universal metabolism. Angus writes,

The growth imperative is not, as liberal environmentalists often argue, just a mistaken policy or a false ideology. It is a fundamental structural feature of capitalism. Uncontrolled growth is an inevitable result of the profit system, of capitalism’s inherent drive to accumulate ever more capital. (122)

The Anthropocene epoch

Angus has been an important proponent of the theory that we have entered into a new Anthropocene epoch. On this view, the Earth has transitioned from a period of temperature and ecological stability known as the Holocene and is now in the capitalist-driven and unstable period of the Anthropocene, a qualitatively new geological epoch where human activity has fundamentally reshaped the Earth.

The reference point for this thesis is the post-World War II period known at the Great Acceleration. This marks an unprecedented era of fossil fuel enabled economic growth.

The charts below show the general trends.

The Great Acceleration: Socio-Economic Trends Since 1750. Image credit: A Planetary Health Check. The Great Acceleration: Earth Systems Trends Since 1750. Image credit: A Planetary Health Check.

In an Earth Systems framework, the result of capitalist production is that key planetary boundaries for maintaining a stable biosphere are being exceeded.

The ecological crisis is much more than about global heating and the need for green energy at scale. Exceeding boundaries also risks creating new tipping points, producing even worse outcomes. In one global heating scenario, for example, after a certain point of warming, a cascade of factors could set in to produce Hot House Earth, an environment inhospitable to human society and many existing forms of life.

Rough Guide to Planetary Boundaries. Image credit: A Rough Guide to Planetary Boundaries.

Scientists share with socialists and millions of oppressed and exploited workers a sense that we need a radical break with the status quo to resolve escalating crises and deteriorating living conditions. Angus quotes from the 2018 landmark earth science article “Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene,” published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences:

Incremental linear changes to the present socioeconomic system are not enough to stabilize the Earth System. Widespread, rapid, and fundamental transformations will likely be required to reduce the risk of crossing the threshold and locking in the Hothouse Earth pathway: these include changes in behavior, technology and innovation, governance, and values. (215)

Ecosocialist strategy

While revolution must be the goal of ecosocialists, this doesn’t mean we have no options for immediate political struggle.

Ecosocialists need to help elaborate necessary non-incremental and revolutionary social and ecological changes. But we must also contribute politically and practically to immediate fights for reforms.

Angus makes the case that our collective goal can’t be to govern nature, as capitalists and ecomodernists urge, but to democratically govern our dynamic interaction with the Earth. For Metabolic Rifts, a guiding goal is expanding the commons—the democratically regulated and accessible provisioning of our basic needs. Housing, education, healthcare, and food shouldn’t be commodified but freely available to all.

The original expropriation of direct producers from the land was integral to early capitalist development. Solving the general metabolic rift requires overcoming the social rift between workers and their communities from the means of livelihood.

The long process of original expropriation, of evicting peasants from the country and forcing them into cities, was a long, extremely violent, and contested process in Europe. Ian Angus’s earlier book The War Against the Commons: Dispossession and Resistance in the Making of Capitalism chronicles this history and points to the role of popular resistance and the need to reestablish a conception of the commons.

Other goals—from closing fossil fuel corporations and expropriating agribusiness, to banning single-use plastic and other chemicals that nature cannot absorb and recycle, to paying international ecological debts and abolishing the U.S. military empire—would be part of the revolutionary transformation to ecosoicalism.

Immediate reforms are challenging—and will not immediately affect the global crisis. But we must engage in struggles that people can learn from and that can have real-world impact. The expansion of the global commons can only come about through the mass struggle of the global working class, indigenous communities, and colonized peoples.

From halting fossil fuel infrastructure, closing data centers, taking back public water supplies, and demanding public housing and transit to the struggle for a free Palestine and end to genocide, everything has an ecological dimension.

Our challenge is to bring the broad scope of ecological breakdown and the need for democratic social and ecological renewal into all our struggles. Metabolic Rifts helps us do this.

Opinions expressed in signed articles do not necessarily represent the views of the editors or the Tempest Collective. For more information, see “About Tempest Collective.”
Featured Image credit: Monthly Review; modified by Tempest.

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Shireen and Anderson: On June 24, two back-to-back earthquakes hit Venezuela. As of now, the death toll has surpassed 6,300 people, and tens of thousands are missing. The earthquakes devastated the northern coastal areas of the country. Can you talk about the days and weeks since the earthquakes hit? What have working-class Venezuelans been experiencing since the earthquakes?

Gonzalo: The earthquakes struck a country already devastated by a prolonged social crisis. The death toll continues to rise, and thousands of people affected by the earthquakes remain in camps, without a clear prospect for their future. The destruction of homes, basic services and workplaces—across parts of the capital, Caracas, and other urban areas, but especially in La Guaira—added a massive natural disaster to the pre-existing social crisis, vastly compounding the scale of the resulting humanitarian catastrophe.

The coastal strip of La Guaira, which was most affected by the earthquakes, is an entire state in Venezuela that covers about 170 km of coast on the Caribbean, and is about 30 km north of the capital, Caracas. There are still no definitive estimates of the scale of the destruction, but apart from the dead and missing, there are about 50,000 people who lost everything or who cannot return to their homes. The death toll that has been confirmed is not definitive yet either—many are still under the rubble and their removal has barely begun, even over a month since the earthquakes. In La Guaira and Caracas, along with some other areas in the central-northern-coastal region, there are about 30,000 uninhabitable homes, hundreds of buildings and houses converted into mountains of rubble. Tens of thousands of people remain in dozens of emergency camps and in improvised street shelters, too, in town squares or in the ruins of collapsed buildings. There are people who, given the insufficiency of official aid, have had to use picks and shovels to remove debris, or have had to pay to carry out debris removal or repairs. Many are recovering from wounds and injuries.

Working-class people have had to face the consequences of the earthquakes without wages, savings, or social protection, living in extreme precarity and appalling poverty.

There are numerous testimonies and news stories from people reporting delays or even bureaucratic obstruction of aid from the immediate response to the earthquake through today. The military and police blockaded access to La Guaira, ostensibly for the direction of government aid. This does not seem justified. Hundreds of people had decided to drive to the region on their own accord to provide aid that was not arriving from the state level up to that point.

The slow and insufficient response of the state has made things much worse. For working class survivors, the impact of the earthquakes has also been twofold: They were already struggling with loss of income and near total absence of conditions necessary for a normal life, and now they must also endure the destruction of their homes, the death of family members, and serious injuries, all in a situation of profound abandonment by the state.

In the face of state abandonment, we must highlight how solidarity emerged from below, from the neighborhood and from citizens: spontaneous groups carrying out rescue work, initiatives collecting aid for food, medicine, and supply distribution. This self-organization helped compensate for the absence of the state during the critical early stages of the disaster, especially since the government responded to these grassroots efforts with bureaucratic obstacles and police and military interference. Although these initiatives cannot substitute for the state’s responsibilities, for days they were the only source of assistance available to many people. The grassroots efforts continue to form the basis for demanding democratically monitored aid, and for aiming toward a reconstruction process subject to social oversight in the context of a state that is inefficient and corrupt.

The U.S. has taken advantage of the situation to advance the military occupation … and to bring Zionist Israeli army members to Venezuela under the pretext of “aid.”

One of the most striking manifestations of the social tragedy that everyday people have endured for years is that the minimum wage has effectively been reduced to zero, amounting today to just a few U.S. cents per month. This violates Article 91 of the Constitution which mandates that the minimum wage cover the cost of basic needs including basic food, goods, and services. Working-class people have had to face the consequences of the earthquakes without wages, savings, or social protection, living in extreme precarity and appalling poverty. Raising the minimum wage to meet constitutional standards is a matter of pressing urgency—one that the tutelary1Tutelage is “protective control,” originally signifying the relation between a lord and a serf. government, the business sector, and their political parties refuse to address. This issue stands alongside other fundamental concerns; the tragedy must also be measured by the collapse of living conditions for workers, retirees, and working-class communities who have lacked, and still lack, access to essentials like public health care and social services needed to address their needs.

The international aid of rescuers and the logistical assistance of some NGOs has been very important in this context. More than fifteen countries sent rescuers and aid to Venezuela after the earthquakes. Among them were the Mexican rescue team known as the Topos, who gave their expertise and dedication to the rescue effort.

But the U.S. government, which already had a presence in Venezuela, rushed to send military personnel rather than quality aid. The U.S. has taken advantage of the situation to advance the military occupation of Venezuela and to bring Zionist Israeli army members to Venezuela under the pretext of “aid.” This is with the forced consent of the tutelary government.

S & A: Natural disasters cannot be disconnected from politics. This is particularly clear in Venezuela, where the Trump administration kidnapped president Nicolás Maduro in January, and then backed Delcy Rodríguez, Maduro’s vice president. The U.S. then took control of Venezuela’s oil—worth approximately $8 billion. In July, a New York Times report stated that U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has taken control of Venezuela’s finances and is working closely with Delcy Rodríguez. And yet, while the earthquakes have caused an estimated $37 billion in damages to Venezuela, the U.S. response to the earthquakes has been to send only $300 million in aid, and to maneuver to put more U.S. troops on the ground. Could you talk about how the Trump administration’s imperialist interventions have affected the aftermath of the earthquake?

