After Lorenzo Salgado Araujo was killed by ICE agents in Houston’s East End neighborhood in early July, residents in the area created a memorial to him at the spot where he died. It included piles of flowers, candles, notes, artwork, photos and posters demanding justice for both Araujo and for Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero, who was killed by ICE on July 13 in Biddeford, Maine.
Efraín Montalvo, a construction worker, left a hard hat at the memorial. He told a reporter, “We are here because we are afraid of what is happening. Like Mr. Lorenzo, we also work in construction and we don’t know if we will come back home….I’ve been here for about 20 years….We brought the hard hat as a symbol of the sorrow we share with his family. My son is four years old; if immigration were to stop me – the thought of having to leave my son – I have a lot of fear.”
No worker in this country or anywhere should have to live in fear, whether it’s fear of being abducted and put in a concentration camp, fear of being murdered, fear of racist attacks, fear of war, or fear of being homeless and hungry. The crisis may seem overwhelming to us – the wars, the genocide, the shaky economy, the fascism, the looming threat of AI, the government’s attack on free speech and on voting rights – but people are realizing that we cannot allow ourselves to be overwhelmed.
If we allow the powerful to deport our working class sisters and brothers under the guise that “they’re taking jobs and benefits to which they’re not entitled,” or because they supposedly “broke the law,” then we are not only immoral, we’re setting ourselves up to be next in line for the detention centers. We know that it is the billionaires, their technology and their drive for profits that is destroying jobs and every social benefit we have won, not immigrants.
Whatever the issue, if more of us can see that it is the for-profit system that is the problem, that the working class has the power to join forces and fight effectively for something better, everyone can win.
In Los Angeles recently, more than 50 organizations came together to lead a funeral procession mourning the lives lost at the hands of ICE. They carried more than 70 coffins. One speaker said, “We want to invite you to not just stay in your grief, but to remember your own power as well, and the power that they [the deceased] left with us.”
Millions are in action and millions more are needed. The people are using every tool we have, including the elections, to win.
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