On April 5, the dam of pent up anger at the Trump administration broke. Millions of people poured into the streets to rally and march in defense of everything from unions to social security and freedom of speech.
Working class people declared “Hands Off” our lives, livelihoods, and democratic rights. But Trump is undeterred. He will not call off his “shock and awe” war on the working class until we stop him with mass, disruptive protests, including civil disobedience and political strikes.
Already a wave of struggle is mounting with actions called here in Vermont and throughout the country almost every week in April. To top off this month of struggle, unions and immigrant rights organizations have called for mass demonstrations on May Day.
In Vermont, we have called for protests in Montpelier and Williston. In Williston, we will assemble, march on the ICE data facility, and hold a rally at the Hannaford Supermarket in solidarity with Migrant Justice’s day-long picket.
Trump’s Class War
As a labor movement, we are faced with immediate attacks that must be resisted. We cannot wait for the midterm elections, and it is not at all clear that even if the Democrats took back the House that they would stop Trump. They are at best a timid opposition. Regardless, Trump ignores Congress and rules like a monarch issuing executive orders to carry out his class war.
As Martin Luther King famously said at the 1963 March on Washington, “We are now faced with the fact that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history there is such a thing as being too late…. Over the bleached bones and jumbled residue of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words: ‘Too late.’”
We have no choice but to unite and fight the Trump administration now. Its authoritarian nationalism is a clear and present danger to workers and oppressed people in the US and throughout the world.
At home, Trump, Musk, and their fellow oligarchs are ripping up union contracts, laying off thousands, and slashing social programs. Abroad, they have launched a new annexationist imperialism, threatening to seize Panama, Greenland, Canada, and Gaza while imposing unprecedented tariffs that have thrown global capitalism into crisis, wrecking the lives of workers throughout the world.
To get away with all this, Trump is trying to split our resistance with the tired, old strategy of divide and conquer, scapegoating oppressed groups in our class. He has gone after migrants, Palestinians, queer and trans people, Black people, all people of color, women, and the poor in order to attack all of us.
Trump’s attack on Palestinians is perhaps the best example of this. In a cabinet filled with antisemites, including Nazi-saluting Elon Musk, the administration has weaponized the charge of antisemitism to arrest and attempt to deport Palestinians and solidarity activists on visas and then carry out a systematic assault on all higher education.
Trump has put 60 universities and colleges, including Middlebury, under investigation. Already, he has used the threat of funding cuts to force Columbia to impose McCarthyite restrictions on whole departments, muzzle professors, expel students including Grant Miner, the Jewish President of UAW 2170, which represents student workers, and curtail the right of students, professors, and staff to speak, assemble, organize, unionize, protest, and strike.
But the labor movement will not fall for such scapegoating. That’s why organizers have called the march in Williston against ICE and in solidarity with Migrant Justice. We know that if Trump first comes for migrants and we do not stop him, each and all of us will be next in his line of fire.
Migrant Rights Under Attack
Vermont is ground zero for the attack on migrant workers. Like they do throughout the country, ICE and Border Patrol harasses, detains, and deports people, especially migrant labor activists on a regular basis at the border and throughout the state.
Williston is home to the Law Enforcement Support Center, ICE’s main data facility. Operating 24 hours a day and 365 days a year, it is the national and international nerve center for immigration authorities, centralizing reports on migrants and dispatching arrest orders to ICE, Border Patrol, and police.
The Trump administration has turned to Vermont to jail migrants in the state’s correctional facilities. For example, the administration revoked the visa of Russian scientist Kseniia Petrova, who is an outspoken opponent of Vladimir Putin’s War on Ukraine, ordered ICE to detain her, throw her in a Vermont jail, and then send her off to Louisiana’s gulag of detention centers.
Our state has also become embroiled in Trump’s war on Palestine solidarity activists. Last month, Department of Homeland Security agents abducted Tufts University student Rümeysa Öztürk for the “crime” of co-authoring an op-ed against Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza in her school newspaper.
She was whisked from the streets in Somerville, Massachusetts, transported to the ICE office in St. Albans, and then, like Columbia University activist Mahmoud Khalil, jailed in Louisiana’s gulag as a political prisoner. By a Boston court order the hearing on her deportation may be heard in Burlington, pending a decision on the matter by a Vermont federal judge.
The Workers United Will Never Be Defeated
Faced with Trump’s divide-and-conquer class war, the labor movement this May Day in Williston will unite in defense of all workers and oppressed people under attack. We know that, in the words of the old labor slogan, an injury to one is an injury to all.
If we do not practice solidarity without exception, Trump will take advantage of our divisions to the detriment of all of us. But, if we stand together as one and oppose each and every one of his attacks, we can forge the fighting unity necessary to turn back the Trump attack.
Such solidarity harkens back to the first May Day in 1886 when immigrant workers led mass protests and strikes in Chicago and throughout the country for the eight hour day. In 2025, as we rise up against Trump, we must revive that tradition of unity and militancy.
We mobilize not just for a protest, but to organize our forces to make our unions and our organization fit for the ever higher levels of struggle that will be necessary to defend what we have now and fight for the radical reforms necessary to address all inequalities and injustices in our country and world today. And in that fight we must set our sights not on the restoration of the status quo, but on a new world that puts people and the planet first.
Join us on May Day!
Ashley Smith, of Burlington, is a member of the Tempest Collective and the Vermont Coalition for Palestinian Liberation.
