ICE kidnappings in New Bedford: Mobilize labor's power to free them now!

ICE Gestapo kidnappings in New Bedford: Mobilize labor's power to free them now!

WORKING CLASS EMANCIPATION
401-837-3685 * March 6, 2007 * laboraction [at] aim.com

* Emergency Protest: Thursday March 8, 12 noon *
* ICE Office, Dyer St, Downtown Providence *

Early this morning, hundreds of agents from Homeland Security's ICE
(Immigrations and Customs Enforcement) Gestapo attacked the Bianco
leather factory in New Bedford. As shocked and angry friends and family
looked on, the black-shirted kidnappers hunted down hundreds of workers,
mostly women from Guatemala and El Salvador, in the streets and from
helicopters hovering overhead, and hustled them off to federal
immigration concentration camps for processing and deportation.

Just as it has during every imperialist war, the US government is
ferociously attacking immigrant workers, stepping up massive raids like
today's atrocity and the Swift Packing raids in December, in addition to
the daily kidnappings that add up to five hundred deportations every
day. The attacks against immigrant workers, by Democrats and Republicans
alike, are motivated by the bosses' need for an oppressed, exploitable
labor force, divided along national lines by unjust laws and
government-sponsored racism.

While the reformists and union bureaucrats are already trying to use
this racist atrocity to plead with the Democratic war-makers in Congress
for "comprehensive immigration reform" (what good does that do for the
jailed workers from New Bedford?), we say that only the working class,
united for its common interests across national lines, can put a stop to
this racist injustice! The power of a strike, demonstrated by the
transit workers in New York in 2005, can bring the ICE Gestapo to its
knees and free our kidnapped sisters and brothers.

Union members whose jobs and benefits are under attack must understand
that the government's raids and roundups against immigrant workers are
the cutting edge of the attack against all workers: as long as immigrant
workers are divided by legal status and racist prejudice from the rest
of the working class, the bosses have a weapon that can break any union.
The government is pretending that the factory was raided because of
sweatshop working conditions, but these ICE attacks are designed to
maintain the oppression and fear that make low-wage sweatshops possible
and profitable. As long as immigrant workers are in chains, native-born
workers will not be free. Working class internationalism is the the only
way to fight back! This is why we reject any compromise short of full
citizenship rights for all immigrants. The UFCW members under attack by
Stop & Shop and the Rhode Island state employees tied to Governor
Carcieri's chopping block by the Democratic legislature should walk out
in defense of workers' rights: the kidnapped immigrants' and their own.

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Workers and oppressed peoples of the world, unite!
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