Opening the House of Labor

On Wednesday, June 11, just a few days before Father’s Day, two sisters named Jaslyn and Kimberly found themselves in the parking lot of a car wash in Culver City, Los Angeles, trying to explain to the assembled crowd what their dad meant to them. “Thanks to all the sacrifices he’s made,” Jaslyn said, “me and my sister were able to graduate high school, go to college, and live the life he wasn’t able to as a kid.”

Their father, Joel, had immigrated from Mexico and worked at the car wash in Culver City for about a decade, spraying and scrubbing and polishing cars until they gleamed. On June 8, a Sunday, he left for his shift as he always did. But that afternoon ICE descended on immigrant workplaces—a car wash, a garment warehouse, a Home Depot—across the Southland, and Joel never came home. On the day of the press conference, he was meant to be watching Jaslyn graduate from high school. Instead he was in detention—where, nobody knew.

The CLEAN Carwash Worker Center had called the press conference. First established in Los Angeles in the late 1980s, worker centers organize mostly low-wage immigrant laborers, who are particularly vulnerable to employers’ predations but who have often been excluded from the traditional labor movement. Now, as ICE targets sites where these workers congregate, the centers are scrambling to adapt their programs and networks for total crisis. “I can’t even describe it,” Flor Melendrez, CLEAN’s executive director, told me the following day. “It’s heartbreaking.”   

As nonprofit organizations that don’t seek collective bargaining agreements or require their members to pay dues, worker centers are distinctly not unions, and the relationship between the two has at times been fraught—partially a reflection of labor’s historically uneasy ties to foreign-born workers in general. But those points of tension can obscure the channels of communication and solidarity that also run between them. CLEAN, for instance, emerged in 2007 out of a joint campaign with United Steelworkers Local 675, which represents mainly refinery workers. That day at the press conference, when Local 675 chief of staff Xochitl Cobarruvias took the stage, she began her speech in Spanish. “Sabemos que una lastimadura a uno es una lastimadura a todos,” she told the crowd—we know that an injury to one is an injury to all.

The Trump administration’s merciless crusade against immigrants of all sorts had already crystallized a longstanding divide within the traditional labor movement. Progressive unions like the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and UNITE HERE have recommitted to their immigrant-friendly politics just as the more conservative Teamsters and building trades unions have sidled up to the administration; even the United Auto Workers, clear-eyed on Palestine and militant once more under Shawn Fain’s leadership, have endorsed Trump’s tariff proposals. Earlier this year the labor reporter Luis Feliz Leon warned about “two sinister and mutually reinforcing dynamics” within the movement: “opportunistic collaboration with Trumpism along narrow sectoral lines, and the embrace of an ‘America First’ nationalist agenda targeting immigrant workers.” (This is to say nothing of law enforcement associations, whose members have been abetting ICE’s work by arresting protesters who show up to challenge the agency’s often violent incursions into courthouses and communities across the country.)

These dynamics have taken on new urgency in Southern California, where last month ICE targeted job sites, seizing hundreds of people where they work—a phenomenon not seen locally in decades. Unprecedented in their scale and aggression, these sweeps have unleashed widespread popular resistance, ranging from direct confrontations to marches to militant action. They have also thrown a sharp light on the respective roles of worker centers and conventional unions: on June 6 SEIU’s California president, David Huerta, was arrested and federally charged for attempting to document an ICE operation at a garment warehouse whose members were more likely to belong to a local worker center than to his own union; since then his actions have received an outpouring of support from the labor movement around the country. The question now is whether the shocking exercise of state power on display in Los Angeles will cause unions to close ranks—either by repudiating immigrant labor entirely or by concentrating solely on their own vulnerable members—or whether it could push them to conceive of their ties to immigrant workers more expansively.

