Resisting the Miller/Trump Deportation Decree, Part 1
Immigrant Communities Take the Lead
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Stephen Miller, the right-wing fanatic who guided the anti-migrant drive in Trump´s first term, is back, now as deputy chief of staff and top advisor on homeland security. Like Trump, Miller comes from immigrant roots, in his case from a Russian Jewish family. Trump is of German and Scottish descent, and two of his wives came from Eastern Europe. For both, their anti-immigrant rage targets only immigrants who are not of European descent, and is inextricably tied with the ideology of white supremacy.
The human suffering caused by this assault is incalculable. But immigrants themselves are leading the resistance. They deserve the support of the rest of us.
Until 1965, immigration law, based on percentages by national origin as of the 1920s, reproduced this bias towards immigrants from Western Europe. Since then, however, the diversity among immigrants to the United States has grown steadily. And, in recent years, the number of immigrants coming from sub-Saharan Africa in particular has grown from 130,000 in 1980 to over 2 million in 2019. Along with immigrant communities from Latin America and the Caribbean, they are increasingly well-organized and taking the lead in resisting the new deportation drive and raids by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
This set of two AfricaFocus Notes highlights recent analyses of resistance at the national level and in local areas around the country, as well as links for additional resources for immigrants and other supporters of immigrant rights.
This post is focused on the national level. Another, also sent out today, includes a selection from several locations around the country. These posts are longer than most AfricaFocus Notes. But, to break them up, I have interspersed the text with selected videos of Manu Chao´s famous anthem Clandestino. Even if you don´t read all of this at one time, I hope you may return for the music! And maybe continue reading as well.
How to Support Immigrant Communities During ICE Raids
by Xiomara Corpeño
Convergence Magazine, January 22, 2025
https://convergencemag.com/articles/how-to-support-immigrant-communities-during-ice-raids/
Staying alert is good, but organized solidarity is essential in these times: know the rights of undocumented immigrants, don’t sound false alarms, and connect people with rapid response resources.
From January 6 – 10, Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) agents executed a series of operations in Kern County, California. They claim to have arrested approximately 80 people for alleged criminal activity, but reports and video evidence suggest that agents knocked on doors, pulled drivers over, and racially profiled people at gas stations, stores, and other public places.
Many asked why CBP was operating 100 miles from the border, outside of its jurisdiction. The simple answer is that we forget that California has an 840-mile-long border called the coast. But a more nuanced answer is that immigration enforcement departments and agents have been allowed to run rogue since the inception of the Department of Homeland Security after 9/11. Documented cases of sexual assault, battery, medical assault, as well as the murder of migrants and death of migrant children while in custody are not new. But under Trump 2.0’s double down on mass deportations, agents now have carte blanche to do whatever they please. Law and order do not apply. Only chaos, rampant abuse, and harm to communities will ensue.
In 2024, immigrant justice organizations prepared for a threatening future, doing scenario planning for the different possibilities they might face if Trump or Harris won. In November they shifted to implementing their plans, focusing on equipping organizations and leaders nationwide for massive know-your-rights trainings, raids response, and litigation defense.
But the reality is that the immigrant justice sector, like many social justice sectors, is severely underfunded. Organizations, community groups, and activists are getting creative at reaching a mass audience. In an attempt to support these efforts, social media influencers are also disseminating information, many times uplifting the work of local organizations.
The Trump administration has made it clear that they not only want to deport as many people as possible (because realistically they can’t deport 11 million people), but they also want to create a state of terror, a world where people are living in fear and are less likely to challenge the dominant systems that seek to exploit their labor. … I want to offer some concrete ways to help immigrant communities combat fear and fight for their rights to remain in their new home country.
Inform yourself and others about people’s rights when in contact with immigration agents
Conduct or attend Know Your Rights (KYR) information sessions. You don’t have to be an attorney to do these, and there are several great resources created by trusted organizations:
The KYR video from CHIRLA (Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights Los Angeles) illustrates several scenarios that you can discuss with your family and your community.
The National Immigration Law Center (NILC) has an excellent Know Your Rights Explainer.
The Immigrant Legal Resource Center (ILRC) has Know Your Rights cards online that can be downloaded in 15 languages.
Understanding your rights helps lower fears. I have done hundreds of know-your-rights sessions and even in post-raid communities they are appreciated and give people more tools to continue to protect themselves.
