As a Dominican New Yorker raised by immigrant parents in the northwest Bronx, I’m shook by the ICE shooting in Kingsbridge-Marble Hill, where an ICE agent shot Oscar Belgal while driving with his 5 year old child. Just weeks prior, I walked that very block of 225 Street and Marble Hill Avenue. Why did this happen to a Dominican father in the Bronx? To understand what happened, we have to zoom out and look at the bigger picture.
Who we talkin’ about? Based on a 2026 New York City study of the Bronx, one in every three people (34%) in Kingsbridge-Marble Hill, and the Bronx as a whole, is an immigrant. In the Bronx, residents earn the city’s lowest median income in the poorest (aka most exploited) county in New York State. Bronx residents are the most underpaid and least employed in NYC. Bronx tenants pay the most rent compared to their income, and are more likely to be evicted than those in other boroughs. Dominicans are the largest immigrant population in the Bronx (39%), and NYC’s second largest immigrant population (5% of total city population and 13% of immigrant population).
In New York City, one in every three people (33%) and almost half of its workers (43%) are immigrants. Nearly half of all New Yorkers speak a language other than English at home, and two-thirds (67%) of all city residents are first- or second-generation New Yorkers. Among Dominicans, they are the poorest (or most exploited) immigrant group in NYC; Dominicans earn the least, are least likely to have a college degree or own a home, are most likely to receive public assistance, and are the second least employed group in NYC.
Why are Dominicans here? For about 120 years, Dominicans on the island of Ayiti/Kiskeya (colonially named Hispaniola) survived independence wars, dictatorships, and U.S. invasions. In 1965, the United States sent more troops to the Dominican Republic than they did to Vietnam to prevent “a second [communist] Cuba” after Cuban revolutionaries successfully kicked out U.S. imperialists from the island in 1959. Then, the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965 allowed a wave of non-European immigrants of color into the country for the first time. To escape state repression and rising poverty under the fascist president Joaquin Balaguer, many Dominicans immigrated to NYC to raise money through bodegas to support the revolution back at home.
They ultimately failed, and in 1984 the Dominican Republic signed a deal with the devil. The Dominican government began taking loans from the U.S. controlled International Monetary Fund (IMF), with the condition that it cuts wages and public benefits for the Dominican exploited and working class. The value of the Dominican peso, which at the time equaled the dollar, was cut and fueled today’s dramatic inflation of $61 pesos to $1 dollar.
Dominicans struggling to survive moved again to the United States to send money back home, but this time with the sad goal of simply surviving. In fact, immigrants like those from the Dominican Republic often leave their country specifically because the U.S. bombed, invaded, and exploited it. So why are immigrants being targeted?
Who’s public enemy #1? The rich use identities such as gender, race, and immigration status to hide, divide, and distract us from what they’re really doing to us: stealing what we deserve as human beings, and privatizing everything to charge us an arm and a leg for our means to survive. The more the rich (exploiters) blame immigrants for everything, the more they’re robbing from us. There’s a very deliberate attempt by a very small rich minority of capitalists, bosses, landlords, and corporations to steal as much wealth and resources as possible from the great majority of poor and working class people.
The rich weaponize identity to divide poor and working class people: immigrants against native born people, white against black people, men against women, heterosexual against queer people. We end up hating immigrants for “taking our jobs,” or for “not paying taxes.” In fact, bosses are the ones who fire and lay off native born workers to hire immigrants so they can pay them less. And did you know the rich pay less taxes than immigrants do? You wouldn’t if you watch Fox News all day, or listen to President Donald Trump’s racist hate rants against immigrants.
Why This Orange Dude Wildin’? Trump says we need to deport immigrants because they’re criminals. The reality is that, as immigration to the U.S. has risen, crime has fallen. A 2024 study showed that undocumented immigrants were jailed at a rate of 674 per 100,000, well below the native-born rate of 1,195. Documented immigrants had the lowest rate of all, at just 303. As we can see, immigrants are not a threat to us. They contribute to society just as much as anyone else, if not more, yet they pay a higher price.
What about white immigrants? Why do we only see Black and Brown people being deported? An undocumented immigrant in the U.S. from Ireland admitted to CNN, “It is easier being illegal here when you’re white.” What about illegal U.S. immigrants in other countries? Reports show that somewhere between 700,000 and 1 million U.S. Americans are living in Mexico without current legal status. Yet we don’t ever hear about them.
Meanwhile, Trump’s One Big “Beautiful” (or Ugly) Bill in 2025 massively cut taxes for the rich while slashing public benefits like SNAP, Medicaid, and Social Security for everyone, not just undocumented immigrants. For example, starting this coming January 1, 2027, millions of U.S. Americans will lose Medicaid if they are under 65 years old and don’t work, volunteer, or go to school at least 80 hours a month.
That means my 63 year old disabled mother has to either work or do unnecessary paperwork just to prove she can’t work. All this while it’s become even harder to find a job or pay for school, especially when bosses use artificial intelligence (AI) to replace workers. And who’s gonna work for free by volunteering with how expensive everything is? The One Big Ugly* Bill is basically a huge robbery of wealth from the poor to the rich. This is what capitalism does to us.
Who’s deporting immigrants? Trump also passed the One Big Ugly Bill to make Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) the largest and most funded U.S. federal law enforcement agency. ICE was created as part of the Homeland Security Act of 2002 following the September 11, 2001 attacks. Why was the U.S. attacked? Because people in West Asia (imperially called The Middle East) were tired of the U.S. and Israeli militaries invading their land to commit genocide against poor and exploited brown people, particularly Muslims and Palestinians.
The U.S. took advantage of this attack to destroy democracy back at home and further divide the working class by passing the Homeland Security Act and blaming immigrants for everything. Today, ICE, Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) and Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) invade neighborhoods like Kingsbridge-Marble Hill to shoot and deport innocent people, whether they’re documented or not.
Put another way, ICE is a publicly funded paramilitary group paid for by federal tax dollars coming more from the exploited, such as immigrants, than from the exploiters. It’s a rich man’s wet dream for poor people to pay the rich to do anything they want. It’s the perfect recipe for total control of our lives. The Trump administration uses ICE for his personal gain but also for his capitalist class friends.
Who’s in his capitalist class? The bosses, landlords, and corporations represented by the Republican Party, which is the conservative, fascist, ultra-nationalist wing of the capitalist class. Trump is this wing’s top representative, as opposed to the liberal, moderate wing previously represented by Joe Biden and the Democratic Party.
How we stoppin’ this? Right now, immigrants are scared to go outside. Workers are scared to speak up. The rich get tax cuts and go to war while the poor pay more in taxes and living costs. The price of food, housing, healthcare, and childcare keep going up. Our wages either stay the same or go down due to inflation. It’s harder now than ever to get a good paying union job with benefits. So what do we do?
We have to organize our people. Our neighbors, our co-workers, our communities. The capitalist rich are small but very organized. That’s why they’ve been in power for so long. But it doesn’t have to be this way. There was a time when our people lived together and had everything we needed. Before Christopher KKKolumbus invaded our lands and colonized our people, our Native American ancestors were free to live a dignified life, until they were enslaved along with our African sisters and brothers.
They organized each other to free themselves from slavery and build a better future for us. And yet, we still haven’t gotten the capitalist rich off our backs. If we’re organized and fight back, there’s nothing stopping us from having a humane society free from racism, sexism, exploitation, injustice, and wars, and full of democracy, justice, equality, and socialism.
We need to demand that ICE be abolished. We need to demand all police stop helping ICE. Instead of more police, we need basic things to live a healthy, safe, and dignified life: universal healthcare, housing, food, education, and clean air and water for all.