The following interview of Joseph Jamison will appear in the February issue of Ortaklasa (Collectively) a new publication of the TKP (CP of Turkey). Murat Akad, an editor of Ortaklasa, is the interviewer.
- Since Trump became president, the United States has been generating more headlines than ever before. A highly turbulent period has opened up, both internationally and within U.S. politics. Let us begin with the killing of Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis by an ICE agent. Although ICE was founded earlier, the world really became aware of it during Trump’s presidency. Trump concentrated ICE agents in certain cities he specifically targeted. On social media we see countless videos showing masked ICE personnel operating almost like a paramilitary force. Many people even compare them to the Nazis. What exactly is ICE? Why has it come so much to the fore? What is its political function? We also see Border Patrol playing a similar role. Although it is officially tasked with guarding the country’s borders, it is now conducting manhunts for migrants in cities far from the border.
JJ- To answer this question we have to take a step back and understand Trump’s immigration policy and its roots. Trump’s essential ideology is right-wing populism. Unlike previous ideologies dominant in the Republican Party, right-wing populism claims to speak for “the people” for “the little guy” against “the elites” but essentially blames scapegoats for the people’s woes: undocumented immigrants, African-Americans, Muslims, Mexicans, Central Americans, Somalis (concentrated in Minneapolis).
Right-wing populism has national variations but Trump is, in many respects, akin to Marine LePen in France, Nigel Farage in the UK, Giorgia Meloni in Italy, Viktor Orban in Hungary, Alice Weidel leader of the AfD (Alternativ fur Deutschland) party in Germany, and so forth. By contrast left-wing populism also celebrates “the people” but puts blame for their plight on the real culprits, however imprecisely defined in the US: Big Business, Wall Street, the monopolies, the railroads, the robber barons, the Eastern Establishment, the 1 percent, “the billionaire class,” the elites.
Trump’s preferred scapegoat is immigrants. In 2024 at the Republican convention that nominated him, he promised, having built a US-Mexico “border wall” in his first term (2017-2021), to undertake “mass deportations” of illegal aliens in his second term.
ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement, formerly called Immigration and Naturalization Service, INS) together with the Border Patrol, and the National Guard (state militias that have been put under federal control) are the three agencies of the federal government’s Department of Homeland Security that are carrying out mass deportations. Trump promised to first target the “worst of the worst” — illegal aliens who were violent criminals (murderers, rapists etc.). But in fact, a very different policy has emerged. According to Minneapolis residents, the basic tactic seems to be ICE convoys driving around looking for any nonwhite person out by themselves, jumping out, dragging them into a van, then driving off.
- After Renee Nicole Good’s killing, a very serious wave of public anger erupted. At the same time, the mayor of Minneapolis and the governor of Minnesota took a strong stand against ICE. We see other politicians, including some Republicans, doing the same. What kind of political fracture does this reflect in U.S. politics? How should the social reactions that have emerged be evaluated? They recall the protests that followed the killing of George Floyd by the police, also in Minneapolis. What lies behind this? Is the issue merely the killing of an unarmed person, or do these reactions also have a political basis?
JJ – Sheer brutality and cruelty have marked Trump’s anti-immigrant crackdown. Mass deportation of Mexican and Central American immigrants often means sending them to harsh prisons in distant countries, or else to remote and isolated areas of the US (for example, to “Alligator Alcatraz,” a hastily built prison camp in the hot, humid Everglade swamps of Florida). Trump has deployed thousands of masked, heavily armed ICE agents, and other federal troops (the Border Patrol, and the National Guard) in major cities, typically, those cities run by Democratic Party mayors such as Los Angeles and Minneapolis. ICE agents seize targeted individuals on the street and jail them, often resulting in separation of parents and children. The sight of these deployments and abductions has terrorized tens of millions of immigrants (documented and undocumented) and it has met with strong disapproval of a majority of Americans, not only the left.
There is, admittedly, majority approval of Trump’s “securing” the southern border, which was seen as “open” and “unsecured” under his predecessor president Joe Biden, a Democrat. In the Biden era 2021-2025, images of large masses of immigrants marching to the US-Mexico border were often seen on television.
There is a profoundly racist dimension to Trump’s immigration policy. Immigrants from Latin America, Central America and Africa (Somalia, in particular. Somalis are concentrated in the Minneapolis area) are especially targeted. Trump has publicly called Somalis “garbage.” It has been reliably reported that ICE is recruiting new agents from white supremacist terror gangs, such as the Proud Boys.
Along with mass deportation, Trump has created a new, racist asylum policy. Its chief beneficiaries have been white South Africans who, Trump alleges, have been persecuted by the African National Congress government in South Africa.
Trump frequently denounces “birthright citizenship,” the provision of the US Constitution that defines a US citizen as someone “born or naturalized” in the US. He alleges that illegal aliens abuse it by coming to the US to give birth to a child, thereby securing citizenship for the child.
As you suggest, the case of Renee Nicole Good could well turn out to be similar to the George Floyd case, that is, a spark leading to much larger nationwide protests. At the time of this writing (January 16, 2026) protests against ICE are continuing in Minneapolis and around the US. Trump is escalating the tension by pouring more federal troops into Minneapolis. The stubbornness with which Trump has escalated repression is due to the centrality of the immigration crackdown to his whole domestic program. Protests against ICE are continuous and there is plenty of teargas and the use of flashbombs (A flashbomb, sometimes called a flashbang or stun grenade. It is a non-lethal explosive device used primarily by military and police tactical units to temporarily disorient people) and rubber bullets. If the ICE protesters compel Trump to retreat, then it will be a defeat of major proportions for him, and it will not bode well for the midterm elections in November 2026.