Emphasize the right to remain silent
Immigration agents need proof that someone is an unauthorized immigrant, not the other way around. Many times, immigrants themselves provide the proof to agents by answering questions like, Where were you born? Are you undocumented/illegal? How did you come into the country? Role-playing will help people practice being able to remain silent, as immigration agents will literally lie, threaten, beat, and in some cases force people to sign documents by grabbing their hands and “signing” for them. By continuing to remain silent, people have a chance to fight for their right to stay. The only thing that people should share is their real name and date of birth so they can be found by family members and their attorneys.
Verify, verify, verify
If you think you see immigration agents or vehicles, verify if there is an operation underway. For example, in Downtown Los Angeles you might see immigration agents because they work in the federal building and they might be eating lunch, running errands, or doing other activities. No need to cause panic just because you see agents or their vehicles. Assess the situation early. You don’t need to post on your social media and create more fear.
You need to assess whether immigration agents just happen to be in a certain place, or whether they are converging to stage an operation or to detain people. CBP may be preparing for a raid if:
Several vehicles are parked haphazardly and agents are setting up tents, or there are buses or vans nearby.
Agents are convening in a place that is not near a federal building or known immigration enforcement office, gathering at a worksite or a public place where there is a lot of foot traffic.
Agents are actively approaching people and asking them questions.
Agents are approaching a particular house.
If you see a social media post announcing a raid or immigration agent activities, verify before you repost. Are there pictures or video identifying ICE, CBP, or another enforcement agency? Are agents actively arresting people? Who is the source? Can you go and verify? If not, you may not want to repost.
It’s an immigration operation. What do I do now?
If you confirm that it is indeed an immigration operation, you can do several things to help protect the community and the rights of people at risk of immediate detention:
Inform your local raids response network, if there is one in your area. The National Network for Immigrant and Refugee Rights (NNIRR) has a list of local and national hotlines you can reach out to.
Try to engage the people who are being approached by immigration agents. Tell people to remain silent, to not answer any questions from agents, and to not sign anything. You may want to yell this information out.
Ask the people who are being arrested for their names and the name and number of a person they want you to contact. This will let their loved ones and/or their attorney know what is happening. Kids might need to get picked up from school, people might need to be called. Only do this if you plan to follow through.
Assess your safety as well. In Kern County, a Latino man who was a U.S. citizen was pulled over and he exercised his rights. His tires were slashed and the agent threatened to break his windows and he was detained anyway. Even if you are a U.S. citizen, you may be arrested. If you have health issues or have other commitments that would be catastrophic if you are arrested even for a few hours, try to stay back and keep yourself safe.
Connect with immigrant rights or other social justice groups in your area to explore ways to support immigrant justice at the local level. Many times, organizations are already working on local or state legislation to include immigrant communities, as well as to protect their rights. If there are no groups in your immediate area, use your existing networks to help disseminate information to immigrant communities. If you are not from an immigrant community and are new to this type of work, try to support the leadership of immigrants as they inform their community. Communities will want to hear from their own members and receive information in their own language.
The next four years are going to be hard for many communities targeted by the Trump administration. Staying alert is good, but organized solidarity is essential in these times. Community defense will look different in different communities, and it’s a great opportunity to build new and deeper relationships, so we can continue to build a strong, multi-racial democracy and fight back against authoritarianism.
Migrant Workers as an impediment to Mass Deportation: A Q&Q With David Bacon
The Border Chronicle, 12/12/24
https://davidbaconrealitycheck.blogspot.com/2024/12/migrant-workers-as-impediment-to-mass.html
Immigrant workers from the Woodfin Suites hotel and their supporters rally outside the hotel in Emeryville, California, while white students from college Republican clubs counter demonstrate in support of the company. Hotel managers fired 20 workers, accusing them of lacking legal permission to work. (Photo by David Bacon)
President-elect Donald Trump says he will enact a mass-deportation operation starting his first week in office. But according to photojournalist, author, and organizer David Bacon, there are serious limitations on what he can do, because big business in the United States depends so heavily on migrant labor. ... Bacon has authored several books, including Illegal People and The Right to Stay Home.
What do Trump's mass-deportation plans mean for the U.S. economy and its many industries that depend on migrant labor?
