Mahmoud Khalil here ♦ Reunite Our Human Family here ♦
Mass rally against arrest of Mahmoud Khalil, New York City (USA), March 10, 2025
Mahmoud Khalil
March 11—Mahmoud Khalil was a graduate student at Columbia University and is a legal permanent US resident. Immigration cops arrested him yesterday. He faces deportation.
This is a fascist attack on a well-known activist against the genocide in Palestine. Trump promises many more such attacks on immigrant protesters.
Similar attacks are happening in Germany.
Khalil was charged under the 1952 McCarran Act. That act and Operation “Wetback” targeted Mexican and other immigrants. It focused on those who had been active in Communist-led trade union struggles.
Before that, the Palmer Raids (1919-1920) targeted Italian and Eastern European Jewish immigrants. Especially activists in radical movements after the Russian Revolution.
Khalil was whisked halfway across the US to a notorious immigration jail. He is appealing his arrest. Pro-Palestinian and free-speech activists worldwide are rallying to support him physically and online. They include some US Jewish organizations.
Marches against the genocide are swelling in Paris, London, and elsewhere. International Women’s Day marches lifted up the Palestinian struggle.
International solidarity with Khalil and the Palestinian masses is powerful. But fighting effectively for our liberation from capitalism and imperialism is always illegal. Masses in Occupied Palestine already know that. Laws, courts, cops, borders, and more – the capitalist state – exist to keep us in wage slavery.
That’s why we must prepare for communist revolution, especially among workers and inside the military. To smash the bosses’ state and build a communist society where the masses govern ourselves and work to meet our collective needs.
Reunite Our Human Family for a Communist World Without Borders
USA, March 10— Thousands are resisting mass deportations here in many ways. However almost 23,000 have been arrested and 18,000 deported this past month.
The resistance has taken many forms. Huge marches, student strikes, highway and street takeovers, demonstrations, boycotts. In several neighborhoods, community patrols have confronted Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents. People are opening their homes to immigrants facing ICE raids. Some hospitals and schools are offering shelter.
These acts of resistance and mutual aid are very important. But they will not stop mass deportations. To do that requires a mobilization of the working masses for communism. It must build for a communist revolution to completely uproot capitalism.
The deportations are taking place as part of the crisis of capitalism. They are to create a scapegoat and blame immigrants. To build fascism in preparation for war like the Nazis did in Germany with the Jewish population.
As Trump’s first term began in 2017, Guadalupe García de Rayos was one of the first people deported under a new executive order that he signed. She had come with her family to the US at age 14. She was deported at age 35, when she had two US citizen children (Angel, 16, and Jacqueline, 14). When she reported for a regular semiannual check-in to the ICE office in Phoenix, Arizona, she was detained and deported within 24 hours.
Now the same story repeats itself. Not only Latinx immigrants but also over half a million Black immigrant workers and over a million Asian workers are at risk. About 20% of undocumented people in the US are white, but racist ICE officers less often target them. The whole working class is weaker to the extent that it is divided by racism and paralyzed by fear.
It is capitalism that enslaves the whole working class under the chains of wage exploitation.
“Capitalism forcibly separates immigrant families throughout the world,” added a comrade. “Most immigrants don’t bring their children when they leave their place of birth. For example, Sikh immigrants in Italy and Mozambican immigrants in South Africa.”
A high school teacher reported, “I have been talking to my students about Jocelyn Rojos Carranza, an 11-year-old girl who died by suicide after being bullied by people who said her family would be deported.” He then emphasized, “We cannot accept the ruling class rhetoric that immigrants are less because of citizenship. We must teach our kids what’s right. Workers can’t fall for this s***.”
A comrade in El Salvador agreed. “Yes, some are being won to this racist narrative. My friend in Canoga Park, USA told me that some would denounce neighbors rather than support them, for their own security. I told him that we need to fight for international working-class unity to change the system that enslaves us all.”
A Mexican immigrant in the US reported, “My wife’s friend told her that this attack on immigrants was like making war on us.” He asked a coworker what he thought about that. The coworker replied, “I don’t think it’s really like war, because at least they’re going to get me out alive. War is worse.”
The Red Flag is the Flag of the International Working Class.
In the resistance against deportations, many students and workers wave flags of different nations from which immigrants come. These flags and these nations divide the international working class.
The working class has no nations: they belong to the capitalist bosses. Workers have only the red flag, the color of the blood we have shed fighting to achieve total emancipation from capitalist exploitation.
Let’s build a new world where the only flag is the red flag. A world without nations, borders, and without money. A world in which no one will be forcibly separated from their loved ones. In which every human being will be welcomed everywhere, and no one will be called illegal. A communist world. Let’s fight for this world! Our lives, and the lives of future generations, depend on it.
How? Read Red Flag and study its entire contents. Form collectives for communist study and action. Discuss the ideas in this paper wherever you are: in schools, factories, barracks, and neighborhoods. Help spread Red Flag as much as possible. Mobilize the masses for communism.
Bring your red flags to march this May Day, International Workers’ Day! Let’s march for the abolition of capitalism, of borders, of nations, and of wage slavery. Only communism will end deportations.
Read our pamphlet:
Fight for the Day When No Worker Will be Called Foreigner, here