Tens of millions of people saw Renee Nicole Good murdered by real bullets on television (as they saw George Floyd murdered on television) and they reject the explanation of the incident put forward by the Trump Administration. They are furious at its clumsy efforts to avoid accountability and to prevent an independent investigation of the ICE agent who killed her. Trump’s vice president, J. D. Vance, has already declared the ICE agent to be “absolutely immune” from prosecution. Trump’s top Homeland Security official Kristi Noem, has called Renee Nicole Good a “domestic terrorist.” She was in fact a US citizen, a mother of three, a poet, and a singer in her church choir.
- The mass character of the George Floyd protests was striking. But the protests against the genocide in Palestine have been even larger. The activism on university campuses has been unprecedented. At the same time, there have been notable strikes in recent years. Young people in particular seem to be developing a higher level of political consciousness. Can we speak of a general politicization of society?
JJ- It is more a shift to the left and politicization among the young, not yet a general politicization of society as a whole. Among the young, as you correctly note, there is a definite shift to the left. Youth are more pro-trade union; they are more willing to begin the difficult task of organizing a union in their workplace. If they already have a union, they are more willing to go on strike. Having watched the televised savagery of the US-backed Israeli onslaught against Gaza for two years, they are more pro-Palestinian and less influenced by Zionist propaganda than their elders. They are less influenced by decades of anti-communist propaganda to which older Americans have been subjected. Six years ago, young people led the George Floyd protests too. Young people were the main force that elected Zohran Mamdani to be Mayor of New York City in November 2025. He is a 34-year-old immigrant (born in Uganda of Indian heritage), a Muslim, and a self-described “democratic socialist.” His opponents on the right, including Trump, red-baited him consistently during the campaign. Red-baiting had little effect on the young.
- How do you assess the Strategy Document that came into force in late 2025 and the debates about a return to the Monroe Doctrine? Would this not require the support of the capitalist class? To what extent has Trump been able to rally the U.S. capitalist class around his policies? Are there divisions among capitalists?
JJ- The National Security Strategy (NSS) is a document setting U.S. foreign policy goals that the president periodically sends to Congress. Commenting on the NSS released on December 5, 2025 Rebecca Lissner, associated with the establishment-oriented Council on Foreign Relations, indicated that, “The Western Hemisphere is elevated as America’s highest priority, with an emphasis on arresting migration, combating so-called “narco-terrorists,” and assuring U.S. dominance through a “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine. The NSS asks, “What are America’s core foreign policy interests? What do we want in and from the world?” The NSS response is: “We want to ensure that the Western hemisphere remains reasonably stable and well-governed enough to prevent and discourage mass migration to the United States … a hemisphere whose governments cooperate with us against narco-terrorists, cartels, and other transnational criminal organizations … a hemisphere that remains free of hostile foreign incursion or ownership of key assets … In other words, we will assert and enforce a ‘Trump Corollary’ to the Monroe Doctrine.”
Historically, the “doctrine” put forth by President James Monroe in 1823 asserted that the United States rejected the intrusion of European powers in Western Hemisphere affairs. Actually, Monroe was opposing the re-intrusion of European colonial powers. When Napoleon conquered Spain and Portugal, many Latin American states were able to win their independence, led by liberators such as Simon Bolivar and Jose de San Martin. At the end of the Napoleonic Wars (1815) Spain and Portugal were trying to regain their lost colonies. The Theodore Roosevelt Corollary of the Monroe Doctrine appearing in 1904 proclaimed that the United States would exercise “police power” over targeted countries and that a “big stick” would be used to fix their finances, governments, and external relations.
Since Monroe, US capitalism has always sought to dominate Latin America and the Caribbean economically and politically, usually by neocolonial means but sometimes by overt colonial means (Puerto Rico). In the current moment, the expansion of China’s influence in Latin America is perceived by US rulers as a new threat to US dominance. Under Trump, those states that assert their independence of the US, such as Venezuela or socialist Cuba or Nicaragua become targets for US economic sanctions and sometimes military action as we saw in Venezuela on January 3, 2026.
- In recent years, people have begun to speak of the possibility of a civil war in the United States in a way we had never heard before. Such scenarios are even being portrayed in Hollywood series and films. How likely do you think this is? Who would be the sides in such a civil war?
JJ- A civil war is unlikely in present circumstances. Nevertheless, the US is a highly armed society and there is plenty of gun violence. The number of guns exceeds the number of people in the US, currently 348 million people. Gun ownership is concentrated in rural areas and in the South and West. But gun violence is a major social problem in all parts of the country; the “gun lobby” composed of arms-manufacturing firms and sections of the political right is powerful and entrenched in the Republican Party. Because of the ready access to guns — even to military-grade assault weapons (machine guns) — there are frequent incidents of mass killings by the mentally ill, criminals, and sometimes, assassins, as well as accidental killings (of and by children). There have been horrific incidents of mass shootings in schools. Progressives advocate restrictions on gun ownership to keep them out of the hands of those who might engage in mass shootings.
The increased — and increasingly violent — repression that the Trump Administration is using in its immigration crackdown runs the risk of larger-scale counter-violence. So far in Minneapolis and elsewhere, anti-ICE protests have been peaceful; the forces leading the anti-ICE protests – often the clergy and other community leaders — understand that Trump wants to escalate tension, hence they are consciously pursuing non-violent tactics. Scenes of chaos and violence in the streets (teargas, rubber bullets, flashbombs) help to justify even more extreme ICE repression and to intimidate the immigrant community.
Moreover, since the January 3 US attack on Venezuela and the kidnapping of President Maduro and Cilia Flores his wife, there is plenty of hubris in the Trump government, so there is a greater possibility of miscalculation.
-Joseph Jamison is a co-author with Roger Keeran, of Socialism Betrayed: Behind the Collapse of the Soviet Union. He is an editor of Marxism-Leninism Today.