G: As I have already alluded to, the emergency situation after the earthquakes cannot be separated from the tutelage imposed by the Trump administration and the “viceroy” of Marco Rubio since January 2026. Washington’s capture of the Venezuelan government and oil revenues created a dependency that today brutally limits the capacity for reconstruction, while many of the economic sanctions continue to be applied to Venezuela. It is evident that its priority is to take billions of dollars of Venezuelan oil, not to help the Venezuelan people. The other thing the U.S. is doing is taking advantage of the tragedy to expand its military presence under the guise of “aid.”

The U.S. now controls the sale of Venezuelan oil, and the resulting revenues are deposited into U.S. Treasury accounts. Whatever funds are transferred back to Venezuela are allocated in an opaque and discretionary manner, to a government that is itself composed of many of the same corrupt officials who participated in the long-running plunder of the country. The scale of that plunder alone would be enough to rebuild the country more than fifteen times over after the earthquake.

Furthermore, Trump claims that what he has taken—or, we should say, stolen—from Venezuela’s oil has allowed him to cover the costs of the military intervention that kidnapped Maduro and has, in his words, made him a lot of money, and given him more fuel and resources for his war on Iran.

The U.S. has taken advantage of the situation to advance the military occupation … and to bring Zionist Israeli army members to Venezuela under the pretext of “aid.”

On top of all that, the restructuring of the foreign debt—which should be considered corrupt and illegitimate—which Delcy Rodríguez took on, multiplying it from $172 billion to around $240 billion, demonstrates clearly the advantage Trump is gaining and the pettiness of his “aid.”

Marea Socialista’s position has been to firmly reject this intervention from day one, without defending Maduro and his government, whose authoritarian, bureaucratic and anti-worker drift had already destroyed salaries and trampled on rights. The “international aid” that the U.S. offered to “restore democracy” to the country and combat “narco-terrorism” has been fully exposed as a pretext and mechanism to undermine the country’s sovereignty and deepen its occupation, utilizing an “interim” government that is hostage to Trump and lacks constitutional legitimacy—much like the Maduro government from which it originated.

Even the right-wing opposition led by Maria Corina Machado, which called for imperialist intervention, has been sidelined by Trump’s antidemocratic schemes, which show no respect for the Venezuelan constitution.

The material and social recovery of Venezuela, together with the restoration of democratic rights, requires simultaneously reclaiming national sovereignty over the country’s resources, ending the U.S.’s imperial tutelage, and ensuring that all humanitarian assistance is administered transparently under the democratic oversight of the affected communities and the working class as a whole. The working class must recover democratic control over what happens in the country—it is the victim of the social and political catastrophe of the counterrevolutionary monstrosity to which Madurismo, and all that emerged from it, became.

Marea Socialista has put forward a series of proposals for an emergency and recovery program, many of which are shared with other political groups from the left-wing opposition and with activist movements fighting for working-class rights.

Marea Socialista supports the proposal—made by Venezuela’s May Day Union Current, which we are a part of—for an Independent Truth and Justice Commission to look into the government’s response to the earthquakes.

We have also been calling for a Public and Citizen Audit to carry out an independent and reliable audit of the expansion of Venezuela’s debt, and of state expenditures more broadly.

S & A: In the days and weeks after the earthquakes, anger in Venezuela has been directed against Delcy Rodríguez for her government’s inept response. What has the state’s response to the earthquake shown about Delcy Rodríguez and her government?

G: The ineptitude and capitulation of Delcy Rodríguez’s government is no accident. Her government represents the PSUV bureaucracy, allied with the military and the lumpen-bourgeoisie2I define the lumpen-bourgeoisie as a type of bourgeoisie whose mode of capital accumulation is based on the corrupt appropriation of income, on speculative financial operations and criminal economies. It emerged from the state bureaucracy due to the degeneration of the Bolivarian revolution that has accelerated under Maduro and further in the current period. spawned by the degeneration of the Bolivarian process—and it reflects the continuity of the bureaucratic and authoritarian model of Madurismo, now combined with open subordination to Washington and to interests such as those of Israel. Israel, as mentioned above, was invited by the Delcy-Trump government to “rebuild” Venezuela following its genocide and destruction of Gaza.

The Venezuelan government has shown and continues to show its inability to coordinate unions, communities, universities and social organizations at the service of those affected by the earthquakes. Its hyper-centralized and opaque structure has prevented popular participation and prioritized the preservation of power over care for victims. And the fact is that all the apparatuses of the bureaucratic state are at the service of its predatory leadership, which is now subordinated to Trump’s blackmail in a bid to save its own skin.

Widespread indignation and complaints against Delcy’s government reflects that the tutelage government cannot live up to the needs of this emergency. Reconstruction cannot be left in the hands of a bureaucracy accustomed to plunder, nor should it be in the hands of private contractors, or at the expense of imperialist piracy. Reconstruction should be under citizen control and public audit, which would require the development of consciousness, organization, struggle, and the creation of alternatives for workers and the people more broadly.

S & A: With the Venezuelan government’s response inadequate, how have regular Venezuelans participated in the recovery process? Has Marea Socialista taken part in these efforts?

G: The most powerful response came from the people. Communities organized rescue efforts, shelters, food provision and searches for missing people. This solidarity could be the seed of a popular organization capable of influencing reconstruction and exercising social control over resources, which would then give way to another level of consciousness and create capacity to fight for something better.

Marea Socialista has welcomed these efforts and participates in them to the best of our ability. We propose the creation of autonomous, community-based committees for aid and reconstruction. Together with solidarity movements, these committees should demand inspections and repairs for damaged buildings, and insist on compensation and sufficient state resources for other needed tasks. The committees should also serve to monitor aid and funding, expose corruption, and coordinate with public services while demanding efficiency, as water, electricity, telephone, and internet services in Venezuela are failing, and the healthcare system is in a dire state. It is worth noting that a worker’s wage, or even an average salary, is insufficient to cover the cost of daily transportation.

The most powerful response came from the people. Communities organized rescue efforts, shelters, food provision and searches for missing people.

Marea Socialista is also collaborating with other organizations belonging to the National Gathering for the Defense of the People’s Rights (a coalition of united left-opposition groups), in spearheading campaigns demanding that the state dedicate all necessary resources to addressing the emergency and to manage reconstruction transparently. This includes the demand that the Trump administration stop stripping Venezuela of its economic resources as part of the spoils of an imperialist war following its intervention. We maintain that not a single cent of the foreign debt be paid: not only are these resources needed to address the social and humanitarian catastrophe, but the debt itself is corrupt and illegitimate.

Grassroots self-organization is necessary to compel the state to act, and to guarantee that the state will serve the public’s interest rather than bureaucratic or private interests. Still, this cannot be fully achieved under an antidemocratic, capitalist government, or under domination with the imperialist boot on Venezuela’s neck.

S & A: The current government in Venezuela is markedly different from the left-wing government of Hugo Chavez in the 1990s and early 2000s. In addition to its entanglement with the U.S., how has Venezuela’s government shifted since Chavez in ways that are affecting the recovery process?

G: The government’s deterioration did not begin in 2026. During the Maduro era, a bureaucracy consolidated; it was enriched through corruption, the looting of oil revenues, and the destruction of workers’ rights. The “lumpen-bourgeoisie” of the state replaced any emancipatory project with management that was patrimonial, authoritarian, and corrupt. Calling itself “left-wing,” “anti-imperialist” and “socialist” became mere rhetoric. Chavez’s government was something quite different, as it had many advanced and progressive elements. At the same time, however, it already carried within it the seeds of the degeneration that would later fully crystallize under Maduro. After the death of Chavez, a regressive stage began, paving the way for an imperialist onslaught, accompanied by the moral rot and betrayal of the Rodríguez siblings [Vice President Delcy Rodríguez and National Assembly President Jorge Rodríguez], and [Interior Minister] Diosdado Cabello. If any remnants of the best phase of the Bolivarian Revolution remained, it should be preserved and redirected. But what followed was nothing less than a counterrevolution.

The U.S. intervention in January only crowned this process: the old discourse of anti-imperialism ended in direct subordination to Washington. On this point, the Venezuelan government now aligns with the traditional right wing, which shares the same neoliberal program and commitment to opening the country to transnational capital that is now being implemented by the post-Maduro tutelary government.

In this context, reconstruction is hampered by destroyed wages, stolen sovereignty, and the absence of the slightest democratic control over the national wealth stripped by the bureaucracy and the imperialist colonial “protectorate.” The way out of this quagmire is not choosing between elites or leaders who are expressions of capital, but to build a real alternative that is genuinely socialist, anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist, anti-bureaucratic and democratic, and emerging from the working class and popular sectors in Venezuela. It must also be in synchrony with the struggles of peoples across Latin America, and with working-class Americans who are resisting Trump’s abuses and their imperialist state.

