At about 11 am on Wednesday, October 22, the news came that 100 federal agents led by the Border Patrol would be arriving the next day at Coast Guard Island in Alameda (near Oakland). Their mission would be to conduct so-called “immigration raids” in working class communities within a 40-mile radius, an area that includes most of the major cities in the San Francisco Bay Area. This was widely seen as a prelude to the National Guard deployment threatened by the Trump administration.
Communities all across the Bay Area immediately sprang into action. A coalition called Bay Resistance held a call with 5000 participants on Wednesday night. At dawn on Thursday, hundreds arrived at the bridge to Coast Guard Island to attempt to block the arrival of the federal agents. Protesters remained there all day, and large rallies were held Thursday evening in both San Francisco and San Jose.
The response was the result of decades of Bay Area organizing in defense of migrant workers, including the massive march of 200,000 in San Jose in 2006. It was the result of years of political education around the understanding that workers cannot win housing, health care, or any kind of economic justice without unity across lines of race and immigration status. Since 2017, Rapid Response Networks had organized hundreds of Know Your Rights trainings in every Bay Area county. They passed out tens of thousands of red Know Your Rights cards and created hotlines for reporting ICE activities and mobilizing observers and legal assistance.
Resistance trainings with hundreds of participants were held around the Bay Area in September and October. Bay Resistance posted a “Hands Off the Bay” statement before the Alameda deployment was even announced. The trainings were modeled on those sponsored by the Indivisible, No Kings, and 50501 groups: promoting love, unity, non-violence, resilience, and non-cooperation with fascism. No Kings, which turned out 7 million people to protest the dictatorship on October 18, describes itself as a low-barrier movement, open to anyone not profiting from or overtly supporting the regime. As a result, it includes very diverse elements, all the way from working class revolutionaries to shameful apologists for corporate Democrats, whose failed policies laid the foundation for MAGA’s rise to power in the first place.
EMBRACING CLASS DEMANDS
Twentieth century history has shown that resistance to fascism virtually always elevates revolutionaries to the forefront of the working class movement, based on their political clarity and moral commitment. The No Kings tactics are a good and effective framework for starting the fight against fascism, but they are limited in their appeal by their very “low-barrier” nature. In the long run, they will have to more fully embrace class demands like those advanced by the Workers Over Billionaires trend within it. Although they call for “transformative justice” and “deep democracy”, actual victory – removal of the regime – will require drawing in even more millions. This means turning these ideas into real battles for the immediate things both migrants and other workers need to survive – housing, health care, childcare, and education.
The rapid upsurge of resistance clearly caused the cancellation of the Border Patrol offensive. After consulting with billionaire tech executives Marc Benioff and Jensen Huang on Wednesday night, as well as San Francisco’s billionaire Mayor Daniel Lurie, Trump announced that he would at least temporarily call off the “surge”. Benioff and Huang essentially told Trump that they were already making good profits in the current environment and – especially with major sports events coming to the area in early 2026 – they did not want to risk the instability that large-scale immigration raids would unleash.
THE WAY FORWARD
Bay Area workers owe a large part of their victory to the heroic resistance to occupation by residents of Los Angeles, Washington DC, Memphis, Portland, and Chicago. The ruling class is carefully picking and choosing its battles as it seeks to step by step impose the Project 2025 dictatorship. The experience so far is that when workers are organized, immigration attacks create more unity than division, and create more obstacles for the fascist agenda.
In Los Angeles for example, the movement even forced the County to declare a state of emergency to provide rent relief, legal services, and food subsidies to families impacted by the raids. This is opening the door to a possible eviction moratorium and is causing a wave of anxiety among landlords and real estate developers. Both San Francisco Mayor Lurie and San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan said they believed they could accomplish some of Trump’s major objectives – to increase property values, lock up more low-income people, and remove unhoused people from public view – without federal intervention. Like most other Democratic Party leaders, they have paid lip service to partially defending immigrants. But they stop short of defending equal treatment by the criminal justice system for migrant workers, or supporting the health care or rent control that they need to survive.
At the same time, because it no longer needs workers in an AI (artificial intelligence) economy, the ruling class is forced to continue relentlessly attacking them. The plan is to occupy as many blue cities as possible, in order to dismantle and suppress the resistance, including using ICE and National Guard troops to block workers from polling places in 2026. The mass deportation campaign is real, but it is also a diversion. It is designed to prevent the unity of the 29 million workers about to be denied SNAP food benefits in November, or of the 20 million workers whose Obamacare premiums are set to double at the same time.
The role of revolutionaries is to fight for the unity necessary to win these demands for basic needs. This means rejecting every compromise that denies the constitutional and human rights of migrants. When workers stand together — across lines of color, gender, and immigration status — the regime’s divide-and-conquer strategy crumbles. When we organize around our shared needs for housing, health care, childcare, and education, we build the power to defeat fascism at its root. The movement that can shut down immigration raids in the Bay Area is the same movement that can remove this regime and create a new government based on human needs instead of private profit. Solidarity is not just our shield—it is our sword. And we are learning how to wield it.
Published on November 4, 2025
This article originated in Rally!
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