Watch John Peterson, editor of Socialist Revolution – newspaper of the International Marxist Tendency in the USA – discussing the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic in the States, which has rapidly become a focal point of the global outbreak, with nearly half-a-million confirmed cases and 13,000 deaths across the country.

In recent years, US Immigration and Custom Enforcement’s brutal onslaught against undocumented workers has sparked waves of outrage and protests across the US. But as COVID-19 continues to wreak havoc in society and the economy, ICE is sparing no effort to maintain and even escalate repression against migrants—actively undermining efforts to mitigate the spread of the virus in the name of “homeland security.”

Millions of ordinary people in Indian-occupied Kashmir are facing an unprecedented situation amidst the coronavirus lockdown imposed on the whole of India for 21 days. Kashmir was already under a strict curfew and has faced brutal repression since 5 August 2019, when a draconian law was passed by the Modi government changing the status of Jammu and Kashmir as a separate state, dissolving its state assembly by presidential order and relegating it to a union territory directly controlled by the central government.