Upstream - [TEASER] Immigration, ICE, and Working Class Rebellion w/ Cecilia Guerrero

Episode Date: June 24, 2025

This is a free preview of the episode "Immigration, ICE, and Working Class Rebellion w/ Cecilia Guerrero." You can listen to the full episode by subscribing to our Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/upstreampodcast As a Patreon subscriber you'll get access to at least one bonus episode a month (usually two or three), our entire back catalog of Patreon episodes, early access to certain episodes, and other benefits like stickers and bumper stickers—depending on which tier you subscribe to. access to bi-weekly bonus episodes ranging from conversations to readings and more. Signing up for Patreon is a great way to make Upstream a weekly show, and it will also give you access to our entire back catalog of Patreon episodes along with stickers and bumper stickers at certain subscription tiers. You’ll also be helping to keep Upstream sustainable and allowing us to keep this project going. It’s easy to get lost in the narratives that are fed to us by the very same institutions that oppress us. Whether liberal institutions or far right ones, there’s always something crucial missing—some component of analysis that’s left unaddressed, some root cause that remains misidentified or distorted. And the reason is because when it comes to the class war that we are all engaged in—whether we like it or not—the issues of class, of imperialism, and of monopoly capitalism are never, ever part of the mainstream discussion.  So, what are the root causes of immigration? What do the ICE terror campaigns look like on the ground in cities like LA or Nashville? What happens when we apply a materialist lens to the conversation about mass deportations and conversation about the scapegoating of the more vulnerable groups in society? And what happens when we shift the frame from the more liberal, rights-based approach to activism to one based on unified, solidaristic class struggle? Well, we’ve brought back on the perfect guest to help us unpack some of these pressing questions.  Cecilia Guerrero is Chair and Founding Member of A Luta Sigue, an organization based in Nashville, Tennessee, which incubates and trains young people and workers within advanced sectors of the working class to build and lead their own class struggle organizations. In this episode, we talk about the terror campaign being waged on immigrants throughout the country and the responses coming from working class communities who are standing up for themselves and standing in solidarity with the oppressed and exploited classes across the globe. We talk about ICE, the role that immigration plays in the imperialist global system, the attempts by liberal institutions to co-opt and neutralize our radical movements, and what the MAGA right gets wrong about the root cause of their immiseration.  Further resources: A Luta Sigue Poder Popular Tennessee Drivers Union Southern Youth Solidarity Network Capitalism and Workers’ Immigration, V.I. Lenin Marx to Sigfrid Meyer and August Vogt In New York, Karl Marx Related episodes: From the Frontlines: Class Struggle and Class War in the US Southeast w/ Cecilia Guerrero The Imperial Boomerang w/ Julian Go Artwork: CPSU propaganda poster Upstream is a labor of love — we couldn't keep this project going without the generosity of our listeners and fans. Subscribe to our Patreon at patreon.com/upstreampodcast or please consider chipping in a one-time or recurring donation at www.upstreampodcast.org/support If your organization wants to sponsor one of our upcoming documentaries, we have a number of sponsorship packages available. Find out more at  upstreampodcast.org/sponsorship For more from Upstream, visit www.upstreampodcast.org and follow us on Instagram and Bluesky. You can also subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts.

A quick note before we jump into this Patreon episode. Thank you to all of our Patreon subscribers for making Upstream possible. We genuinely could not do this without you. Your support allows us to create bonus content like this and to provide most of our content for free so that we can continue to offer political education media to the public and build our movement. Thank you comrades. Hope you enjoy this conversation. These deportations do tend to happen often during times of economic crisis. And so some describe these mass deportations as mass layoffs as well.

So what these do is that they make the status of immigrants even more precarious. They want to make people docile, complacent, too afraid to strike, too afraid to organize. And so as a result, it will drive down wages for all workers, regardless of immigration status, and it's gonna lead to the further consolidation of monopoly capital. Because all of this behavior by the ruling class,

by the monopoly capitalists, they're only doing what is convenient to the activity of exploitation and to the domination of capital, you know, in the words of Marx. Trump doesn't just represent himself, even though Democrats might want to say that, oh, he's just an egomaniac, he's just this, he is representing collective interests. And those collective interests are from a section of the monopoly capitalist class. You are listening to Upstream. Upstream.

