Archives: Statements

President Donald Trump’s recent announcement to deploy the National Guard to Washington, DC, framed as a crackdown on crime, marks a dangerous escalation in the federal government’s militarization of one of the spaces of the Black/African internal colony. On August 11, Trump declared, “We’re taking our capital back,” while signaling an unprecedented federal takeover of the Metropolitan Police Department. This move, under the pretext of public safety, follows his March 2025 executive order establishing the “Safe and Beautiful” task force, led by Stephen Miller, an architect of white nationalist immigration policies. The initiative has accelerated mass surveillance, aggressive policing, and the criminalization of Black/African and working-class communities, particularly in Southeast DC.  

Trump’s declaration comes on the heels of the “Secure DC” Omnibus bill, alongside decades of Democrat-backed crime bills that have devastated marginalized communities and are now being expanded further under Trump’s task force. His order promotes harsher pretrial detention, sweeps of homeless encampments, ICE raids, and relaxed concealed carry laws—measures that will inevitably target the same communities Democrats once claimed to protect. This bipartisan tradition of punitive governance reflects a shared commitment to maintaining racial and class control, differing only in rhetoric.  

Moreover, historically, the National Guard has been weaponized against Black/African communities, from suppressing uprisings during Red Summer (1919) to violently attacking and then occupying the community of Cambridge, Maryland during the Black Freedom Struggle (1963) to the George Floyd uprisings during the first Trump presidency (2020). 

Trump’s current deployment revives this legacy, embedding militarized force into daily governance. But this moment is not isolated—it reflects the enduring logic of settler colonialism, where state violence and deputized white civilians (from slave patrols to modern “stand your ground” vigilantes) uphold racial hierarchy. By seizing DC’s police apparatus, Trump isn’t just escalating policing; he’s testing a more blatant and centralized model of authoritarian urban control, one that could soon extend beyond the District.  

It is no coincidence that the consolidation of this outright militarized domestic occupation advances as the U.S. deepens its support for the zionist perpetuation of genocide in Gaza. The barbarous collaboration in a live-streamed genocide by the U.S. and collective “West” has opened the door for open disregard for the lives and livelihoods of the masses of people across the globe, as well as the demonization of our resistance. The failure to recognize the humanity and fundamental rights of Palestinians is replicated in the escalating fascistic domestic policies of the U.S. settler-state. Just like with the zionist occupation, this acceleration of barbarous violence and militarized repression is simply an embrace of the states’ settler-colonial foundations.

The tragedy is not just Trump’s brazenness and further consolidation of neofascism, but the Democratic Party’s continued collaboration in strengthening the repressive capacities of the state through militarization, surveillance, and economic austerity. Decades of “tough-on-crime” posturing have normalized the criminalization of poverty, leaving communities vulnerable to even more extreme repression. 

Now, as Trump invokes “law and order” to justify occupation, the challenge lies not only in resisting his agenda, but also in confronting the colonial/capitalist structures and oppressive class rule that made it possible. BAP is clear: self-determination and collective resistance are paramount human rights, central to the People(s)-Centered Human Rights framework that BAP is prepared to defend. 

The fight ahead is not simply against Trump’s authoritarianism. It is a fight for a future where safety is not imposed by militarization but built through structures of popular democracy, peace, social justice and collective liberation. But to achieve this future it is absolutely clear that the people must fight. We will oppose the intensification of colonial occupation with popular organization and a steeled determination to defend our individual and collective rights by any means necessary. 

We want peace. We work for peace but we understand the sacrifice that sometimes must be made for peace and a new world—and we stand prepared to make those sacrifices. 

No Justice, No Peace, 

No Compromise, No Retreat

US Issues $50 million Bounty while Sanctioning Venezuelan People and Starving Gaza

The Trump State Department and Department of Justice have once again increased hostility against the elected president of Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro, doubling its reward up to $50 million for information leading to the arrest and/or conviction of the president of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela. The press release states, “for over a decade, Maduro has been a leader of Cartel de los Soles, which is responsible for trafficking drugs into the United States.” Besides issuing a capricious so called bounty on the head of a democratically elected president, the US claims Maduro is the leader of a cartel responsible for trafficking drugs into the country. This coming from the country who has facilitated Israel in carrying out a livestreamed genocide against a civilian population in Gaza for almost two years and continues in the next phase of planned starvation as Israel carries out the Final Solution against Gaza. BAP condemns this reckless attack on the Venezuelan government and people and stands with the Venezuelan peoples in asserting their right to sovereignty in solidarity with all peoples of Our Americas (Nuestra América). 

These unfounded claims are not only false but also dangerous, as they lay the narrative groundwork to justify a military attack, and is the next phase of a long lawfare campaign. By linking Maduro to transnational criminal organizations, they expand the justification for the use of force and usher in the drumbeats of war. This attack on the Venezuelan people follows a long list of tactics used by US empire to subvert the Bolivarian Revolution, such as economic warfare, the theft and piracy of the oil company Citgo, pushing so-called leaders like Juan Guaido, or this type of lawfare. As BAP’s Haiti/Americas Team has written, lawfare is simply imperialist weaponization of legal systems and litigation in Our Americas. This is on top of the continued use and tightening of sanctions, which reflect an economic war on the people. The Lancet recently published a report demonstrating that sanctions do kill: “economic sanctions imposed by the USA or the EU were associated with 564,258 deaths annually from 1971 to 2021, higher than the annual number of battle-related casualties (106,000 deaths).” By sheer numbers, sanctions are deadlier than war.   

For BAP, the Black Radical Peace Tradition helps us to understand these sanctions as mirroring economic violence used in the U.S., considering African/Black communities overwhelmingly represent the poor and working masses who are economically exploited  in the United States. Economic warfare, as waged against African/Black and oppressed communities under internal colonialism and global imperialism, operates in opposition to People(s)-Centered Human Rights through systemic deprivation and exploitation, reinforcing the structural location of Blackness as a site of extraction and disposability. 

This warfare manifests in premature death, health disparities, gentrification, unemployment, the privatization of public goods, financialization, corporate profiteering, housing crises, attacks on labor, and coercive debt regimes further entrench mass poverty, ensuring economic destabilization for the global majority. These conditions are not accidental but strategic, upholding imperialist hierarchies by rendering African/Black life expendable while transforming marginalized nations and communities into endless sites of accumulation. 

No Compromise, No Retreat is not just a slogan but a strategic framework to challenge economic warfare against our people, and defend African/Black, working class and poor people, and our neighborhoods by confronting these economic attacks, including neoliberal austerity policies; privatization and expropriation of land and human needs; and capitalist exploitation of our labor, resources, and people.

That economic war in the U.S. represents a domestic counterpart to these attacks on Venezuela’s sovereignty and the sanctions waged against its people, which reflect the imperialist global aspect to this war. This arrest warrant against Nicolás Maduro, and the Venezuelan people, is another in a long list of attacks against the people of the region. Accelerating U.S.-led militarism has increased the urgency to make Our Americas a Zone of Peace, through engaging the masses of colonized, working poor communities who face the brunt of these attacks, and building a base with the popular power to defeat this imperialist war on the peoples of Our Americas. The US/NATO Out of Our Americas Network is building out a structure to be able to successfully expel these nefarious forces that deny peace. Learn more and sign up for the network at zoneofpeace.org.