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For much of the twentieth century, major US labor unions were in relative agreement about immigrant laborers: they mistrusted them, seeing them as pawns the bosses could exploit to undercut native-born workers’ collective power. That began to change with the dramatic increase in Mexican migration to the US in the 1980s. “In Los Angeles, labor started organizing and seeing immigrants as the future in the late 1980s,” Gaspar Rivera-Salgado, the project director of the UCLA Labor Center, told me. Then, in 1986, came Reagan’s amnesty bill, which granted millions of immigrants legal status and made them potential new union members.

By that point unions like SEIU, which represented service workers, and HERE, the hotel and restaurant workers’ syndicate, “clearly were dominated by immigrant workers,” Rivera-Salgado said, “so it was unavoidable that they really needed to have a strategy to organize” them. In 1987 SEIU embarked on its remarkable “Justice for Janitors” campaign, which mobilized low-wage immigrant and undocumented cleaners who labored as contractors. Huerta, the LA-born son of Mexican immigrants, was one of its organizers. That same year, María Elena Durazo, a member of HERE and the child of Mexican migrant workers, mounted an electoral challenge to her local’s president, who had sought to minimize the participation of foreign-born members. She took over leadership two years later and went on to run the local for seventeen years. (HERE would eventually merge with UNITE, a textile workers’ union, to form UNITE HERE). In 2003 Durazo led a national immigrant workers’ caravan modeled on the freedom rides of the civil rights movement—“a very courageous act that really brought immigrant rights on the scene,” Ada Briceño, the current co-president of UNITE HERE Local 11, told me.

Briceño belongs to the newer generation of labor leadership that people like Huerta and Durazo made possible. She is an immigrant herself, having escaped the Somoza dictatorship in Nicaragua with her family when she was seven. “Seeing all the raids, seeing labor leaders arrested, senators detained, the president asking for Newsom to be jailed—it just brings me back to the reason why I fled my country to begin with,” she said.

Other sectors—like factory work, shipping, and construction—remained dominated by American-born workers and didn’t encounter such vigorous internal opposition to their nativist stances. Meanwhile union density waned across the board, and newly arrived immigrants were most likely to land somewhere in the informal economy, which never had unions to begin with. The 1986 amnesty bill, for its part, had a trade-off: for the first time, it made hiring undocumented workers a crime. Union business tended to happen only in English; union halls might even ask to see workers’ documents.

That relatively inhospitable landscape in turn created fertile terrain for the worker center movement to germinate. It has since spread across the country, but Los Angeles is its home. The Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights LA (CHIRLA) opened the country’s first day labor center in the South Bay region in 1989. Day laborers (jornaleros) and garment factory workers began organizing throughout the 1980s and 1990s; the National Day Laborers’ Organizing Network (NDLON) and LA’s Garment Worker Center were both officially established in 2001. “It’s a really rich ecosystem,” said Maria Juur, the communications director of the Los Angeles Worker Center Network, a coalition of eight local centers that organize on behalf of predominantly black, immigrant, and refugee workers at businesses like car washes, warehouses, and clothing factories, which tend to lack formal unions.

Inspired by domestic civil rights campaigns and third world liberation movements, the centers generally had a more intersectional focus than traditional unions. Melendrez told me, for instance, that the CLEAN center takes “a more holistic approach” to the project of creating “a space where workers feel safe” to “come and learn more about their rights”: providing services in the workers’ native languages, rooting their current efforts in struggles for indigenous or social equality in their home countries, and acting as a hub to connect people to other services, like health care or immigration assistance. 

The flourishing of worker centers in LA occasioned a new version of the old debate about foreign-born labor, Rivera-Salgado said: “Is the house of labor only open to workers with the collective bargain agreement, or is it open to all workers?” The same unions that continued to regard individual immigrant workers as a threat were likely to view the very concept of worker centers as an affront. “Frankly, our relationship with organized labor in Los Angeles has been riddled with complexity,” Chris Newman, NDLON’s legal director, told me. “I don’t think it’s a controversial thing to say that there hasn’t been the type of investment in organizing of low-wage workers from organized labor in the last twenty years that is commensurate with the need of low-wage immigrant workers.” The International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers once blocked one of NDLON’s members from opening a day labor center in Pasadena. Later, when NDLON brought local legislation requiring Home Depot to build shelter for day laborers on their property, some of the building trades unions opposed it, as if to say: no shade for scabs.

