While the billionaires try to plunder the social safety net, the Trump administration is working hard to convince working people their economic problems are caused by immigrants.

We can’t say we weren’t warned: At last year’s Republican National Convention, delegates waved signs demanding “Mass Deportations Now.” There are, at a conservative estimate, eleven million undocumented immigrants in the United States. The force required to even attempt to remove so many people is showing us just how authoritarian this administration is prepared to be.

Plans include using the National Guard, state and local police and the military to go house-tohouse and business-to-business to round up millions of immigrants, expel them to tent camps along the southern border, in Panama and other Central American countries, and at the Guantanamo naval base in Cuba.

To deport 11 million people is, of course, insanity—one of Trump’s fever dreams alongside making Canada our 51st state and turning Gaza into the Mar-a-Lago of the Middle East. The deportation of 11 million undocumented workers means shutting down the US agriculture, poultry, livestock, restaurant, hotel, landscaping and construction industries. But that won’t stop Trump from making a show of it.

His fixation is not really about immigration, though. That’s as fake as Trump University or the man’s orange skin and hairdo. Two of his three wives were immigrants. His co-president and principal underwriter, Elon Musk, is an immigrant. He recently offered US citizenship to millions of white Afrikaner South Africans. In his first term, when he uttered the infamous slur about “having all these people from sh*thole countries come here”—referring to Haiti, El Salvador and all of Africa—he also added that, “we should have more people from Norway.”

So, no, the man is not concerned with unchecked immigration. He is obsessed with non-white immigrants. The essence of his election campaigns: Make America White Again. In his 2016 campaign, the targets were Mexican “rapists” and Central American “criminals”; in 2024, it was the entire Haitian community of Springfield, Ohio, here legally for years, who were “eating the pets” of white neighbors.

It’s not the billionaires plundering the economy and depriving us of affordable healthcare and a decent education for our children. No, the problem is a make-believe “invasion” of families from the global South.

Trump was redirecting the anger of white workers about economic inequality into an imagined racial grievance. To deflect attention from the real steal of tax breaks for billionaires, the Republicans are trying to make people believe that reduced access to housing, education and healthcare is caused by a makebelieve “invasion” of families from the global South.

The Trump administration announced that it plans to revoke legal protections for hundreds of thousands of Haitian, Cuban, Venezuelan and Nicaraguan people including Temporary Protected Status (TPS) which many 1199 members rely upon setting them up for deportation next month.

The administration’s assault on immigrants is, of course, affecting the country’s healthcare systems. Dr. Altaf Saadi, associate director of the Asylum Clinic at Massachusetts General Hospital, reports, “We certainly have heard from folks that they have not left their homes in weeks. They’re sending their children to get groceries because they themselves are afraid to go, or they’re relying on their community and friends to help because there is that fear that they could be subject to immigration enforcement”. Saadi noted that it’s essential to understand how this directive will impact not just undocumented patients, but also anyone who lives with or has family members who do not have authorized immigration status.

Trump has made his plans clear. But as Mike Tyson famously said, “Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face.” Like any bully, Trump will pick on anyone or any country that submits to him. Unfortunately, too many people—including some political figures who claim to be our friends—are unwilling to fight. But bullies will also back away after enough punches. Our union has never given in to bullies and we never will. Resistance to Trump is building in our communities, among unions, in our places of worship. He and Musk are coming not just for our immigrant communities, but for all of us. The impending battle is the fight of our lives. We need all the friends and allies we can gather. But to those too willing to abandon us, we say what the Civil Rights Revolution said half a century ago: Move on over or we’ll move on over you. Let’s go!