S & A: There are more aspects to the U.S.’s detrimental involvement in Venezuela that are impacting the recovery process. For example, extensive sanctions that Trump imposed on Venezuela beginning in 2017 have only been partially lifted. How are U.S. sanctions affecting the recovery process? Also, it should be noted that the U.S. deported over one hundred people to Venezuela just hours before the earthquake, and the majority of them were killed in the earthquake.

G: The U.S. sanctions have aggravated the crisis, making it difficult to access supplies, technology, and financial resources to address it. Marea Socialista rejected the sanctions from the start because they punish the Venezuelan population and strengthen authoritarian tendencies of the state. And it is not a matter of slightly “easing” or “relaxing” the sanctions today. The U.S. government is playing with the hunger and suffering of the Venezuelan people, and the sanctions have served as a pretext for the Maduro and Delcy administrations to justify authoritarianism and cutbacks—and for their failure to meet working-class people’s demands.

But it would be wrong to attribute the crisis fully to the sanctions: before 2017, when Trump’s sanctions began, there was already massive corruption, the destruction of the PDVSA (the state-owned oil company), capital flight and a pattern of looting oil revenues. The sanctions added to and aggravated the situation of a country already devastated by lumpen-capitalist bureaucratic management.

We demand the suspension of all economic sanctions, which fall on the people and hinder reconstruction, but we also call for a struggle to recover sovereignty over oil revenues, to carry out public audits and confront the gigantic national embezzlement. Furthermore, Trump must return all the resources stolen from Venezuela.

Trump has tried to justify all of this in the name of “democracy” and as help to “liberate” Venezuela, but very early on we saw how he treated Venezuelan migration to the U.S. with ICE arrests and deportations. We see that while he extracts oil and minerals and tries to promote his businesses, Trump is keeping an illegitimate government in power while maintaining authoritarian structures and worsening the conditions of the Venezuelan people.

Although the final blow came with the earthquakes, the situation in Venezuela worsened significantly after January 3 under a government that has remained repressive and undemocratic, has made no concessions to the working class, and threatens further hostile maneuvers—such as undermining labor laws and eliminating social benefits. In the months following the military intervention, the government has enacted unconstitutional laws that dismantled oil sovereignty, among other regressive measures.

S & A: From the perspective of Marea Socialista, is the anger against Delcy Rodríguez in Venezuela coalescing into significant opposition, or mobilizations? Is there a sense of exhaustion, or of renewed activity? Will the discontent with her government continue to grow?

G: Today, social exhaustion coexists with some signs of renewed social and political organization. The community response shows that there is a reserve of forces that can be organized and potentially transformed into a political force, if it is articulated democratically and independently on the part of the working class. However, the traditional Right is trying to capitalize on this potential (what is left of Chavismo today has become another right-wing force, though not the traditional right wing). On the other hand, before the earthquakes, workers’ struggles had been revived. While they have lessened since the earthquakes, we believe that momentum will be progressively recovered and that there is potential for a class reorganization at the socio-political level. Sectors that still retain a degree of loyalty to Madurismo have begun to mobilize alongside others who are in opposition or critical of the government from the Left. On July 24, the birthday of Simon Bolivar, some of these forces gathered in Bolivar Squares in certain Venezuelan cities to shout anti-imperialist slogans and to denounce the presence of Zionists in Venezuela.

The way out of the authoritarian tutelage imposed by imperialism is not a return to the Madurismo that helped bring about this situation. Nor is it the right-wing neoliberal option that promoted U.S. intervention, the consequences of which we are now witnessing. And the way out is certainly not to resign ourselves to the “transition” plans that rely on the current government remaining under foreign tutelage. The Venezuelan people see this reality and are reformulating their understanding of the situation. The polarization between elites in leadership is preventing any solution that would benefit the majority of the population, as both factions are equally beholden to the dictates of imperialism.

Sectors that still retain a degree of loyalty to Madurismo have begun to mobilize alongside others who are in opposition or critical of the government from the Left.

Resistance and recovery are not merely a matter of willpower—they must be forged through organization built by struggle, guided by a class-based program, and driven by a political alternative and alliances independent of those capitalist elites.

We must become as organized and deeply rooted as possible with the working class and people. The formation of class-based alliances or united fronts of action between anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist and anti-bureaucratic organizations and movements is very important.

Marea Socialista, who at an international level are linked to the International Socialist League (ISL), in Venezuela currently participates in a union current called Corriente Primero de Mayo. We also mobilize with other left-wing opposition organizations. We are part of what is known as the National Meeting for the Rights of the People, which fights for wages, against repression, for democratic freedoms, against corruption, and in international efforts of solidarity with Palestine and now the fight against imperialist intervention and the puppet government in Venezuela. Within this political space, we have joined forces with the Communist Party of Venezuela, the PPT-APR (Patria Para Todos-Alternative Popular Revolucionaria), the PSL (Partido Socialismo y Libertad), and other organizations—an alliance formed nearly four years ago to oppose both Madurismo and the traditional right. The alliance as a whole now radically opposes the tutelary government of Trump and Marco Rubio, that of Delcy and Jorge Rodriguez alongside Diosdado Cabello, a government used as a tool by the imperialist invader that must be driven out of Venezuela.

Discontent will continue to grow as long as hunger persists, the lack of sovereignty and reconstruction guided by external interests continues, and the dearth of democracy and repression continue. The challenge is to convert this discomfort into a conscious organization and a socialist, democratic and anti-imperialist alternative built from below.

Opinions expressed in signed articles do not necessarily represent the views of the editors or the Tempest Collective. For more information, see “About Tempest Collective.”
Featured Image credit: Allison White; modified by Tempest.

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The high-profile murders in July by ICE agents of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo (52 years old) in Texas and Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero (25 years old) in Maine six days later have added to the growing list of shootings by immigration officials. There have been 41 shootings by ICE and CBP officials since the start of Trump’s second term, in which 11 people have been killed.

This is a direct result of Trump’s terrifying escalation of his mass deportation agenda.

In the face of growing scrutiny, the Trump administration had signaled that it would pause ICE traffic stops. But it quickly reversed that and gave the green light to murder with impunity. Instead of being held accountable for its lethal actions, ICE, a brutal and racist agency, has been rewarded with billions of dollars in federal funding.

The removal of TPS status, following a U.S. Supreme Court decision in June, has now put thousands of Haitians in peril.

Trump will not relent: his attack on migrant workers is the centerpiece of his authoritarian project. It’s the way he divides and conquers the multiracial, multinational working class.

He aims to keep us fighting among ourselves while he cuts taxes for the rich, guts social programs for workers and jacks up funding for imperialist wars. Only working-class resistance can stop this reign of terror.

The current violence is integral to the very nature of the border regime and police. The ruling class divides the working class globally to pit workers against each other. And they maintain migrant workers as a cheap labor force without democratic and union rights.

In the midst of deep social crises, the attacks are only getting worse. ICE continues to escalate its assault on immigrants. Both capitalist parties—the Democrats and Republicans—created ICE and have used it to ramp up arrests, detentions, and deportations.

They also bankrolled the massive expansion and militarization of police forces across the country and have used them against workers and disproportionately against people of color, especially Black people, with impunity. And as the murder of Corey Ruiz last month, an unhoused 38-year-old Black man from Madison, WI, brutally shows, the police continue to kill Black people at nearly three times the rate of white people.

The police are part of the same regime of class rule. They break strikes. They repress protests. They target radical movements of workers and the oppressed. They serve and protect the ruling class. ICE and the police collaborate in enforcing the existing class and racial order.

The Democrats have long been just as guilty as the Republicans, not only paving the way for the right wing but actively increasing border militarization, deportations and funding for the police.

Now Trump has escalated the attack beyond anything we have seen so far. Behind his agenda is an extreme form of authoritarian nationalism driven by his clique of oligarchs. Their agenda is class war at home, imperialist aggression against Venezuela, Iran, Cuba, Greenland and China, and a new form of autocratic rule.

ICE and the police are key to this project. Increased funding means that ICE  would rank as the fourteenth largest military budget in the world.

Democratic mayors in city after city have not resisted these developments but collaborated with them. Their police forces have worked hand in glove with ICE.

The resistance has been led not by the political establishment but rather by migrant organizers. They knew all this was coming and they prepared across the country, setting up emergency response networks, joining with working class organizations, and deepening community outreach and defense.

With this foundation in place, when Trump escalated his assault on migrants, our multiracial, multinational working class was prepared to respond with mass self-defense. Protests have erupted in city after city from LA to Chicago to Minneapolis to Houston, and throughout the state of Maine.

The workers and oppressed of Minneapolis gave Trump his biggest defeat. Despite the high risks of organizing and the stakes of the struggle, they continued to stand up against ICE, CBP and the police, looking to the model of the George Floyd rebellion and building on deep bonds of solidarity and traditions of organizing. So, when Trump deployed ICE and murdered Renée Good and Alex Pretti, among so many others, the people of Minneapolis shut the city down.

Trump reacted, firing Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and demoting Border Patrol Commander Gregory Bovino. But he did not relent. He brought in Tom Homan, who before serving in both Trump administrations was appointed by President Obama to lead the deportation branch of ICE. He was assigned to his latest role by Trump to achieve the same ends with different tactics of deploying agents in a less public-facing manner.

