June 18, 2025

During the summer of 2020, the U.S. was engulfed in widespread protests that brought hundreds of thousands of people into the streets in the aftermath of the racist public lynching of 46-year-old George Floyd. The Minneapolis police murdered Floyd on May 25 of that year. Those protests, which spread to other countries, not only called for justice for George Floyd and denounced police brutality but demanded local governments “defund the police” and even “abolish the police.”

One year later on June 17, 2021, President Joe Biden signed into law the Juneteenth National Independence Day Act, creating a federal holiday to be commemorated annually on June 19. Juneteenth became a paid day off for public sector workers. Some unionized private sector workers, notably United Auto Workers members at the Big Three, also won Juneteenth as a paid holiday. This was an important symbolic concession won by the protests the year before.

This year will mark the 160th anniversary of Juneteenth, when on June 19, 1865, enslaved Black people were liberated in Galveston, Texas — two and a half years following the 1863 enactment of the Emancipation Proclamation signed by President Abraham Lincoln and two months after the Confederacy surrendered.

Even before Juneteenth — also known as “Freedom Day” — was made a legal holiday, Black people celebrated this anniversary all over the U.S. with marches, rallies and an array of social and cultural events. But up until the 2021 bill was passed, the bourgeois media paid little to no attention to these celebrations.

But since Donald Trump took office for the second time, Juneteenth and other significant commemorations for oppressed people have come under attack as they had been put in place under the umbrella of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) programs. A federal law signed by Biden on Feb. 22, 2023, requires certain federal agencies such as the Departments of Labor, Health and Human Services and Education to set up “equity teams” and “DEI steering committees.”

These groupings were assigned tasks by law to promote “the consistent and systematic treatment of all individuals in a fair, just and impartial manner,” especially those who had “been denied such treatment,” most notably people of color due to systemic racism.

Ever since Donald Trump issued an executive order to overturn DEI directives for governmental agencies, there is major concern that Trump’s order will eventually block programs recognizing the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, Black History Month and Juneteenth for federal workers, many of them African Americans.

Trump wants to turn back the clock

Today Trump’s racist attack on migrants, especially those with origins in Central and South America and the Caribbean, have taken center stage on an international scale. Similar to what was done during the Floyd protests, the National Guard has been deployed in Los Angeles to join the local police in using brute force, including tear gas, batons, and flash-bang grenades against migrants and their supporters. Trump has ordered hundreds of Marines from a nearby base to be unleashed on the protesters, moving a few steps closer to martial law.

Trump illegally invoked the Insurrection Act of 1807, a federal law that empowers the president to deploy the U.S. military and to federalize National Guard units in specific circumstances, such as the suppression of civil disorder, insurrection and armed rebellion. As of this writing, the Los Angeles protests do not fall under any of those categories.

The attacks on Black people and migrants are part of the same class struggle. It is incumbent on the entire multinational, multigendered and multigenerational working class to unite to come to the defense of the most oppressed, most vulnerable sectors of our class. They have fought long and hard — no matter who has occupied the White House — for basic democratic rights through decades of mass struggle and movements against a predatory, profit-driven capitalist system.