Lessons of Nashville: The working class and the defense of immigrants

http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2019/07/25/pers-j25.html
Date Written:  2019-07-25
Publisher:  World Socialist Web Site
Year Published:  2019
Resource Type:  Article
Cx Number:  CX23739

A recent story about residents of a Nashville neighborhood rallying to protect their neighbors from ICE agents shows the power of class solidarity in the face of attempts at racial division.

Abstract: 
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Excerpt:

Residents of the working-class Hermitage neighborhood in the Tennessee capital defended an immigrant father and his son, after agents of Immigration and Customs Enforcement sought to detain the father for deportation. The father and son refused to leave their van, parked in their own driveway, after the ICE agents accosted them....

Against this doomsday picture of America on the brink of race war, one must counterpose the Nashville video of working people, white and black, male and female, linking arms to defend an immigrant father and his son from detention and deportation....

The popular resistance to mass deportations is in sharp contrast to the role of the Democratic Party, which last month approved an additional $4.6 billion in funding for Trump’s regime of detention facilities in which immigrants are subjected to family separation, overcrowding, semi-starvation, and the deliberate promotion of disease through neglect and denial of medical care.