The mass resistance forced the Democrats to be seen as doing something different. They held up funding for ICE. But their only demands were more training, removing masks, and, of course, body cameras. We know that none of these “reforms” stop cops everywhere from brutalizing and killing people. This is not resistance, but collaboration.

Given the continuing escalation of attacks on immigrant workers— the ever-growing numbers of detentions, deportations, and killings on the streets and in custody—it is an urgent priority to build working class solidarity against Trump’s assaults. Political clarity in this moment is a life and death matter, and we cannot afford to have illusions in the two-party system.

Obviously the Republicans are our enemies. But we cannot trust the Democrats either. We can only rely on ourselves. This means that regardless of what we do at the ballot box, we have to build the kind of struggle that can provide a counterweight to politicians’ default mode of capitulation to the system.

This is a dangerous moment. Trump is a wounded beast who is becoming more authoritarian and erratic. He lost in Minneapolis. He is losing the war in Iran. He’s plummeting in polls. And in response, he is threatening our right to free and fair elections.

Steve Bannon, who remains a Trump confidant, is even clamoring for ICE to be deployed at the polls to suppress the votes of Black and Brown people and rig the elections in favor of the GOP. Democracy hangs in the balance.

We must organize to defend what is left of our electoral rights after the gutting of the Voting Rights Act. But we also know that elections will not stop state violence because both parties are part of the problem. Lesser evilism enables the greater evil. Only mass working-class action can pose an alternative. We are not yet ready, but we can direct all our energies to becoming more organized so that we can rise to the challenge of the moment.

Depending on locations, we can fight to create or strengthen Fair and Impartial Policing Policies (FIPPS) that prevent collusion between ICE and the police, we can demand discipline and accountability for criminal violence by agents, we can build and expand defense networks so that whenever ICE comes for someone, they are met with organized resistance.

And above all, we must build the fight to defund the police and abolish ICE, and to fund the pillars of working-class communities: jobs, education, affordable housing, healthcare, public transportation, and environmental measures that can mitigate the climate crisis.

If we are to succeed in these greater goals, we need mass community protests that are bigger, more working-class, and more rooted in unions than those we have seen so far. Only such mass actions can stop the right or pressure the Democrats.

These are necessary objectives to confront the immediate crisis. They are also part of the long-term work of advancing solidarity across divisions of nationality and community toward the goal of liberation for the working class, which can only be achieved in a post-capitalist society through the abolition of borders, the police, and prisons.

There has been a lull in struggle in the run-up to the midterm elections. But once this ends, we have no choice but to ramp up protests in the streets and in the workplace. This is the only way we can prevent more devastating murders by bloodthirsty agents of the state.

Opinions expressed in signed articles do not necessarily represent the views of the editors or the Tempest Collective. For more information, see “About Tempest Collective.”
Featured Image credit: Chad Davis; modified by Tempest.

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Trump’s repression collapses in LA, Chicago, and Minneapolis

In LA, Chicago, and Minneapolis, Trump attempted to divide and weaken the movement by securing hundreds of indictments against individual activists for interfering with an ICE agent, destroying federal property, or similar crimes.

From the beginning, the scope, size, and determination of the protests frustrated ICE’s attempt to repress them. To begin with, despite the massive deployments, ICE did not have enough agents to control the crowds, detain the immigrants, and arrest the protesters whom they claimed had violated the law. Agents, moreover, had great difficulty in identifying and recording which individual had committed which allegedly criminal act. To overcome that difficulty, the ICE agents, who were untrained, incompetent, brutal, and dishonest, arrested first and came up with charges later. Occasionally, official or cell-phone videos confirmed what the agents said, but most often they revealed that the agent had erred or lied.

The U.S. attorneys were supposed to review the charges that any officer reported, but many of those attorneys had resigned in protest. Some of the remaining U.S. attorneys dismissed dishonest or unsubstantiated charges, but under relentless pressure from above, most sought indictments from the grand juries on weak or non-existent cases. As the cases wound their way ahead, many U.S. attorneys would have been happy to proceed to trial except for the fact that the judges and, even more, the juries were increasingly skeptical of any charge that ICE had filed.

Pressure from the defendants, the defense lawyers, and the movement increased the pressure on the prosecution. Many defendants turned down plea deals despite the risk of going to trial. The defense often filed numerous motions seeking dismissal, and in many cases, members of the movement showed up in court for the crucial proceedings.

In criminal cases that do not involve ICE, 90 percent of federal indictments end up in a guilty plea or verdict. But after an extensive investigation of 400 cases in which protesters were charged with assaulting or impeding ICE agents, the New York Times found that half of those cases ended in acquittals or dismissals and that many of the others were pled down to misdemeanors. Significantly, of the 26 cases that went to trial before a jury, 22 were acquitted.

Similarly, ProPublica and Frontline reported that the federal government arrested 132 U.S. citizens in southern California for interfering with or assaulting ICE agents, but only 32 were convicted, and most of those had been convicted when they pleaded to misdemeanors. In fact, the federal defenders in Southern California won six straight acquittals—an unheard-of event—because juries simply did not believe ICE agents, including Greg Bovino. Likewise, after a jury had acquitted a professor at California State on a charge of aggravated assault against an ICE agent, the California Faculty Association reported that as of April 16, 2026, the U.S. attorney in LA had filed over a hundred charges against anti-ICE protesters and still had not convicted a single one for assaulting an ICE officer.

The same was true in Chicago. According to the same ProPublica and Frontline report, the government dropped charges in 75 of the 109 arrests of protesters against ICE.

If anything, the government did worse in Minneapolis. Early in ICE’s occupation of the city, Kristi Noem published “wanted posters” for 16 protesters who had supposedly interfered with ICE agents. But as Minnesota Public Radio reported, of the 36 protesters charged with interfering with ICE officers (including the 16 on Noem’s list), the U.S. attorney dropped 18 and offered 11 others a deal to dismiss their cases in 18 months if they had no further offenses.

While there are no official statistics, the New York Times found that of the 26 cases of ICE protesters who went to trial before a jury, the jury found 22 were not guilty.

There is also a great deal of anecdotal evidence of the juries’ opposition to ICE in the New York Times and ProPublica reports, but two cases, one from Chicago and the other from LA, express what juries thought of the ICE campaign.

In the Chicago case, a man had posted an online picture of Greg Bovino above a caption which read: “10K if U take him down.” The government charged the poster with attempted murder-for-hire and, at trial, called him “a ruthless member of the Latin Kings.” But after the jury heard the evidence, it acquitted the man. In response, Steven Miller issued a statement saying that “leftist judges and juries were empowering violent insurrection against the government,” but his racist sputtering could not reverse the verdict.

Similarly, in Los Angeles, the government charged a tow truck driver with interference with ICE officers when he mistakenly towed an ICE vehicle away from a scene where the agents were attempting to arrest an undocumented immigrant from Colombia. Once again, the jury acquitted the defendant, and once again Miller issued a public statement saying it was “another example of blatant jury nullification in a blue city.”

Even in LA, Chicago, and Minneapolis, the government obtained some convictions, although often on lesser offenses. However, even those who were ultimately exonerated suffered financial and personal harm from the prosecutions. Even so, there were so many acquittals and dismissals that the government’s prosecution of individual protesters in those cities barely made a dent in the growing movement against ICE and Trump.

Trump’s conspiracy indictments.

As stated, Bondi directed the FBI and the U.S. attorneys to consider charging anti-ICE activists with substantive offenses and conspiracy to commit those offenses because that would make it possible to prosecute those who planned the event and to double the penalties for anyone who committed an unlawful act.

From LA forward, the Justice Department was zealous in filing conspiracy charges, but almost immediately, the need to prove an “explicit or implicit” agreement to commit an unlawful act opened a weakness in those charges. If there were no electronic or other written statements suggesting such an agreement, a sympathetic jury could find defendants not guilty of the conspiracy charge if it concluded that there was either no agreement or that the agreement was limited to an agreement to carry out a lawful protest.

In the early days of the LA protests, the regime nevertheless stormed ahead with its conspiracy charges. Thus, in the first few days of the rebellion, Alex Jones (yes, that Alex Jones) provided the government with a video of a Latino man standing on the back of a truck, handing out water and face shields to crowds who had been gassed by ICE. Almost immediately, the government obtained search warrants, and ICE agents, surrounded by National Guard troops, used flash bangs to storm into his home and arrest him for conspiracy to interfere with ICE agents. When it turned out that the man was just a lone Good Samaritan, the government was forced to dismiss all charges against him and to incur months of adverse publicity

Similarly, on the first day of the occupation of LA, ICE agents arrested David Huerta, the President of California SEIU, for conspiracy to interfere with ICE agents because he had sat down by himself on a driveway outside a garment factory where ICE was conducting a raid.  Since the only agreement that he had was with himself, the government was forced to drop the conspiracy charge. Months later, it was also forced to drop the charge of interfering with an ICE officer because Huerta had not interfered with anyone.