Upstream. Upstream. A show about political economy and society that invites you to unlearn everything you thought you knew about the world around you. I'm Della Duncan. And I'm Robert Raymond. It's easy to get lost in the narratives that are fed to us by the very same institutions

that oppress us. Whether liberal institutions or far-right ones, there's always something crucial missing. Some component of analysis that's left unaddressed. Some root cause that remains misidentified or distorted. And the reason is because when it comes to the class war that we're all engaged in, whether we like it or not, the issues of class, of imperialism, and of monopoly capitalism are never ever part of the mainstream discussion. So what are the root causes of immigration? What do the ICE terror campaigns look like on the ground in cities like LA or Nashville?

What happens when we apply a materialist lens to the conversation about mass deportations and to the conversation about the scapegoating of the more vulnerable groups in society? And what happens when we shift the frame from the more liberal, rights-based approach to activism to one based on unified, solidaristic class struggle? Well, we've brought back on the perfect guest to help us unpack some of these pressing questions. Cecilia Guerrero is chair and founding member of Aluta Segue, an organization based in Nashville, Tennessee, which incubates and trains young people and workers within advanced sectors of the working class

to build and lead their own class struggle organizations. In this episode, we talk about the terror campaign being waged on immigrants throughout the country and the responses coming from working-class communities who are standing up for themselves and standing in solidarity with the oppressed and exploited classes across the globe. We talk about ICE, the role that immigration plays in the imperialist global system, the attempts by liberal institutions to co-opt and neutralize our radical movements,

and what the MAGA right gets wrong about the root cause of their miseration. And as Della is still enjoying her first few weeks as a mother and some much deserved time off, I'll be presenting my own interview again today. So here's my conversation with Cecilia Guerrero. All right, Cecilia, it's great to have you back on the show. Yeah, it's great to have you back on the show. Yeah, it's great to be here. Yeah, thank you so much for coming on and on a little bit of short notice too. And so we've had you on in the past, actually not too long ago, we had an episode where

we discussed class struggle and class war in the American Southeast, which is where you're based. And so yeah, if anybody missed that or just needs a refresher, though, I'd love it if you could introduce yourself for our listeners and maybe just share a little bit about the work that you do. Yeah. Yeah, it's great to be here. I am Cecilia.

I'm an organizer from Tennessee. I work with an organization called Aluta Sigue. What we do, we try to find working class leaders and progressive youth and support them in building organizations. So in the last two and a half years, we've supported the development of three projects. The Tennessee Drivers Union, which is a union of Uber and Lyft drivers representing drivers from over a dozen nationalities primarily in Nashville. Puder Popular which is an organization of Latino workers in construction, manufacturing and hospitality. Right now they have two large tenant unions in middle Tennessee and have also supported tenant unions in Memphis.

Then we also have the Southern Youth Solidarity Network, which is an organization of progressive young people in Nashville and Memphis that are working to integrate the working class and align with working class struggles. So you can find us on Instagram or on our website. You know, we're always looking for volunteers and also just support all around. And so I myself was, you know, born and raised in Mexico in a family of steel workers. I have a background in the labor movement, in also some in the immigrant rights movement. And, you know, currently in the work we do, we focus a lot on conducting social investigation, like just integrating with working class communities and, you know, getting an understanding of what are the conditions that the people on their ground are facing. And then how do they think? How do they think about themselves,

about other classes? How do they relate to each other. And so trying to get a real sense of that and using our social investigation alongside our study to build a class analysis, right? An understanding of like what classes are there in our region, what are the different classes relationship to each other, to politics, culture, the economy, nature. So there we can really understand like who are the friends, who are the enemies and just like fully inform

