AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.

Juan, there are a lot of challenges right now in this country, but you’ve been looking at the kind of successful organizing that’s going on with immigrant groups on the ground. Talk about what you see there in Chicago.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Yeah, Amy. Well, you know, despite much media attention on the ramping up of mass deportations by the Trump administration — coverage, by the way, that the White House has aggressively orchestrated — the actual number of deportations during the first few weeks have hardly lived up to the hype. Homeland security officials acknowledged yesterday that around 11,000 immigrants, supposedly folks who have committed crimes or are undocumented, have been arrested — an average of about 500 a day. And just half of those, according to the department’s own statistics, are supposedly criminals. Others are what they call collateral arrests. At that rate, it would take about six years just to deport 1 million people — not 5, 6, 7 or 11, just 1 million people. It would take six years. So, obviously, the worst is yet to come if we’re to believe that Trump is actually serious about deporting millions and millions of people.

But few people are focusing on the inevitable resistance that immigrant rights groups are certain to launch. As we used to say in the 1960s, wherever there is oppression, there is resistance. And immigration activists that I’ve talked to in recent days are right now in the midst of coordinating a string of mass mobilizations for this spring that they hope will go beyond the historic immigrant rights protests of 2006, when millions and millions of undocumented and their supporters turned out into the streets of all the major cities in the United States. They’re calling on grassroots organizations to culminate those protests in early May, specifically on May 1st, International Workers’ Day, with a series of labor strikes — not just one, but several days without immigrants, including Cinco de Mayo walkouts from restaurants and hotels across the country, to make clear how critical immigrants are to American capitalism. So, it’s obvious that the neofascist coup we are witnessing will not be defeated simply by legal challenges in the courts. It will have to be confronted in the streets. And I think that the immigrant rights groups are going to be setting the path for the level of militancy that will be needed.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, we’re going to look right now at a victory for immigrant rights that came in a legal case on Sunday night, around the same time the musical legend Jon Batiste was singing “The Star-Spangled Banner” at the start of the Super Bowl, attended by President Trump, just days after Trump fired Batiste and others from serving on the board of the JFK Center for Performing Arts.