More seriously, in Ventura County, the government brought a twelve-count conspiracy indictment against two leaders of an immigrant rights group that had allegedly built blockades on the roads leading to a marijuana farm as ICE arrested and detained 400 or so immigrants. For unstated reasons, the government later dismissed all eleven felony counts in return for the lead defendant pleading to a misdemeanor and agreeing to 24-months of probation.

In Chicago, the situation was similar. The U.S. attorney obtained an indictment against six people, most of whom were associated with the Democratic Party, who had stood in front of an ICE vehicle and banged on its hood as it attempted to leave ICE’s Broadview Detention Center just outside of Chicago. Someone broke the rear windshield wiper, and that person or someone else also inscribed the letters PIG on the side of the vehicle. Fortunately, there were no text messages or other evidence of agreement to act together, but the government claimed that by standing side by side, the protesters had reached an implicit agreement to act together.  On that basis, the government asked a grand jury to approve a two-count indictment against all six people for conspiracy to interfere with an ICE agent and conspiracy to damage federal property.1United States v. Michael Babbitt, et al., US Dist. Ct. N.D. Ill. No. 1:25-cr-00693.  A copy of the indictment and of any document filed in that case may be obtained via PACER on the website of the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois.

Before the second Trump Administration, grand juries had almost never rejected an indictment requested by a U.S. attorney. But following in the footsteps of other grand juries that had rejected indictments requested by the Trump Administration, the first grand jury refused to approve the indictment against any of the six Broadview defendants. Undeterred, the U.S. attorney presented the same indictment to a second grand jury. As it turned out, a member of the first grand jury was also on the second, and when he saw the indictment, he told the U.S. attorney on the record that he thought that the first indictment was a “crock of shit” and that he had the same opinion about the second indictment.

The prosecutor then unlawfully excused him from the second grand jury and, after further unlawful acts, finally obtained a conspiracy indictment against the six defendants.2Hannah Meisel, “Crock of s—’: Transcripts show grand jurors dismissed for disagreeing with government’s case against ‘Broadview Six,’” Capitol News Illinois, June 10, 2026.  Months later, when Trump’s newly (and illegally) appointed Acting U.S. attorney learned what had happened, he dismissed the conspiracy charges in an attempt to prevent the release of the full grand jury transcript. When the judge ordered it released and learned what had happened, she dismissed the remaining misdemeanor charge, saying that the prosecutorial misconduct was the worst that she had ever seen. Undeterred, the U.S. attorney said that no “civilized society” should tolerate conduct like that of the defendants, but other than sputtering out racist nonsense, he could do nothing to reinstate the conspiracy charges.

Until the most recent indictment in Minneapolis, [the government] did not attempt to bring to trial a conspiracy indictment in any of the three cities where massive protests occurred.

The government obtained conspiracy indictments and convictions in a case in Spokane, Washington where a crowd attempted to prevent an ICE bus from moving undocumented immigrants3 In Spokane, local police arrested and confiscated the phones of 30 activists who had stood in front of an ICE bus.  After local police turned the phones over to the FBI, the federal authorities found electronic communications urging others to come to the station to “sit in front of the bus,” and “block the exits.” On that basis, the government obtained an indictment against nine protesters for conspiracy to interfere with ICE agents.  Six defendants pleaded guilty to the felony in return for an agreement that it would be converted to a plea to a misdemeanor in 18 months, and three other defendants were convicted at trial and await sentencing.  Aaron Glantz, “Federal Jury finds army veteran and two other ICE protesters guilty of conspiracy,” Guardian, May 29, 2026, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/may/28/ice-protesters-conspiracy-charges., but until the most recent indictment in Minneapolis, it did not attempt to bring to trial a conspiracy indictment in any of the three cities where massive protests occurred.

The Minneapolis indictment

On June 11, 2026, the Trump regime filed an eight-count indictment against 15 activists who had fought against ICE during its occupation of Minneapolis. Of those counts, the key one is that the activists were accused of conspiring to impede or injure ICE agents as the agents attempted to arrest immigrants and to move them to sites from which they could be deported. As this case arose in the city where the most important victory over ICE occurred, it could become the national symbol of the regime’s attempt to disband and disrupt the movement that defeated it last January.

To begin with, the Minneapolis indictment is the most dishonest and hypocritical indictment that the government has filed. For weeks, the nation saw three thousand ICE agents rampaging through the streets of Minneapolis, breaking into cars and homes, arresting anyone who “looked like” an immigrant, shooting and severely wounding Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis, and, most notoriously, shooting and killing Renee Good and Alex Pretti.  The government has investigated none of those crimes but has instead spent its time investigating the signal chats, videos, and other “evidence” of a few minor incidents where it says those named in the indictment blocked ICE vehicles or agents for short periods.

For weeks, the nation saw three thousand ICE agents rampaging through the streets of Minneapolis, breaking into cars and homes, arresting anyone who “looked like” an immigrant…

The indictment does not charge anyone affiliated with the unions, the teachers, or the neighborhood and community groups who organized the mass patrols, marches, and semi-general strike that drove ICE out of Minnesota. Instead, it charges 15 people who it says were supporters of Direct Action Minnesota (DAMN) and several smaller “direct action” organizations. The indictment says the defendants organized specific direct actions during the mass struggles, including, for example, attempts to organize “soft blockades” (i.e., pickets) or “hard blockades” (i.e., debris, trailers, etc.) around federal buildings on the day of the largest mass march and the general strike.

The indictment apparently hopes to separate “legitimate” protesters from the “troublemakers.” This is an old tactic that has long been used by governments and strike-breaking employers, but after the great mass actions in January, most of the labor and community organizations that fought ICE in the streets have rejected that tactic by joining the campaign to defend those charged in this indictment.

If this case goes as most such trials have gone, the government will call an assortment of informants, turncoats, and the like to prove its claims. In addition, however, many of the 273 paragraphs in the indictment quote from text messages, chats, Facebook posts, and other electronic communications allegedly sent by some of the defendants in which they discussed plans to take various actions. A crucial part of the defense will thus be challenging the authenticity of those messages and whether the government broke laws to obtain them.

Given all that ICE did in Minneapolis, the movement should demand that the government dismiss this indictment. If the case goes to trial, however, the government will seek, as it has in other cases, orders prohibiting defense lawyers or witnesses from saying in the trial what happened to Renee Good or Alex Pretti or what in general happened during the occupation. It will also see orders prohibiting the defense lawyers from saying or implying that the jury has the right to find the defendants not guilty because of what ICE had done in the city. If the government obtains those orders—and it has done so in other cases—it will limit the ways in which the lawyers can point out the political nature of this case in the courtroom itself.

But many of the jurors will be from Minneapolis, St. Paul, and surrounding cities, and they will know what happened. Especially with a mass defense campaign including shows of support at the court, it will be difficult for the regime to secure a conviction.

The Minneapolis trial will be a crucial battle in the fight to defend the movement and thus in the fight to stop Trump’s deportations.

If the movement can prevent a conviction on the charges in this indictment, it will be important in the region and in the country. On the other hand, even if the regime secures a conviction on one or more charges, it cannot secure Prairieland-style sentences because the charges carry far less severe penalties and the movement is much stronger. While any conviction in Minneapolis will harm the movement, it cannot disrupt or uproot the movement in Minneapolis or the region. Nevertheless, the Minneapolis trial will be a crucial battle in the fight to defend the movement and thus in the fight to stop Trump’s deportations.

The Detroit indictment

In May 2026, the government obtained an indictment charging eight people affiliated in various ways with the University of Michigan with eight counts of conspiracy to transmit threats in interstate commerce, a felony that carries a maximum sentence of five years.

In essence, the indictment alleges that in a series of separate incidents, differing combinations of the defendants spray-painted and otherwise vandalized the homes of two regents, two senior university administrators, a university police official, two businesses, and the Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Detroit. The Federation, the businesses, and the University officials had actively supported the Israeli attack on Gaza, and the spray-painted slogans included calls like “Free Palestine, “Divest Now,” “Shame, Long Live the Intifada,” and the like.  There were, however, no threats to any individual.

As in Minnesota, the Detroit indictment includes numerous seemingly incriminating statements allegedly made by defendants on Facebook pages, text messages, Signal chats, and the like. Once again, there is no reason to believe the government’s claim that the defendants made these statements or that the government obtained them by lawful means, but the fight over whether they are genuine or were lawfully obtained will be a crucial part of the defense effort.

In this case, the hypocrisy is again enormous. The U.S. supplied arms for a genocide, but instead of stopping that genocide, the Trump Administration is charging eight young people with federal felonies for alleged acts of vandalism which would have been charged, if at all, as minor misdemeanors if they had been committed during a fraternity’s pledge drive.

We must fight against this attempt to criminalize political opposition to the regime by organizing a movement to demand that these charges be dropped and that the defendants be acquitted if the case goes to trial.

Conclusion

After ten months, Trump’s campaign to “disband and uproot” the left and the movement has failed in key cities because the mass resistance in LA, Chicago, and Minneapolis and other cities sparked determined opposition among layers of the working and middle classes. In part due to the courageous defendants and an organized defense movement, that opposition reached into the court system and led to the acquittals and dismissals of hundreds of felony indictments.

