FIRE (Fight for Im/migrants and Refugees Everywhere) is a multi-national, multi-generational and multi-gender organization borne from one of the most pressing political challenges of our time: the war against migrants. Based in the United States, this group seeks to bring together all sectors of society to concentrate our energies on abolishing ICE, immediately putting an end to all deportations and closing all migrant detention centers. 

The world has stood in horror at the draconian, racist and downright inhumane treatment of migrants along the southern border of the United States and Mexico. Trump has called undocumented people “animals, not people” and says they are “infesting” our country, all language primed to dehumanize and justify attacks on the most vulnerable among us. 

But this administration’s outright attacks on migrants is not new, nor is it isolated to Trump, or even the United States. The dire situation facing migrants is reflective of the deepening, global, capitalist crisis forcing people to flee poverty and imperialist war and leave their homes to risk an extremely dangerous journey that now ends with children and even infants ripped from the arms of their parents and sent to detention centers that more and more resemble concentration camps. U.S. wars, U.S. backed counter-revolutions, trade policies, and of course Trump’s uncensored racism are swiftly creating a death machine that is reinforced by ICE and their border patrol agents. 

These ICE agents not only stand armed at the U.S.-Mexico border, but have made borders out of Greyhound buses and Amtrak trains where passengers are asked for their “papers”, the workplaces where undocumented migrant labor is exploited, courthouses and other government buildings, and in neighborhoods and communities where migrants live in fear and constant surveillance. Those who are targeted, followed, and detained by ICE are eventually deported, but not after spending some time in an immigration detention center where they are not protected by nor entitled to any legal rights.

Attacks on migrants are only intensifying. Our forces must take up the task of intervening in a period where the state has made it clear it will target and repress efforts to build working class solidarity by going after undocumented organizers, Black activists on the frontlines of police brutality, youth taking back and occupying their schools and campuses, and many others in our class who are super-exploited and who want to fight their way out of capitalist oppression. 

FIRE rejects this attack on our class and is mobilizing to fight back in a number of ways. Sign up to immediately get plugged in.