From Global Imperialism to the Police State: The United States in Its Repressive Phase
By Bianca Morales
The deployment of the repressive apparatus of imperialism is a direct expression of the historical decomposition of the United States. Each policy that, viewed from a distance, appears irrational—the attacks against Venezuela, the permanent blockade of Cuba, or even open threats against Greenland—reveals the extent to which bourgeois democracy is incapable, at this historical moment, of protecting humanity.
The government of Donald Trump acts not only with total arbitrariness on the international stage, but also within its own borders.
On January 7, 2026, an ICE agent shot and killed 37-year-old Renee Nicole Good while she was inside her vehicle in south Minneapolis during a large-scale federal immigration operation. According to recent reports, this case constitutes at least the ninth shooting by immigration agents against people inside vehicles in the past four months, with at least one other person recently killed during an operation near Chicago. The question is unavoidable: is this the “democratic” country that once showed advances as a bourgeois republic compared to other capitalist states?
To answer this, it is necessary to place the “democratic” character of the United States in its proper historical perspective: it has always been subordinated to the interests of capital at every stage of development. When U.S. capitalism needed labor power, the country opened its doors to the world to attract workers and purchase labor power on a massive scale. However, when the struggle between capital and wage labor cyclically contracts, a surplus labor force emerges—one that today is uncomfortable and expendable.
After the pandemic, the United States experienced this phenomenon with brutal clarity. Capitalists raised their voices not because they aspire to reindustrialize the country for the benefit of the majority, but because maintaining a large workforce is increasingly unprofitable in an ever more parasitic economy. Today, financial capital dominates, and the profitability of capitalist accumulation is generated primarily through the circulation of money on Wall Street and in global financial markets. The United States is not interested in reorganizing production according to the needs of the working class; it seeks to keep the wheel of transnational capital intact and to secure geopolitical control over the zones it deems strategic.
That control inevitably begins on its own territory. Since it cannot be sustained through real and productive economic development, it is imposed by force. From this decomposition of capitalist economic anarchy flows the brutality of the persecutions against immigrants. This brutality materializes not only in street shootings, but also in detention centers, where 2025 recorded at least 31 deaths in ICE custody—the deadliest year in two decades—due to medical negligence, suicides, and preventable diseases such as tuberculosis. Three men died in January 2026 from withdrawal syndrome following recent arrests, exposing privatized centers where capitalist profit takes precedence over human lives.
The Trump administration maintains a chilling defense of repression and deploys rigid ideological control to justify state violence, claiming that ICE shootings are acts of “self-defense” and even labeling actions such as that involving Renee Nicole Good as “domestic terrorism.” Meanwhile, local governments and civil rights organizations point to these events as direct consequences of an openly aggressive immigration policy.
Every democratic process has been postponed by the desperation of U.S. capital in its search for higher rates of profit for the national bourgeoisie. They gambled on tariffs and failed. They now seek investments in artificial intelligence and chip production, but the cost of developing them on U.S. territory is too high for capitalists. Moreover, automation and mechanization lag significantly behind China’s productive capacity. Faced with this panorama, desperation deepens and war emerges as a central tool: as a mechanism of mass control, as an axis of capital circulation, and as internal repression.
These actions seek to secure more favorable conditions for accumulation and to send a clear message to the masses: anyone who rises up against the imposition of the capitalist social order, amid the economic and political crisis facing the United States, will be persecuted, repressed, and, if necessary, eliminated. The State arrogates to itself the right to shoot, disappear, and criminalize protest.
The decomposition of capitalist logic has pushed to the extreme the discourse of “saving America” and “returning to what it once was.” Along this path, the government has incorporated groups linked to the far right to swell the ranks of ICE.
Recent reports describe a “wartime recruitment” strategy, with more than $100 million invested in ads targeting followers of “patriotic” podcasts, UFC events, weapons content, and tactical gear. At the same time, age and education requirements have been lowered to attract heavily militarized profiles.
Academic and civil rights investigations warn of the infiltration or affinity of sectors of ICE and CBP with far-right groups such as the Proud Boys and border militias, facilitated by the weakening of background checks and internal oversight mechanisms.
On the external front, the attempt to increase the military budget to figures exceeding trillions is not absurd within the logic of protecting the U.S. capitalist order.
The unhinged nature that characterizes Donald Trump and his administration is inseparable from his class position, profoundly alien to the way the majority of the population earns a living. But beyond his individual figure, Trump represents the political personification of a system desperately seeking to reproduce and accumulate capital. This need collides head-on with the valorization of labor power: when one increases, the other decreases, and at no point in history have they managed to be balanced.
From this imbalance, brutality is born.
To achieve new rates of accumulation, capital needs to reduce the value of labor power. The directive is clear: impose a repressive order that warns the working masses that any attempt to obstruct capitalist accumulation will be labeled terrorism, both internally and externally. That is the price the working class pays today.
A price that dangerously pushes us to normalize and even applaud the onslaught of a leader like Donald Trump: a convicted felon, responsible for an attack on Congress in which innocent people died, investigated for ties to a pedophile, accused of political blackmail, a defender of genocide in Gaza, and responsible for attacks against Venezuela based on lies about a supposedly nonexistent cartel that cost innocent lives.
This is the scenario we face. And only the organized working class, in unity, can overcome it.
Imperialism is not a development model favorable to the working masses of the United States; on the contrary, it is a direct threat to their well-being. The money produced by the working class is no longer used solely to attack other peoples, but to finance a repressive state that, in the midst of its crisis, turns its weapons against its own population.
Therefore, international working-class solidarity is not a symbolic gesture or an ideological whim, but an immediate necessity for the well-being of the U.S. people and the world. The silence of the labor movement in the United States is deeply troubling, constrained by the control that bipartisan politics exerts over unions and guilds.
Workers’ organizations will be the key to raising mobilization in the streets and halting the repressive offensive of the Trump administration, which acts without limits against immigrants, marginalized communities, workers who identify as socialists or communists, and anyone who decides to fight for justice—a fundamental principle enshrined both in the U.S. Constitution and in international human rights law.
Trump and his administration act with impunity because bourgeois laws favor them. But those same laws can also be transformed by the working class, with greater conviction and urgency, because we are the majority and because we are not obligated to continue tolerating the atrocities of this false democracy designed to serve a capitalist minority.
We do not want more crumbs—economic or democratic. We want a world governed by workers’ solidarity, not by imperialist wars. And as a working class, advancing toward that horizon, under the conditions demanded by this historical moment, means organizing politically in an independent manner, separate from the bourgeois bipartisan system in the United States.