The victory was not total. In Prairieland, Trump’s prosecutions led to unjust convictions and life-destroying sentences. Elsewhere, others were unjustly convicted and sentenced, although none of the other sentences were remotely comparable to those handed down after the Prairieland trial. Moreover, for every defendant, including those whose charges were dismissed, the convictions and sentences were still unjust. Even those who were exonerated suffered physical, economic, and emotional damage due to unjust arrests and prosecutions.

Even acknowledging the pain inflicted by Trump’s attack on the movement, the movement defeated Trump’s attempt to “disrupt and uproot” it. Indeed, the overall movement against ICE is stronger today than it was on the day Trump signed NPSM-7, which means that the movement can continue the fight against Trump’s deportations and other attacks. The defendants who faced down the government are now seen as heroes, and large sections of the movement see more clearly the tasks ahead and the need for a militant fight against ICE and against Trump.

Obviously, much remains to be done. Above all, the regime has found new ways to increase deportations, and the movement must find new ways to stop those deportations, because, as we have seen, the overall success of the movement is the best way to defend the movement itself.

Beyond that, we need special movements to defend against the indictments in Minneapolis and Detroit, to support the appeal from the convictions and sentences in Prairieland, and to defend against any new indictments that may be filed, including those for events that have already occurred and those for acts of resistance that will occur in the future.

We must also fight for broader political demands because the public trials and the jury system cannot prevent every unjust conviction (or prosecution) and because the current wave of popular opposition, which made it possible to defeat these prosecutions, will either grow or shrink depending upon the overall development of the struggle. We must thus link the fight against these prosecutions to the overall struggle against the regime, including the fight to drive Trump from the Presidency and the fight against fascism and for demands that will eliminate the conditions that gave birth to Trump and Trumpism.

Until we can prevail in that larger political struggle, we must also take steps to protect the movement itself. To do that, we must assess the strategic and tactical lessons of the fight against Trump’s attempt to destroy the movement.

The liberals have said or will say that the defense of the anti-ICE fighters shows that the system “worked.” But while the jury system, public trials and the media are the most important checks on state repression within the capitalist legal system, they have failed too many times—including, for example, in Prairieland—in the face of the resources and the demagogy that the regime can bring to bear. Contrary to what the liberals say, the grand juries, juries, and judges who dismissed these specific indictments did so because of action by the mass movements. The dismissals and acquittals again confirmed that the most important check on repression by the capitalist state is not the checks and balances within the State, but organization and action by the working class and the oppressed.

While a mass movement sometimes needs direct action, the struggle over the last year has decisively shown that it was mass action that slowed Trump’s deportations and his attempts to prosecute the movement.

Similarly, anarchists have said and will continue to say that the leaders of the mass movements are too weak and too bureaucratic and that we need “direct actions” to stop the deportations. But while a mass movement sometimes needs direct action, the struggle over the last year has decisively shown that it was mass action that slowed Trump’s deportations and his attempts to prosecute the movement. A mass movement must be able to defend itself, but that cannot be done by building small squads of activists who are separate from and unaccountable to the movement because they cannot defeat the state and they are extremely vulnerable to state repression. Instead, the answer is to fight to build a new, militant, and democratic movement leadership,

Finally, while only a few now say that we can defeat Trump and ICE by “civil disobedience,” the sheer brutality of the regime and the success of the mass movement have shown the utter falsity of those claims.

On a tactical level, there are a few simple and clear lessons.

First, we must take steps to ensure that no member of the movement posts any electronic communication that they do not want to see as an exhibit in a federal prosecution. While we must maintain our right to use electronic means to debate general political issues and to organize many events, we should not make any comments —however innocent they may be —which suggest that any form of “violence” may or should occur at any specific event. Those comments can survive forever, and their meaning can be twisted by Trump’s henchmen.

Second, we must consider seriously every tactical decision as to when, where, and how to conduct every demonstration, picket, or other event. In most such events, there is little if any risk, but in some cases the risk is much higher, and while we must sometimes take such risks, we should not take them without carefully evaluating and discussing whether the risk is necessary.

Third, and more specifically, while we must defend the right of armed self-defense, we must carefully consider whether and how to use it at specific events because having firearms at a protest and even loose talk about using firearms in the struggle for self-defense creates great risks.

Finally, while we must fight to build a mass movement, we cannot do that without recognizing the weaknesses in the current movement. Above all, we must recognize that even though large sections of the working class and of the Black, Latinx, and other oppressed communities adamantly oppose the deportations and Trump, the active movement is dominated by the white middle class. We must take every possible step to overcome that gap because only a movement of the multi-racial and multi-gendered working class and the oppressed can defeat Trump and Trumpism.

How to do that is far beyond the scope of this article, but the fact that it can be done is confirmed by what has been described in this article.  For many reasons, those grand juries and juries whose actions were composed of citizens from the middle class and the upper levels of the working class. But if those levels of the working and middle classes were willing, as Miller said, to “nullify” Trump’s policies, that is a signal that there is even more militant opposition to Trump among the more oppressed sections of the working class. How to turn those sentiments into active support and leadership of a movement is a complicated question, but it is what must be done if we are to eliminate horrors like NSPM-7 and the ongoing nightmare of Prairieland.

Opinions expressed in signed articles do not necessarily represent the views of the editors or the Tempest Collective. For more information, see “About Tempest Collective.”
Featured Image credit: U.S. Northern Command, Chad Davis, SwissAmish; modified by Tempest.

The post Trump’s legal conspiracy (part two) appeared first on Tempest.

In June 2025, Donald Trump sent thousands of ICE agents into Los Angeles to show that he could carry out mass deportations in the national stronghold of the Latinx and immigrant rights movement. But mass militant action defeated Trump, and he was forced to withdraw most of his agents from LA.

Four months later, Trump sent his thugs into Chicago, another stronghold of the Latinx and immigrant rights movement, hoping for the decisive victory that had eluded him in LA. But once again, mass, militant action stopped him, and he was forced to withdraw most of his thugs from that city.

In September, Trump’s high command, such as it was, met to assess the lessons of LA and Chicago and to prepare for an even more massive attack to win the decisive victory that they still hoped for. As part of those discussions, they discussed the legal attacks that they used in LA and Chicago to weaken the movement by arresting, prosecuting, and jailing its leaders and militants, and formulated an even more draconian policy. Using Charlie Kirk’s death as a pretext, this policy was announced in the National Security Presidential Memorandum Number 7 (NSPM-7), which Trump signed on September 25, 2025.

In words that fall somewhere between those of Joe McCarthy and Adolph Hitler, NSPM-7 declared that the “attacks” on ICE officers” and the protests against ICE and the regime were the product of “sophisticated, organized campaigns of targeted intimidation, radicalization, threats and violence.” NSPM ordered the relevant federal agencies to investigate “all participants in these terroristic conspiracies” and “the networks, entities, organizations, funding sources and predicate actions behind them.” It directed the attorney general to devise a plan to arrest and prosecute the militants and “disband and uproot” the networks and organizations that had supported the “violence.”

In words, NSPM-7 targeted antifa, but its description of antifa made clear that it targeted the Left and the entire movement:

Common threads animating this violent conduct include anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity; extremism on migration, race and gender; and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion and morality.

Following the dictates of NSPM-7, Attorney General Pam Bondi directed the Justice Department, the FBI, and other federal law enforcement to attack the movement with every method that had been used against organized crime. She ordered all U.S. attorneys to charge “violent” protesters with the “most serious, readily provable offenses,” to refuse to offer pleas to lesser offenses, and, if a conviction resulted, to ask the court to impose the highest sentence permitted by law.4Trump’s order also ordered Bondi and other agency heads to act against non-profit and other organizations who supposedly encouraged the “violence.” The regime has recently published proposed regulations to do that, and while that attack is important, for reasons of space, this article does not address that question.

In words, NSPM-7 was the most serious legal attack on the Left and the progressive movement since Nixon’s COINTELPRO. In fact, its objectives went far beyond COINTELPRO, because a plan for ethnic cleansing backed up by a plan to “disband and uproot” the organizations that oppose the ethnic cleansing” is a distinctly fascist plan.

The threats represented in NSPM-7 are ominous, but while we must take them seriously, we cannot be mesmerized by Trump’s words. On many occasions, labor, civil rights, and other movements have defeated unjust prosecutions and rendered unjust laws unenforceable by organizing mass action against them. We must thus examine not only the words of the decree but whether the regime has the material means and the political support needed to carry out that decree.

On that crucial point, on the day Trump signed NSPM-7, large sections of the Latinx and immigrant communities and of the working and middle class already opposed ICE and Trump. They knew that Trump’s claim to be fighting “violence” was a lie because they had seen him pardon the 1600 thugs who had marauded through the Capitol and had seen him cheer on the right-wing terrorists who had murdered and threatened their way across the country. Most of all, they had seen ICE drag immigrants from homes and cars and beat them on the streets.