Others took a broader view. After employees at two car washes in Santa Monica and Marina del Rey began mobilizing and embarked on a wildcat strike in the 2000s, United Steelworkers Local 675 helped them establish the CLEAN center, the first of its kind in the US. “I don’t view worker centers as competition,” Local 675’s secretary treasurer, Gary Holloway, told me. “I don’t view them as not being part of the worker’s movement writ large. They’re a way people organize for their own mutual aid and self-defense, which is what we’re all about.”

Today worker centers have a seat on the executive board of the LA Federation of Labor, the county’s chief labor council. Los Angeles’s annual May Day parade, which took place this year just a month before the raids started, is a visible testament to the influence that they and their members have had on the local organized labor scene. “The worker centers were the ones who restarted that tradition of marching on International Workers Day” in LA, Rivera-Salgado told me. After organizers from Mexico, El Salvador, the Philippines, and Korea realized that their countries of origin all claimed the day as a celebration of labor, he said, “May Day became a symbol of resistance for workers—and unions embraced it.”

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When Trump won reelection last year, these organizations made use of their existing channels of communication to prepare for his return to office. “We started having group calls,” Juur told me. “We knew that raids were in our future, and we tried to really urgently mobilize, talk about organizing legal aid and also know-your-rights trainings for workers to prepare them for what’s coming.” This was not their “first rodeo,” she added: “we all know about the deportations that took place under Obama.”

Now that the crisis is here, Juur went on, “there’s all these rapid response emergency networks to locate people, trying to understand where the raids are happening, who’s being taken and where they’re being taken to.” It wasn’t long before the raids began calling attention to the stark vulnerabilities of the populations the worker centers represent. ICE has trained its sights on precisely those workplaces most likely to employ undocumented people. (“Why aren’t you at Home Depot?” a furious Stephen Miller reportedly asked ICE agents a few weeks before the LA raids began.)

These operations have sent LA’s low-wage immigrant workers into hiding. The taco stand that caters to hungry fans leaving Dodger Stadium vanished for a time; the fruteros’ brightly colored parasols have thinned out, the jornaleros, who had done yeoman’s work cleaning up the city after January’s devastating wildfires, are few and far between now.

They have also left Angelenos furious. Many of the people who have taken to the streets since June 6, Rivera-Salgado noted, are the American-born children and grandchildren of immigrants who have been denied the opportunity to naturalize because they arrived here after the 1986 amnesty bill. After DHS forcibly removed him from Kristi Noem’s LA press conference two weeks ago, Senator Alex Padilla—the son of Mexican immigrants who worked as, respectively, a diner cook and a house cleaner—specifically mentioned day laborers. In two decades, Newman, the legal director, said, “I’ve never seen the level of political support for day laborers that we’re seeing now.” Holloway told me that Local 675 is “very supportive of the car wash workers and doing whatever it takes—and I’ll use the phrase to keep them from getting kidnapped, because I consider it kidnapping.”

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On the morning of June 6, soon after immigration activists got wind of a raid on a clothing warehouse on the industrial outskirts of Downtown LA, Huerta arrived on the scene. (He was able to get there in time, Rivera-Salgado noted, precisely because of the rapid response mechanisms—Signal, text threads, email chains, social media appeals—that advocates have been crafting for years.) Stills included in the affidavit later filed against him show him in a red and white checkered button-down shirt and sneakers, first sitting cross-legged in front of the warehouse gate and later standing with his hands on his hips, confronting two masked federal law enforcement agents near a white van trying to enter the facility grounds. Video recorded at the scene sometime after that shows the agents detaining him and forcing him roughly down to the concrete. For these efforts to stand with a group of workers who do not belong to his union, Huerta was also pepper sprayed, then arrested, hospitalized, held in custody for a weekend, and charged with a federal crime—conspiracy to impede an officer—that can carry a six-year prison sentence.

