Chinga La Migra! Solidarity statement with LATU
The Vancouver Tenants Union has been in connection with organizers from the Los Angeles Tenants Union (LATU) since our founding convention. Over the past year, members of the Vancouver Tenants Union visited LATU locals, the Pasadena Tenants Union (PTU) and the Chinatown Community for Equitable Development (CCED). Our members have attended a week long Organizing Training with Union de Vecinos (UV), sat in on meetings of LATU Locals & Tenant Associations, joined direct actions against landlords, and spoke with organizers from across the city. This year, LATU celebrated a decade of organizing, and UV is approaching its 30th year as a political force of tenants in Boyle Heights. We are proud to be standing alongside them in the fight for justice, and share our utmost congratulations, appreciation and solidarity.
In this spirit, we stand in unwavering solidarity with the recent community-led actions to kick ICE out of their neighbourhoods. The bipartisan, continuous increase of deportations and Trump’s terror raids and kidnappings against the migrant population of Los Angeles are despicable. But as LATU and our Angeleno comrades taught us, organized communities can and will defend their territories. We join their demands to free all those kidnapped by ICE and to drop the charges laid against those who organize to stop the assault on their neighbors. Those calls go beyond LA, to our comrades in Phoenix, New York and to all those who are facing state violence for their immigration status or ethnicity. No one is illegal!
This wave of deportations and displacement is rocking a community still recovering from devastating wildfires. Altadena, a majority-Black area of LA, is on the frontlines of the climate crisis. Before the flames cooled, landlords were already price-gouging rent. Meanwhile, the state did little to provide aid and even blocked community-led efforts to help wildfire survivors, but has mobilized immediately to send marines into LA to violently suppress anti-ICE mobilisations. The resilience that Angelenos have demonstrated by linking arms with their neighbours to organize for their collective safety and material well being during this time of unimaginable crisis serves as an example to us all.
On our side of the border, the ugly head of state violence is taking a similar shape under Mark Carney’s racist, anti-refugee, and anti-migrant Bill C-2. By preventing a majority of migrants from making refugee claims, dramatically expanding the power to deport migrants, revoking their status without due process, and increasing mass surveillance and policing of our communities, this dangerous bill will affect every single one of us. We reject any efforts to scapegoat based on ethnicity or migration status, and we affirm our solidarity with poor and working class migrants everywhere. We stand with all those who, within the imperial core and beyond, fight against the violence of settler colonial powers and their right of life or death on our loved ones.
The fight against racism and anti-immigrant violence is inseparable from the fight for housing justice. We see this clearly in the struggle of the Flower Drive tenants in South Central LA, as they resist the displacement and gentrification by the upcoming 2028 Olympics. As residents of so-called Vancouver, we know that the burden of these mega-projects falls heaviest on poor, working-class, immigrant, and racialized communities. We witnessed this with the 2010 Winter Olympics, which displaced residents and sold public housing to private capital, devastating neighbourhoods like the Downtown Eastside or False Creek. The fight by Flower Drive tenants against their city’s betrayal of housing justice is another frontline in the struggle against capitalism and systemic racism. As our cities prepare to host the 2026 World Cup, we stand in solidarity against the mega-projects used to trample our neighbourhoods.
Crucially, this solidarity must extend past the imperial core of the United States and its resources colony Canada. To be internationalist, we must study and build solidarity with our comrades across the world, from Palestine to Mexico, as well as the Indigenous nations that exist within our colonial borders. Capital knows no borders, nor should we.
Again, we extend our solidarity and gratitude to our California comrades for warmly welcoming us into your homes and communities, and for your willingness to share the lessons learned over the past decades. We are overwhelmed by your generosity, and inspired by your fight.
Migrants aren’t to blame. Our neighbors are our only way out.