like the work that we do down the line. So that's what we do. Awesome, yeah, thank you so much. And you're doing such important work. And so as usual, I'm going to link to all of those organizations that you're involved with in the show notes and highly encourage everyone listening to check those out, check out Cecilia's work more deeply, and also go back to listen to our first episode with Cecilia, where we really dive deep into this concept of social investigation

and class analysis and exploring a lot of the topics that you just briefly touched upon in a lot of depth. So if anybody has any questions or curiosities there, go back and listen to that episode. Check out the show notes and click on those links to get more information on that. But we're also going to be embedding a lot of the work that you do and the analysis

that you do into the conversation today as well. And on that note, so I wanted to invite you back onto the show specifically to talk about the current events that are sort of hitting our headlines maybe a little bit less since the war in the Middle East and the war on Iran is sort of dominating headlines right now, but I think it's really important to keep this conversation going as well. And of course, those are the ice raids,

which have been impacting workers all over the United States and also have been impacting you and the work that you do in Tennessee, I'm sure. And we'll talk about that now. And the uprisings in LA, we'll get to that as well. And just this whole sort of fascist, Gestapo style of assault and attack on working immigrants throughout the country. So yeah, I mean, just, I guess to start, this feels a little bit like an escalation,

right? But also, you know, you and I and most of our listeners know very well that this kind of assault on working people and working immigrants didn't start with Trump. So maybe just give us a sense of what's happening on the ground and give it some context if you think that might be helpful. For sure. I mean, and what we're experiencing right now is like this more reactionary liberalism. So just wanted to say that it does feel like it's fascism, but in reality, like liberalism can be just as reactionary and can inflict so much terror. But I wouldn't say that we are fascist just yet.

There's some steps that need to be in place in order for me to be able to confidently say that. But just to be able to shed a little bit on the ground what we have been experiencing. Since the beginning of May, ICE has abducted hundreds of working class people from Nashville and Middle Tennessee, which is where many of us are based in.

This was one of the largest ICE operations in the region. About a month ago, the count was over 200 people that had been kidnapped, and we know that they have continued to kidnap people, but we just stopped counting. The rates have primarily affected working class Latinos, but they have also targeted other communities. One of the first acts of terror that we can link to this operation was an ambush outside of very popular nightclub in South Nashville called Bucanas

on Saturday, May 3rd. And so on a Saturday night, Bucanas is just packed. Like there's hundreds of people in this club, right? And it's one of the only spaces, like nightclubs in the area that you can go and listen to banda music, corridos, like other kinds of regional Mexican music, plus like reggaeton. So like it's just the music that like working class Latinos listen to, right? So on any given night, like on a weekend, you see hundreds of Latinos, working class Latinos in there. So at like 3 a.m., people are leaving the club, right? And this is when they got folks, they were waiting for them outside

and it took primarily men, but took a lot of people there. Throughout that weekend, ICE was collaborating with the Tennessee Highway Patrol and conducted around like 150 traffic stops and kidnapped like 94 people, right? Just that weekend. And then they put everybody into a bus

which transported them to detention centers in places like Louisiana by May 4th. So then like that marked the beginning of the operation and it's considered the largest in our region. There's a notable for the amount of cooperation between like state and local agencies. So in Nashville, we don't really see that local cooperation between the cops and ICE, but outside of Nashville, there's just a very clear cooperation that we're seeing. And so they have been terrorizing our streets, like raiding the day laborers corner, waiting for people outside

immigration law offices. You know, I saw people get taken at the fast food line. Just chaotic. And it's just a campaign of terror. They've also been like driving and ICE has been making an appearance at certain places without taking anyone, right, which stresses the whole community out. And that's the point. They have been driving around complexes where there's one of the tenant unions that we work with without taking anybody. They have been driving around manufacturing plants

where workers are making the servers for the cloud systems used by Tesla, by Dell, making servers for Elon Musk, not taking anyone, but also just with the purpose of scaring the workplace. So we're seeing that a lot as well. One worker at one of our organizing meetings was saying, well, the difference between the Democrats and the Republicans is that the Democrats are fake. They tell you what you want to hear and then they deport you. Then they deport more people than anyone. And Trump is different. He's a businessman. He likes to make a big fuss and like be selective about he goes about it. So he causes the most panic and they're like, you know, his tactics are psychological. So people leave on their own or stop coming.

