From ICE to Ausländerbehörde: Fighting Global Border Regimes

In recent months, the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has intensified its raids, abducting people from their homes, workplaces, and communities. These violent operations are not isolated events, they are part of a global pattern of border enforcement designed to control, exploit, and divide.

In this workshop, we will draw connections between the current wave of ICE raids in the U.S. and the tightening of asylum laws and deportation practices in Germany. By looking at these cases, we can see how border regimes function as essential tools for maintaining capitalist order: regulating labor markets, producing “illegal” status to enable exploitation, and using racialized violence to keep communities divided and precarious.

Borders do more than mark territory. They act as filters for labor, selecting who is allowed in and under what conditions, while excluding and expelling those deemed “undesirable.” This violence is justified through racist narratives, securitization, and manufactured crises, but its underlying purpose is to protect profits, not people.

Together, we will discuss: How raids and deportations operate as a form of state terror; The links between immigration enforcement and capitalist exploitation; Resistance strategies from antiracist movements in the U.S. and Germany; How solidarity can be built across borders and struggles

This workshop welcomes everyone committed to dismantling racist border regimes or wanting to learn about it. We welcome especially those with lived experience of migration and state repression. Our goal is to share knowledge, connect struggles, and imagine a world where no one is illegal.

This workshop is organized by the BIPoC-Referat of the AStA and the marxist student group Waffen der Kritik and is part of the critical orientation weeks at the FU Berlin.