On September 16, U.S. President Donald Trump signed an order authorizing the deployment of the National Guard and other federal police agencies to Memphis, TN. Right wing Tennessee Governor Bill Lee, and Tennessee Senators Marsha Blackburn and Bill Hagerty stood by his side.
While they gut Medicaid and other social programs, give some of the largest tax breaks ever to the rich, layoff federal workers and attack collective bargaining rights for more than 500,000 others, they’re dumping billions into ICE to terrorize immigrant workers and indiscriminately racially profile Latinx people, and billions more into these phony deployments to cities with major Black populations. After deploying the Guard and federal agencies in Washington, DC several weeks ago, Trump said he intended to next target New Orleans, St. Louis, and Chicago.
Sixty-three percent of Memphis’ nearly 635,000 residents are Black. Nearly a quarter of the city lives in poverty. Over one third of those living in poverty are children, while Black and Latinx people each account for nearly a third of the total of those living below the poverty line. Eighty thousand Memphis residents are Latinx, and another nearly 50,000 are immigrants.
Memphis is also the international headquarters of FedEx. In 2024, FedEx brought in over $87 billion in revenue. The vast majority, nearly 70%, of FedEx workers earn between $25,000 and $40,000 per year, or an average hourly wage of $16.96. FedEx is a notoriously anti-union corporation, who has busted efforts by workers to organize, and spent $837,000 on union busting firms between 2014 and 2018 alone. Elon Musk, another notorious anti-worker billionaire, recently opened a massive supercomputer facility in Memphis, sending poisonous toxic emissions into the nearby Black community.
In 1968, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in Memphis while standing with striking sanitation workers. During that same period, the National Guard and other federal agencies were sent into the South to enforce desegregation orders. What’s happening now is essentially the reverse – federal police agencies are being sent to Memphis and other cities to repress and target Latinx, immigrant, and Black workers.
In the federal funding bill passed earlier this summer – known as the “Big Beautiful Bill” – a record $170 billion was allocated towards ICE and immigration enforcement, including the expansion and development of additional prisons. The military budget ballooned to nearly $1 trillion. This is while, in just the last year, the 400 richest people in the U.S. – including Musk, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, and others – saw their wealth increase by $1.2 trillion.
We condemn in the strongest possible terms the mobilization of the Guard to Memphis and other cities, the terrorism of ICE against immigrant communities, and other efforts to sow division, fear, and curtail our rights. Tennessee National Guard members should refuse their deployment orders to suppress their neighbors in Memphis.
Workers in Memphis and across the South need power – we need power over our workplaces and power over how the vast wealth our labor produces is used. We say money for people’s needs – good jobs, housing, education, food – not for tax cuts for the rich, ICE, the military, and the other tools of repression against our communities.
Southern workers need a political program to unite and fight back. The SWA’s 10-point worker program demands we cut the military budget in half, and fund workers’ needs. Our program also states that “The billionaires, not migrant workers, are our enemy”.