And I think that's spot on. I think that assessment was spot on. But one thing that I wanna touch on is that, while it's true that Biden deported more people than Trump, and that Obama earned his nickname, the Deporter in Chief, there's one key aspect that I find that is different from previous administrations that does constitute an escalation.

And that's the fact that workplace rates have increased exponentially. So Trump is targeting the so-called sanctuary cities. And in that process, he's showing how the term doesn't mean much and like what is a sanctuary city exactly and you know so Trump is targeting the Home Depot, the construction site, elementary school graduation and that's a campaign of terror very explicit against the working class right and and I'm not saying that deportation has not always

been an attack against the working class. Like deportations are always an attack on the working class. But this time the mask is just fully off. They are blatant about it right now. More blatantly than ever targeting working class people, working class spaces and working class leaders, labor organizers, activists, anti-class spaces, and working-class leaders, labor organizers, activists, anti-imperialists, right? And all of those people are at the top of Trump's deportation

list, right? And you know, while I do see that this is a type of escalation, I also see that this is a type of weakness, right? It's a major contradiction because that is also a force that is currently galvanizing the working class and opening people's eyes and building deeper, more class conscious and more internationally this type of solidarity than ever before. Because how can undocumented workers not see themselves in Palestine

when they're seeing Palestinians get thrown in the same ICE detention centers as their loved ones for standing up against the genocide of their own people, right? And not just that the United States doesn't just deny them any kind of action to stop the genocide of Palestinians, but they lock them up in the same detention centers. How can black workers not see themselves in undocumented people when they're seeing the violence inflicted on them by the police and ICE? Ultimately, how can you not lose your shit seeing

the government terrorize our people at the same place where we get exploited, at our more sacred spaces, right? You know, that's just going to continue to, you know, as we say, by him and the ass. And yeah, I mean, you're talking a little bit about how these assaults and disappearances and kidnappings are the potential for building solidarity between different groups of people that are often pitted against each other under capitalism. What has the community response been like? You're seeing some potential for solidarity, but also just like on the ground too. What has that response been like? Do you see more predominantly spontaneous organic reactions? Are there foundations for more organized responses, you know,

that have been utilized to respond and protect immigrant workers from the kinds of assaults and kidnappings that are taking place across the country? Like, like what does it look like on the ground where you're at? So in Tennessee, it's a little bit different than in LA given the fact that, you know, there's just so many organizations that are, you know, principle in LA that have been working with the people, integrated with the people for a long time. And even though the rebellion that we have seen in LA is spontaneous, the anger is spontaneous, the class consciousness is not. The class consciousness is there.

And so I do think that there is some work to be done in Tennessee still. Although we do see some level of organization in the communities that have already been organized. So for example, in our tenant unions, we are seeing that they have the infrastructure that allows people to actually engage in a more productive community defense. For example, just a few days before the mass rate of May 3rd, one of our tenant unions had a meeting with a landlord from North Carolina. And so the members had organized for months, right, to stop. The landlord was implementing this predatory parking policies.

They were scamming people, overcharging them for everything. So the members had organized and applied pressure on the landlord and finally got the landlord to agree to meet them and take a flight from North Carolina to Middle Tennessee and actually meet with the residents in person in a town hall. However, the requirements, the conditions that the landlord placed for the residents in the town hall were very concerning. So they require IDs. They did not allow any electronic devices. And they did not allow press or anybody else in there. So, you know, it was going to be in a closed space, town over Nashville. So like one hour away in an area where ICE presence is more dominant,

where local agencies are cooperating with ICE. And it was going to be in a space fully controlled by the landlord. It was going to require people to give their IDs, and it was going to require people to not have their cell phones, right? So if there was an emergency, they couldn't be able to call anybody. So the residents are like, you know what, if this is a set up, if this is whatever, we don't care. We're not afraid, right? We do not want to be portrayed as victims and defenseless victims. And we want to show people that we are unafraid, we are brave, and we're organized.

