By Comrade Buruisiomma
DETROIT – The Trump regime’s campaign of state violence by way of ICE raids and enforcement of terror against working class immigrants and migrants continues, as agents conduct two vehicular raids across the city within the last three weeks. Within the birthplace of the capitalist-powerhouse Ford and General Motors automotive companies, ICE agents have conducted high-speed chases in plainclothes and unmarked vehicles, terrorizing working class residents in the process.
On May 19, Yerlys Moreno López, a Venezuelan woman who immigrated to the United States in 2024 to seek asylum through a parole program and a resident on Detroit’s east-side, sustained a broken knee and other critical injuries in a car chase and eventual crash caused by ICE agents in an attempt to pull her over. In her attempt to drive away, the agents cut her off, causing her to crash her SUV into a parked car. López was then tackled to the ground, subsequently breaking her knee and having a chunk of her hair pulled out. According to medical records, her knees, right arm and the left side of her face made direct contact with concrete when she was tackled. Her injuries also include a lacerated knee requiring eight stitches, a large scrape on the right forearm, non-severe head trauma, and facial bruises
López was sent for medical treatment at the Detroit Medical Center’s Receiving Hospital. Her husband attempted to visit her and was told by a doctor that she was under surgery. However, when he returned a second time, nurses and staff refused to relay updates as to López’s medical status, indicating the hospital’s bowing to pressure from ICE.
She was taken to the GEO Group-run North Lake Processing Center in Baldwin, Michigan, where the detained immigrant masses rose up and held hunger strikes in protest of the inadequate health care of the Old State facility; in fact, medical records from the facility shows the “rehabilitation” for López involved walking down a hallway three times a day using a walker despite her receiving surgery barely days prior. If not freed, the “medical care” of ICE would cause irreparable damage.
Detroit is a city with an historically majority-Black/New Afrikan population and robust tradition of class struggle between New Afrikan, Palestinian, Mexican, Irish, Chinese and other immigrant and oppressed workers in the auto factories. For many of the city’s immigrant working class community, including López, the U.S.’s “legal” bourgeois channels as to secure asylum and citizenship have become platforms of active reaction by U.S. Imperialism to target the deepest and most marginalized sections of our class and deport as many people as possible.
Due to the very nature of the principal contradiction between imperialism and the peoples and nations it oppresses and super-exploits, workers from Latin America, Africa, Asia and other parts of the world are forced to migrate to the center of world imperialism for better conditions of labor and living, only for them to be subjected to the worst of those conditions, vilified, and targeted by the Old State through mass media, law and other channels of class rule.
In this case, poor and proletarian women of oppressed nationalities and minorities endure the whiplash of U.S. Imperialism. Despite the huge presence of Black and Arab women politicians from the Democratic Party and Democratic Socialists of America in Detroit, it has not ended the oppression of poor and proletarian women of said minorities, nor the class struggle unleashed by said women. The multi-national propertyless class, the U.S. proletariat, is the only class capable of building neighborhood and workplace defense against state repression and terror, for an attack on a worker seeking asylum is an attack against the workers and oppressed peoples and nations subjugated by the U.S. Old State.
[Image Source: Outlier Media]