Soon, they saw much worse in Minneapolis, as countless videos showed ICE agents murder Renee Good and Alex Pretti, and the growing opposition also listened as Trump slandered the victims and announced that neither the federal nor the state governments would investigate those murders. Even more importantly, people saw mass resistance and the semi-general strike that forced Trump to withdraw most of his thugs from the city.

Ten months after Trump signed NSPM-7, his political support had dropped dramatically—and as that support fell, it had a dramatic effect on the regime’s ability to sustain the legal prosecutions it had filed under NSPM-7.

Trump had hoped that his prosecutions would force protesters to submit. In most places, however, the opposite occurred. Brave protesters, facing federal indictments for the first time in their lives, stood up. Despite burdens on their finances, health, families, and personal lives, they continued to fight as the legal proceedings dragged on. Defense committees sprang up to defend them, and lawyers came forward to help. Mistakes were made, and there will be time to evaluate those mistakes, but on a national scale, the overall effort defeated Trump’s plan to disrupt and uproot the movement.

Uneven outcomes

There were different outcomes in individual cases and in different areas. Since it is impossible to review each case and each area, this article will review the prosecutions in   Prairieland, Texas, where the movement was weak, and in LA, Chicago, and Minneapolis, where the movement was exceptionally strong.

As we will see, in Prairieland the policies of NSPM-7 led to one of the greatest legal outrages in U.S. history. In the main Prairieland trial, the federal government convicted ten people and sentenced them to a total of 450 years in prison for a ten-person demonstration in which common fireworks were set off, a few cars were vandalized, and a single protester may or may not have shot and wounded a police officer who was aiming his gun at another fleeing protester. Prairieland is the true face of Trumpism, and while it has not been exposed as fully as it should be, we will show the lies and the extreme brutality that the regime used to attack the movement.

As we will also see, there were very different results in LA, Chicago, and Minneapolis. In those cities, the regime arrested and indicted hundreds of protesters on various felony charges, but the movement against ICE and Trump in those cities penetrated deeply into the middle and working classes and thus into the overwhelming majority of those who served as grand jurors and jurors. As Trump bellowed out his usual threats, a silent rebellion grew in which the grand jurors, jurors, and even some judges rejected indictments, acquitted defendants, or dismissed the charges. That, in turn, led to prosecutors dismissing cases that they could not win. There were some convictions, but as defendant after defendant walked free, Trump’s threat to disrupt and uproot the movement turned into mere words.

The movement2In this article, the term “movement”  describes the more-or-less open protests and opposition to ICE. It is critical to recognize that there is another and much larger movement against ICE among the Latinx and other immigrant communities and specifically among the undocumented immigrants in those communities. That movement resists ICE in many ways, but it’s not possible to  record here the regime’s persecution of it because it is largely subsumed in the ICE arrests and deportation campaign which is shrouded in secrecy. needs to understand how the regime won its brutal victory in Prairieland and how it lost in LA, Chicago, and Minneapolis because the lessons learned are vital in the struggle against the pending indictments against anti-ICE protesters in Minneapolis and pro-Palestinian protesters in Detroit, and in what the movement must do to prevent and defend against the prosecutions that are yet to come.

The movement needs to understand how the regime won its brutal victory in Prairieland and how it lost in LA, Chicago, and Minneapolis because the lessons learned are vital in the struggle against the pending indictments.

While the defense of the movement is the key focus of this article, if one looks closely at these events, one can see Marx’s Old Mole at work as actions by jurors and grand jurors reflect the growing hatred and militance from key sections of the working class and the oppressed and their desire action to end all of Trump’s attacks and of the system that gave birth to those attacks.

The tools of repression

In her Memo, Bondi provided a list of 22 specific crimes that federal law enforcement and the U.S. attorneys must consider for any individual who fell within the sweeping scope of NSPM-7.

The most common of those charges were federal felonies for interference with federal agents and destruction of federal property. For decades, state and local governments have used comparable charges to attack various movements, but Bondi directed the U.S. attorneys to file federal charges because she and Trump wanted to inflict as much punishment as possible on activists who dared to fight against ICE and Trump.

In addition to those charges, Bondi’s list included three federal crimes that had been enacted in the past specifically to punish militants and other opponents of the regime.

The first such crime is “riot,” which carries a maximum sentence of five years, and which Congress had enacted in the dying days of the Johnson Administration to prosecute Black activists who had supposedly incited the great urban rebellions of the 1960s. As with most reactionary statutes, it was written broadly so that it could be used to prosecute anyone who incited and took an overt step towards creating a riot in any assembly where three or more people were present. As we will see, Bondi stretched that crime beyond its limit in the Prairiewood prosecutions.

The second such crime is “providing material support to a terrorist act,” which carries a maximum sentence of 15 years. Enacted after September 11, it was aimed at those who assisted in sending the jets into the Pentagon and the World Trade Center. As we will see, Bondi has stretched that crime beyond all recognition by charging the Prairieland protesters who set off fireworks—which contained about two tenths of a gram of gunpowder—with assisting a terrorist attack.

The third such crime is “conspiracy,” which has a reactionary history that stretches back to the early nineteenth century when it was used to prosecute labor unions and their officials. In essence, it says that if two or more persons agree to commit an unlawful act and one of them takes an act to further that agreement, any person in the conspiracy may be found guilty of any later unlawful act taken by another member of the conspiracy even if the person charged (a) had no role in that act (b) did not know the person who had committed that act, and (c) was not even present when that act occurred.

The three charges vastly increase the penalties that can be exacted for particular events, and all three of them authorize the regime to use informants, search warrants, grand juries and much else to rummage through public statements and private conversations to find random statements—including statements about a person’s political beliefs—that can be stitched together to prove intent to incite a riot or to provide aid to terrorism or a conspiracy to obstruct ICE.

In a trial on any of those charges, the judge will instruct the jury that an individual has the right to their own beliefs but will then say that to incite a riot, provide “material support” to terrorists, or agree with others to interfere with ICE extends beyond protected beliefs. As the line between protected beliefs and unprotected action is nebulous at best, the government will turn a trial on any of these charges into an attack upon the beliefs of the defendant and of any organization with which the defendant is associated.

The nightmare in Prairieland

The best way to describe the danger posed by NPSM-7 and the charges issued under its authorization is to tell the story of the horror that decree inflicted upon twenty-two people who were associated with a July 4 protest in front of ICE’s North Texas Detention Facility (“Prairieland”).

The ten protesters who were the central defendants in these cases did not tell their story in court because the defense decided not to call any witnesses. They believed that the prosecution’s case had been weak. The protesters, however, gave a detailed account of the events to a prize-winning reporter from the Texas Monthly. What follows is a summary of  the events based on his report and on reports from others who have reported on  the Prairieland cases.

The Prairieland facility is in Alvarado, Texas, a rural and ex-urban town of 8,000 located 35 miles south of the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex, where over 8 million people live. The ten protesters included Latinx and white people, many of whom were gay or trans. They lived in Dallas-Fort Worth; most were members of the Emma Goldman Book Club, the Socialist Rifle Association, and similar organizations; and all were part of the anarchist and left milieu.

In July 2025, they were angered by Trump’s attack on Los Angeles and discussed what they could do to assist undocumented immigrants in Texas. They soon settled on a plan to hold a noise demonstration outside Prairieland. They purchased some Roman candles and fireworks to make noise, scheduled the protest for 10:30 P.M. on July 4, and publicized the event on a Signal chat. Because Texas is an open-carry state with a large Klan presence, they decided to bring rifles, including AR-15s, for defense, but everyone agreed that the weapons would remain in the cars unless there was an armed threat.

After a short stop for some target practice and instructions on what to do in the event of an attack, they arrived at an assembly point near the ICE facility at about 10:00 P.M. Leaving the weapons in the cars, they walked towards Prairieland carrying the fireworks in a cooler. Unknown to most of the protesters, however, Benjamin Song, a former Marine reservist, remained behind and stood outside the grounds of the facility with an AR-15, which he planned to use if there was an attack on the protest.

At about 10:30 p.m. some of the other protesters began to set off Roman candles and other fireworks outside the security fence around the building. Not surprisingly, ICE officials in the facility called the local police. Two ICE employees also came out, saw the protesters, and asked them to leave. Many did just that. While most would agree that the entire event was an ill-advised and risky plan, to this point, no one had violated any state or federal law other than perhaps an unenforced local ordinance on the use of fireworks.

At some point, however, two protesters broke into a parking lot and began to spray-paint anti-ICE slogans on a guard shack and a few vehicles. As the two ICE agents outside the building pursued the two spray painters, a local police officer arrived. Knowing nothing about what had occurred, he immediately saw the smoke and two unknown individuals running by his car, one of whom wore a mask and was dressed in black. As he got out of his car, he drew his Glock and pointed it at the fleeing individuals, one of whom was a protester and the other of whom was an ICE employee chasing the protester. Holding his AR-15, Song appeared a distance away in the opposite direction. Suddenly, Song and the officer fired their weapons, and the officer was hit by a projectile in his upper left shoulder.

