This May Day, stand in solidarity with the workers Trump’s trying to deport

As workers prepare to march in the streets on May Day, congressional Republicans are moving to use a budget reconciliation process to add $70 billion in new funding for Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection. No legitimate reform is attached. No oversight is required. And many of the people in the crosshairs of this expanded deportation machine are among the workers we march for on May Day.

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This term, the Trump administration restarted worksite raids — enforcement actions the Biden administration had mostly paused — and aimed those raids at workers, not the employers exploiting them. Indeed, companies exploiting such workers are almost never held accountable. Thus, workers who fear deportation don’t report wage theft. They don’t report unsafe conditions. They don’t organize. Research on previous enforcement surges found that when immigration raids increase, the willingness of workers to make workplace injury complaints falls, and minimum wage violations rise — not only among immigrant workers but also among everyone working alongside them. The suppression spreads. The terror and its associated chilling effect are not a side effect; it’s the intended effect.

The $70 billion request is outrageous if for no other reason than we have already seen what the Trump administration does when it has unlimited resources and no accountability:  masked agents smashing car windows and grabbing parents in front of their children. The administration wants no guardrails against racial profiling. It wants no accountability for the deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, two U.S. citizens shot dead during this year’s federal paramilitary surge in Minnesota. Republicans want to give ICE billions of dollars more even as it makes no effort to rein in White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, the architect of the administration’s mass deportation operation.

All the reasons above are why Rep. Delia Ramirez helped introduce the Melt ICE Act, and they’re why we should see this May Day as not just another protest but as a reckoning. The bill would begin dismantling Trump’s expanded deportation machine. Not reform it. Not alter who oversees it. Dismantle it. Because the problem is not that ICE lacks accountability. It’s that an agency with so much money, so much power and so little oversight is designed for impunity. ICE is designed to be a vehicle for terror, not safety.

ICE’s total funding is already larger than the combined budgets of the FBI; the Drug Enforcement Administration; the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives; and the U.S. Marshals. The administration has requested enough new funding to support the removal of one million people per year. That is not security. The administration is pushing for a domestic enforcement apparatus operating at a scale our country has never attempted, and $70 billion more would lock in such outrageous and disproportionate spending  for three more years.

Rep. Delia Ramirez

Delia Ramirez represents Illinois’ 3rd Congressional District in the House of Representatives.

Andy Kang

Andy Kang is the managing director of the Fair Immigration Reform Movement, a national coalition of immigrant rights organizations.