Resistance to ICE, the largest security agency in the U.S.
Also in this edition: Cuba in the crosshairs. Supporting small coffee growers. Joseph Stiglitz on the new imperial era. Drug trafficking, the black sheep of the family.
Lea La Jornada Internacional en español aquí.
The brutal anti-immigrant campaign in the United States is being led by what is now the country’s largest federal security agency, and one of the largest in the world: Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Much of the media attention earlier this month focused on the videotaped killing of one unarmed protester inside a car in Minneapolis, but in just the first 10 days of January, four immigrants died while in ICE custody.
The architect of President Donald Trump’s anti-immigration policies, White House adviser Stephen Miller, has transformed ICE and the Department of Homeland Security, of which it is a part, into the “shock troops” of his ambitious plan to deport millions of people. For many, Miller is translating the slogan “Make America Great Again” into “Make America White Again,” and there is evidence to support the accusation of racism.
“The scale of the propaganda we’re seeing from this government is beyond imagination” when it comes to immigration, explained journalist Nick Miroff of The Atlantic, adding that the goal is beyond ambitious: the Department of Homeland Security set its deportation target at 100 million, nearly a third of the country’s total population, and accompanied it with an illustration of the paradise that would supposedly result.
Although it is very far from achieving such a goal, its tactics have had a dramatic impact. Last year for the first time in at least half a century, more immigrants left the United States than entered it.
“At the same time, the response of Minneapolis residents shows the exhaustion of broad sectors of society with hateful rhetoric, the persecution of the most vulnerable, and the Trumpist drive to establish a police state,” La Jornada writes in an editorial. “The outrage of citizens and the spontaneous demand for accountability from the killers allow room for hope that, without intending to, Trumpism is generating a broad social backlash rejecting fascism and demanding basic levels of civility.”
The growing national wave of repudiation of the Trump administration’s anti-immigrant actions is leading to a shift in public opinion. According to a January YouGov poll, more Americans now support protests against ICE than support the agency itself. What’s more, state and local politicians in Tennessee, Illinois, New York, and New Jersey are advancing legislation to set limits on the federal government’s anti-immigrant operations.
And the resistance has not remained only in the streets. Some local political leaders are also reclaiming the words and songs of resistance that emerged from immigrant-led struggles that unified social movements in the United States more than a century ago. “For rising of the women means the rising of the race…the sharing of life’s glories. Bread and roses… Hearts starve as well as bodies; bread and roses, bread and roses.”
The Quote:
It maybe is time to start drinking..
—Kaja Kallas, head of foreign policy for the European Union, in a private session with lawmakers, assessing the state of the world.
In Case You Missed It
◻️ Cuba in the imperial crosshairs. The second target of U.S. military action against Venezuela is Cuba. The Trump administration is now demanding that the Chavistas halt oil shipments to the island. In Mexico, the right wing is questioning the supply of oil to Cuba. For La Jornada, given this context, “the Mexican government’s decision to continue regular oil shipments agreed upon with the island should be a source of pride for all Mexicans.”
◻️ Supporting coffee. The coffee sector includes around 500,000 producers; 95 percent of them are peasant farmers, very small-scale producers. As part of the Rural Supply Program, the government increased the purchase price of parchment Arabica coffee from 75 to 100 pesos per kilogram, benefiting 6,455 small producers in Guerrero, Oaxaca, Puebla, and Veracruz.
◻️ International alliances, key for Mexican trade unionists. “Labor rights are no longer defined solely in national congresses, but also in international forums, union networks, and globalized political spaces,” explained Napoleón Gómez Urrutia, national leader of Mexico’s miners’ union, who last year resolved a strike at the Cananea mine that had lasted more than 18 years. In that sense, he called on his “fellow Mexican union leaders to strengthen international alliances in order to curb efforts to make labor organizations disappear.”
◻️ Hegemony without occupation. The relationship between the United States and Mexico is sustained primarily not by treaties or diplomatic rhetoric, but by an informal architecture of domination made up of incentives, validations, and silences, writes José Romero, director of CIDE. At the center are the elites—political, economic, and academic—tasked with ensuring the relationship functions smoothly. The decisive question is not whether Mexico has competent elites, but whether those elites are willing to stop managing subordination as if it were a virtue. When elites give up imagining alternatives, the country gives up deciding.
◻️ Venezuela resists every day. Marches take place daily in different regions of the country demanding the release of President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, reported La Jornada’s correspondent. Acting president Delcy Rodríguez insisted that “there is an acting president here and a president being held hostage in the United States,” and emphasized that the Bolivarian government remains in charge, “together with the organized people, together with popular power.” She has, in fact, held meetings with ambassadors from China and other countries without asking Washington’s permission. However, the world should also understand, writes Luis Hernández Navarro that “Venezuela is now a matter of US domestic politics, so that, in addition to the capacity of the Venezuelan people and their leadership to resist, the final outcome of the military offensive against them will depend largely on what happens in the bowels of the empire.”
◻️ The new U.S. imperial era: Joseph Stiglitz. Trumpist imperialism, devoid of any coherent ideology and completely lacking in principles, is merely an expression of greed and the will to power, writes the Nobel Prize–winning economist. “One would hope we have reached ‘peak Trump,’ that this dystopian era of kleptocracy will end with the elections of 2026 and 2028. But Europe, China, and the rest of the world cannot rely on hope alone. They must develop contingency plans that recognize that the world does not need the United States.”
◻️ The disliked relative. Víctor Quintana explores the “suspicious geopolitical functionality of drug trafficking,” writing that it is “not a ‘disease of contemporary capitalism,’ but a kind of disreputable relative, very useful to the current project of accumulation, domination, and colonialism.” He concludes that “real or exaggerated drug trafficking is suspiciously functional for the purposes of constructing U.S. colonialism and domination under Donald Trump. If it didn’t exist, he would invent it.”
◻️ It’s not about copying reality, but inventing it. With these words, José Agustín Monsreal Interián, recent winner of the 2025 National Prize for Arts and Literature, explained the approach that has guided his work. “Each story starts from a minimal event that, when it resonates internally, deserves to be told. Something pleasant or anecdotal is not enough; there has to be knowledge, an exploration of the human condition.”
