The following is based on a talk given by Monica Moorehead, Workers World managing editor and former Workers World Party presidential candidate, for a Sept. 7, 2025, webinar entitled “The wars come home: Troops out of our cities! ICE out of our communities!” sponsored by the United National Antiwar Committee (UNAC). 

Other speakers on the webinar included ​Ajamu Baraka – Director of Black Alliance for Peace’s North-South Project and UNAC Administrative Committee; Cristobal Cavazos – Immigrant Solidarity DuPage; and ​Frank Chapman – Executive Director, National Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression. The webinar was chaired by Joe Lombardo, UNAC co-chair. View the entire program at UNAC’s YouTube channel.

Let us not be confused or narrowly focused. There are many reasons why [President] Trump changed the Department of Defense to the Department of War. And it’s not just about the wars abroad but wars right here at home, which makes this webinar so timely. I thank UNAC for organizing this discussion. These wars at home and abroad are linked by the same inhumane, rotten, decaying system of imperialism.

Trump first declared open warfare on the entire U.S. working class when he fired tens of thousands of federal workers, a vast majority of them Black women, using Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE. Trump then attacked the Diversity, Equality and Inclusion (DEI) programs, passed under former President Biden, threatening to cut federal funding if these attacks were challenged. 

An openly white supremacist in the White House is attempting to sweep away any progressive gains fought and died for by oppressed peoples to win some semblance of democratic rights long denied, beginning with settler colonialism and the theft of Indigenous lands, genocide and violations of sovereignty. 

Sending armed troops, the National Guard, along with ICE, to join the police in the streets of Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., Chicago and the many other cities that Trump plans to impose military occupation on, is in preparation for an inevitable working-class rebellion. 

The massive raid on the Hyundai plant in Georgia a few days ago, with the arrests of hundreds of mainly South Korean construction workers, should set off alarm bells throughout the entire labor movement, especially throughout the unorganized South where unions have been making some important gains from worker formations like the Southern Workers Assembly.

The white supremacist Trump government, which is widely supported by the bourgeois ruling class, is targeting migrant workers, Black and Brown people and multinational urban cities first because this is about violently imposing white supremacy, including ethnic cleansing from gentrification to incarceration. Trump is targeting places like D.C. and Chicago to rally his demoralized MAGA base. And he’s also doing it to weaken the already anemic pro-war Democratic Party to steal the 2026 elections.

White supremacy hurts all workers

However, fundamentally, we can only understand what is happening if we see it within the context of the deepening capitalist economic crisis, the decline of U.S. imperialist global hegemony, and the coming intensification of class struggle. The ruling class is scared, desperate and preparing to fight for the survival of their dying system. So they are preparing to crush the resistance and the rebellions whether in the form of protests, strikes or other forms of militant struggle.

Labor unions and other worker formations must know this, understand this and prepare to defend their right to wage class struggle. There are reasons why they [the capitalists] come for the most oppressed first, and then they target the entire working class.

When unemployment starts rising as it already has, and cuts to every basic need of the workers from health care to education to housing to food start really kicking in, the workers have no other choice but to fight back, and this is what the ruling class is losing sleep over and what Trump’s Department of War is preparing for.

Deploying troops city by city is very calculated and very strategic. A major part of the strategy is to get us and the rest of society, including the political establishment, used to seeing troops in the streets. This is so when the time comes to crush resistance, by declaring martial law, it won’t be a shock. Moreover, the military and the police will have had the time to create the infrastructure necessary for the imposition of martial law.

Communities of color are no strangers to this kind of occupation and terror traced back to the days of “slave catchers” hunting down escaped enslaved African people. This was followed by the post-slavery Black Codes when Black people were arrested and incarcerated for minor infractions, laying the basis for fascist terror imposed on the Southern Black masses following the defeat of radical Reconstruction. 

Many of us remember when the National Guard was deployed to urban cities like Detroit, Newark and Los Angeles during the 1960s to suppress rebellions sparked by police brutality and fueled by the same inhumane conditions as today, but those conditions have expanded classwide. 

Forces in Los Angeles and D.C. have been uniting against ICE, the police and the National Guard and now in Chicago, and our movement must extend solidarity to all who are under immediate siege by these fascist tactics. Just yesterday, Sept. 6, there was a huge anti-Trump march of thousands in D.C. demanding to “Free D.C.” from this repression.

Classwide unity is key

In light of this unprecedented crisis, we can’t afford for our movement to be divided and to act only in the interest of our individual organizations. This is a recipe for disaster. A forward-thinking, working-class perspective is what’s needed for our class to become the gravediggers of capitalism, predicted almost 180 years ago in The Communist Manifesto.

We must take a page from the heroic Palestinian Resistance, made up of both secular and non-secular factions, that has built a strong united front with a common goal — to liberate their ancestral lands and to win sovereignty from imperialism and its partner in war crimes, Zionism. And this 77-year-old resistance against genocide and ethnic cleansing, especially since Oct. 7, 2023, has inspired a higher level of resistance to imperialism throughout the Global South and Global North. 

Our strategy — a strategy which will require a level of unity, urgency and political analysis that we don’t yet have but must organize to get — is that the struggle to stop martial law and the deployment of troops at home and abroad is a class struggle. This means the working class has to be central in this struggle — not peripheral or an afterthought. How can this be done? If we comprehend this, and we have the will to do it, then we will find the strategy and tactics that will make it possible.

 Long live internationalism!