For the many people in the labor movement in California who know him, including worker center affiliates, Huerta’s willingness to put himself at risk to try to stop the operation is entirely in keeping with his history of support for the rights of low-wage immigrant workers. “David’s act of solidarity was no surprise,” Newman said. SEIU, UNITE HERE, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), and other unions promptly demonstrated across the nation to demand his release—and an end to the immigration raids more broadly.

Will organized labor continue to marshal that sort of effort on behalf of the nonunion workers for whom Huerta put his own body on the line? Unions have a very effective mechanism for bringing about change: withholding labor. They know how to run campaigns that win, and they know that doing so requires more than issuing statements and rallying a few times. But as of this writing there has been no serious talk of a general strike—little surprise, perhaps, at a moment when the labor movement is so weakened that such a prospect seems faint even when it comes to agitating for union workers’ core demands. And even progressive unions with large foreign-born populations seem unsurprisingly reluctant to mobilize their members for relatively risky and high-stakes direct actions like getting in between ICE agents and the nonunion workers they target.

In LA, that sort of confrontation has generally come from groups like Union del Barrio—not a union but a San Diego–based grassroots organization that has set up community patrols across the county to stymie the agency’s operations. On June 11 the news broke that the Republican senator Josh Hawley had launched an investigation into Union del Barrio, CHIRLA, and a third group, the Party for Socialism and Liberation, for allegedly funding the protests. In the aftermath of that announcement, the labor leaders I interviewed were reluctant to speak on the record about any activity on their part behind the scenes. During our conversation the following afternoon, Briceño emphasized twice that UNITE HERE Local 11 has been participating in “peaceful actions,” implicitly distancing the union from any charges of contributing to the so-called disorder on which the administration has seized to justify sending in troops. “We were out there on Monday,” she said. “We did a candlelight vigil on Tuesday night…. I plan to be with folks in Anaheim for the No Kings March.”

“I would like to see building trades unions deploying their members to Home Depots to help defend the rights of innocent day laborers who are coming under attack,” Newman told me. Such an outcome is unlikely, to put it mildly. But Newman said he’s optimistic that the terrain might be shifting. He cited Huerta’s act of solidarity with nonunion workers and SEIU’s decision to rejoin the AFL-CIO, which may allow the union to force the national labor movement to take a bolder stand on immigrant rights. “My hope is that the rest of the labor movement will follow their example,” Newman said. For its part, the sheet metal workers’ union rallied nationally on behalf of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who is a sheet metal apprentice and member, and the president of the building trades unions personally demanded his release.

On a practical level, the movement can hardly afford not to do so: as the US completes its transition from a manufacturing to a service economy, immigrants increasingly perform the critical labor that sustains entire industries, from agriculture to home health care. Nor is this just a matter for the moment. After these raids are over, Juur noted, immigrant employees will still be struggling with all the other workplace issues they face, notably wage theft. Fear already prevents many of those workers from agitating for their rights; now many more people will be disinclined to leave the shadows. “The immigration issue being added to the mix on such a scale, it’s only going to get worse,” she said.

In the shorter term, the raids have tested new and existing bonds of solidarity. In LA, when the unions rallied for Huerta’s release, the worker centers were there too. “It has been a way to bring us together, not only putting the attention on him, but opening the floor to really talk about all the other workers,” Melendrez told me. Luckily, she said, Huerta “was able to get released and was able to go home—but a lot of the rest of our communities have not gone through that, and we need to continue fighting until they do.”

The workers snatched from their jobs by ICE now confront a terrible choice: accepting deportation or fighting their case from inside a detention center. Jaslyn and Kimberly’s father, Joel, chose the former. Nearly a week after he vanished from his car wash, he was able to meet with his family again in Juarez. But the reunion is just a temporary balm. The family’s life as they knew it in Los Angeles is over: under the conditions of his deportation, Joel will be banned from the United States for at least ten years.