So over 100 and so residents showed up to the meeting. When they show up to the meeting, like the meeting had over 40 cops, which counted several undercover. And they wanted the residents to come inside this room and come inside a circle of cops, right? But when the landlord sees that the residents are not afraid of it, the landlord freaks out and cancels the meeting right on the spot. And so the residents call press, which was outside, the residents organized and they pushed. And so this is a glimpse of what we're seeing in LA, not to that greater degree, but we're seeing that immigrant people are no longer afraid as they used to be.

They are brave and they are fed up with all of the attacks that they have been experiencing. People are saying, well, like the people in LA, they are mostly Chicanos. They are mostly people with documents, and that's not really the case. The whole community is behind. And so we're seeing glimpses of that in Nashville, but for the type of scale of what we're seeing in LA to happen, then there needs to be more organization that is similar to what we're doing happening as well. And so because of that lack of infrastructure, we're only seeing pockets of that kind of bravery and pockets of that kind of consciousness in some parts of the city, but not all across. So let's continue to broaden out a little bit from Tennessee and talk more generally about the assault on immigrant workers all across the country. kind of a larger question, like how can we make sense of what's going on through a lens of like materialist analysis, which you're so disciplined at and you're so good at applying to different conditions.

So like what role ultimately does immigration play, both for, you know, US capital and more broadly for imperialism? And how can we understand the Trump regime's focus on immigration and mass deportations right now in this context? Yeah, yeah. I mean, first we should be clear that the displacement of workers and peasants from oppressed countries to capitalist imperialist countries is inevitable. Immigration is inevitable under a capitalist, imperialist system. And also competition among workers is a feature of capitalism. And so as long as capitalism exists,

someone out there is always going to be coming for your job, right? Like blame capitalism, not your fellow workers. And so now that that's out of the way, we can dive into it a little bit more. So capitalism always needs to expand. It needs to find more markets, more things to commodify, more resources to extract,

more labor to exploit. Monopoly capitalists from imperialist countries are displacing people from their land. So like in Guatemala, for example, Mayan communities right now are being displaced at alarming rates due to mega projects by corporations from imperialist countries. These mega projects involve things like mining operations, hydroelectric plants, cash crop, monocultists, like palm oil.

And so, oppressed countries are not able to develop their economies like other countries. Their economies are subjugated to finance capital and external debt, which gets exacerbated by predatory trade agreements, for example. In these conditions, capitalism is unable to fully develop domestically, and feudal relations persist in the countryside. And so we call these conditions semi-colonial and semi-feudal. Because they still have, it's not that this is a new type of colonialism or feudalism, it's just the fact that those questions are still unanswered or unresolved. Those problems are still there, even though the countries are independent in name. And so to protect their investments and power, imperialist governments representing

these monopoly capitalists intervene with the domestic affairs of other countries they oppressed, inflicting brutal violence on the people and destabilizing their societies. So then people leave their countries because of the violence inflicted upon them by imperialists with the help of their governments and move to imperialist countries to find work and safety. Right? And so then they are considered like immigrants or foreign workers and then they become part of a pool of super exploited labor.

This was a clip from our Patreon episode with Cecilia Guerrero. You can listen to the full episode by becoming a Patreon subscriber. As a Patreon subscriber, you'll have access to bi-weekly episodes ranging from conversations to readings and more. Signing up for Patreon is a great way to make Upstream a weekly show, and it'll also give you access to our entire back catalog of Patreon episodes along with stickers and bumper stickers at certain subscription tiers. You'll also be helping to keep Upstream sustainable and allowing us to keep this whole project

going. Find out more at patreon.com forward slash Upstream podcast.