By this point, it is essentially undisputed that the two protesters  had broken federal law by damaging federal property. Far more seriously,  Song may have committed far more serious crimes if, as the prosecutor claimed, Song had shot at the officer for no reason. But if, as  Song claimed, he had shot in a different direction to distract the officer and the officer was unintentionally hit by a shot from his rifle or from the officer’s Glock, he may not have committed any federal crimes. In any event, there is no claim that any of the other nine people, some of whom had left the scene, had personally done anything unlawful.

But as other local, state, and federal police officers arrived at the scene, they arrested the protesters who were still on foot, those who had reached their cars, and those who had driven a short distance away from the scene. As the officers searched the cars, they found other weapons, bulletproof vests, and anarchist literature. In the following days, the local police and the FBI searched the homes of those who had been arrested, and they arrested and searched the homes of anyone who had communicated with those who had been arrested. Six days later, the police arrested Song. In total, the FBI, ICE, and the state and local police arrested and charged 22 people with various state and federal offenses.

From the initial arrest forward, the local police, the FBI, most of the media, the governor, and the Justice Department claimed that the ten protesters had used fireworks to lure ICE officials out of the building where the protesters could ambush them. Acting on the ambush theory, the state charged all ten people at the scene with assault on a police officer, organized criminal activity, and aiding in the commission of terrorism. The federal government charged all ten with attempted murder of two ICE officers and of the local police officer. And the Department of Homeland Security issued and widely publicized a statement that said that “On Independence Day, a group of approximately 15 rioters violently attacked and shot at the brave law enforcement operating ICE Prairieland Detention Center that houses monsters including pedophiles, human traffickers, murderers, and terrorists.”

This case [Prairieland] was almost tailor-made for NSPM-7.

This case was almost tailor-made for NSPM-7. In October, the federal government obtained an indictment that charged all ten protesters with inciting a riot, providing material support to terrorists, conspiring to use an explosive in a criminal act (i.e., the fireworks), and using that explosive in the commission of that crime.The case went to trial in February before an extremely conservative judge who had been appointed by Trump. To prove its case, the U.S. attorney paraded across the stand every officer who had been near the scene and introduced into evidence every AR-15 and bulletproof vest that had been found. Snatching every stray remark that it could find, the government said the ten protesters had all been part of the plot to ambush ICE officers and local police.From the beginning, however, there were significant holes in the heart of the government’s case. How could this all have been a plot to assassinate officers when the protesters had almost cordial conversations with the two ICE officers who had left the building? And why did many protesters leave due to that conversation? Likewise, how could this event have been a plot to ambush officers, when all but one of the protesters left their weapons in their cars, and none had even attempted to retrieve those weapons? And how could all ten be guilty of inciting a riot when the only persons whom they could “incite” were two ICE officers and a local police officer? And how could any protester other than Song be guilty of attempted murder of the two ICE officers or the local police officer when they had not even been near Song when he shot his rifle? As to Song himself, there were other questions, but to all of them the prosecution had only one answer.

These defendants, it said, were all anarchists. Even though none of the literature or the chats had ever mentioned the name “North Texas Anti-Fascist Cell”—and even though there was no evidence that a group by that name even existed—the prosecutors insisted that every protester was a member of that group. In any event, all of them  (or at least most of them) wore black, used an encrypted messaging service (Signal), and used various names on that service. And if that was not enough to show that they planned serious breaches of the law, all (or maybe most) of them were members of the Emma Goldman Book Club.

To fill in any blanks left by that presentation, the prosecution called as an “expert” an individual who worked for a security center which the Southern Poverty Law Center had called an anti-Muslim hate group. The judge allowed the “expert” to read inflammatory passages from Goldman, similar passages from various anarchist zines found in the defendants’ cars or homes, and from stickers with headlines like “Make America Not Exist Again” and “Fight ICE with class war.” The judge also allowed the expert to testify to what other “anarchists” had done in other anti-ICE protests elsewhere in the county and to read to the jury the definition of anarchism and terrorism from NSPM-7, which the President himself had signed.

If all that was not enough, the prosecution sprinkled in references that some of the protesters were gay and others were transgender, and that was why some of the defendants used “aliases.”

While the judge let all that in, he rejected key claims on behalf of Song. As stated, Song claimed that he had shot in a different direction and that the officer must have been hit by a ricochet. But when it was revealed in testimony that an officer had found ballistic evidence that suggested that a shot had ricocheted off a nearby pavement, the judge refused to dismiss the case against Song even though the prosecution had not revealed that crucial fact to the defense until the middle of the trial.

Despite those rulings, as a matter of logic, the government had presented an exceptionally weak case against Song but even more so against the other nine people. But the problem was that the prosecution’s multi-faceted political diatribe—which amplified what the media, the police, the governor, and the president had long been saying—overrode logic. The jury found everyone who had been at the protest guilty of inciting a riot, providing material support to terrorism, and conspiracy to use an explosive device during a crime. It also found Song guilty of attempted murder of the local officer, although it acquitted him of the charge that he had attempted to murder the two ICE officers, and significantly, acquitted the other nine defendants of the charge that they had aided or abetted Song in shooting at the officer.

The problem was that the prosecution’s multi-faceted political diatribe—which amplified what the media, the police, the Governor, and the President had long been saying—overrode logic.

At the prosecution’s request, the court sentenced Song to 100 years in prison, the other persons who had been present to 50 years, and a person who had not been present but who had removed a box of zines from a home to 30 years. Following the sentencing, the U.S. Attorney issued a public statement praising Trump’s NSPM and bragging that his office had convicted a total of “15 Prairieland terrorists” who were sentenced to a total of 556 years in prison.

The Prairieland trials were held in Fort Worth, Texas, but they should have been held in Salem, Massachusetts, a  city historically associated with convicting people because of who they supposedly were and what they supposedly believed.

The Prairieland trial was a poster child for NSPM-7 and showed what the Trump regime would do to destroy opposition to its program of mass deportations and to maintain Trump’s power and money. Freeing the Prairieland defendants must be a key task of our movement.

Part two of this article will take up Trump’s reversals in Southern California and the Midwest.

Opinions expressed in signed articles do not necessarily represent the views of the editors or the Tempest Collective. For more information, see “About Tempest Collective.”
Featured Image credit: U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement; modified by Tempest.

The post Trump’s legal conspiracy (part one) appeared first on Tempest.

Try Me for Treason: Anti-war Protesters’ Speeches in the Russian Courts  is a film featuring excerpts from four speeches by Bohdan Ziza, Darya Kozyreva, Igor Paskar and Andrei Trofimov. The film is produced on a Creative Commons basis by the Ukraine Information Group. The videographer is Tony Aldis. Readings by John Graham Davies, Leila Mimmack, Gareth Brierley, Maya Willcocks and Nick Evans.

These and six other speeches, in English, are published in Voices Against Putin’s War.

Please share it and screen it below.

Notes about the speeches In Bohdan Ziza’s speech:

The Crimean Tatars are a Turkic ethnic group that until the 20th century made up most of the peninsula’s population. In May 1944, in the space of two days, the Soviet government deported all Crimean Tatars, an estimated 470,000 people, to Kazakhstan, on false accusations that they were Nazi collaborators. Many families returned in the

1990s. Since Russia annexed Crimea in 2014, Crimean community and political groups have been subject to political repression.

In Darya Kozyreva’s speech:

The Cossacks are a Slavic people who lived in eastern Ukraine and southern Russia. Under the Russian empire they maintained autonomous military and proto-state formations. Hetmans were military commanders in Cossack and other forces.

The Ukrainian People’s Republic was founded in January 1918 and effectively dissolved in March 1921. In February 1917 the tsarist empire was swept away by revolution; in June that year Ukrainian politicians declared the country’s autonomy; in November Soviet power was established in Russia; the declaration of Ukrainian independence soon followed soon after. The civil war across the old Russian empire continued during the republic’s whole existence. Both the area it controlled and its political colouring changed constantly. The Bolsheviks (Reds, or Soviet forces) and Volunteers (Whites) were the two principal antagonists in the civil war. Symon Petlyura was commander of the Ukrainian People’s Republic army, opposing both. Forces under Petlyura’s command carried out pogroms in which thousands of Jews were killed. In 1926, in Paris, Petlyura was assassinated by the Jewish anarchist Sholem Schwarzbard.

In Igor Paskar’s speech:

Tamara Petkevich (1920-2017) grew up in a communist family. Her father was arrested and executed in the purges of the 1930s, and other family members died in the siege of Leningrad. She was falsely charged with terrorism and served seven years in prison camps, where she joined a theatre group. Her book, Memoir of a Gulag Actress, was published in 1993 and an English translation appeared in 2010. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008) is the best-known writer about the Soviet prison camps, author of The Gulag Archipelago, Cancer Ward and One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, and winner of the Nobel Prize for literature in 1970. Kolyma Tales by

Varlam Shalamov (1907-1982) is also rightly regarded as a masterpiece, unfortunately less well-known outside Russia.

 

More information at bit.ly/againstputinswar.

Opinions expressed in signed articles do not necessarily represent the views of the editors or the Tempest Collective. For more information, see “About Tempest Collective.”
Featured Image credit: Crimea Platform, Linva Chernyavskaya, Memorial Political Prisoners, Memorial Political Prisoners; modified by Tempest.

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