Immigration enforcement doesn't exist for its own sake. It plays a role in a larger system that serves capitalist interests by supplying employers the labor force they require. Immigrant labor is more vital to many industries than it's ever been before. Over 50 percent of the country's agricultural workforce is undocumented, and the list of other industries that depend on immigrant labor is long--meatpacking, some construction trades, building services, health care, restaurant and retail service, and more.
Trump is not free to eliminate this workforce—which is an advantage and even a source of potential power for workers. Employers know this, and within months of his 2017 inauguration, agribusiness executives were already meeting with him to ensure that he would not follow through on his threats of raids and a tightened border when they needed labor. Last month construction companies in Texas were warning Trump that mass deportations would threaten their profits. Even in 2006, growers in California bused workers to the big marches in hopes that the Sensenbrenner bill wouldn't deprive them of workers.
But workers, communities, and unions can't depend on employers to battle Trump for them. What companies need is labor at a cost they want to pay. The existing system has worked well for them. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, about 8 million of the 11 to 12 million undocumented people in the U.S. are wageworkers, and most earn the minimum wage or close to it. The abysmal federal minimum of $7.25 an hour produces an annual income of $14,500. Even the higher minimums in states like California render an income of barely twice that. The average farmworker family income is below $25,000. Yet Social Security estimates that the average U.S. wage is $66,000.
That difference is a source of enormous profit. If the industries that depend on immigrant labor paid the average wage, they would have to pay undocumented workers an additional $250 billion, so the rewards they reap from low-wage labor are huge. Trump has to guarantee not just workers to contribute the labor, but labor at a cost that is acceptable to corporate employers. If we look at his cabinet picks, it is clear that their needs come first.
In his 2017 meetings with growers, Trump promised to expand the contract labor system, in which as many as 900,000 people recruited by employers work in the U.S. each year. These workers can come only to work, not to stay. Visa categories include the notorious H-2A program for farm labor, like the old bracero program of the 1950s. Last year growers were given 370,000 H-2A visa certifications-a sixth of the entire U.S. farm labor workforce. The program is known for abusing workers, and the recent reforms by Secretary of Labor Julie Su are already being targeted by growers and their MAGA allies for repeal. The H-2A program is huge, but similar ones are growing in hospitality, meatpacking, and other industries, even for teachers in schools.
What do you expect to see in terms of workplace raids? Will corporate executives also be arrested and jailed?
Workplace enforcement is based on a provision, called employer sanctions, of the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act. It makes it illegal for employers to hire undocumented workers. In reality, the law makes it illegal for people without papers to work. Over almost 50 years, the federal government has built up a database, called E-Verify, that seeks to identify every undocumented worker. ICE then requires employers to fire anyone it says is not in the U.S. legally.
Employers are almost never punished in this enforcement strategy. The only ones punished are workers, who lose their jobs and therefore can't pay rent, buy food, or survive. By making it impossible to live, the strategy seeks to force workers to "self-deport." Heavy workplace enforcement has also included raids, in which ICE enters workplaces and detains anyone they accuse of being undocumented. Both tactics have been used extensively by both Republican and Democratic administrations for half a century. Trump will undoubtedly make them a primary enforcement strategy too. There is also, however, a long history of resistance by workers and unions to workplace enforcement, and it is important to learn from that history the tactics we've used.
Migrant farmworkers, domestic workers, and their supporters march through San Francisco's Mission District to call for passage of the Registry Bill, which would allow undocumented people to gain legal immigration status. (Photo by David Bacon)
Under President George W. Bush, federal prosecutors charged workers with felonies for giving their employers a false Social Security number. He further proposed the complete enforcement of employer sanctions, but he was defeated in a suit filed by unions and civil rights organizations. Under President Obama, workplace enforcement was further systematized. In just one year, 2012, ICE audited 1,600 employers. Tens of thousands of workers were fired during Obama's eight years in office. Trump's announced appointments for the coming administration include some of the strongest advocates of this kind of enforcement.
In the period before Trump took office in 2017, many unions expected that workplace raids and firings would be a large part of his immigration enforcement program. The hotel union in Oakland, California, developed a proactive strategy to keep ICE away from workplaces, and it asked the Oakland City Council to protect immigrants on the job. The council passed a resolution, noting that Oakland has been a "city of refuge" since the anti-apartheid movement of the mid-1980s: "The City Council ... calls upon all employers to establish safe/sanctuary workplaces where workers are respected and not threatened or discriminated against based on their immigration status."
Like many unions, HERE Local 2850 (now part of UNITE HERE Local 2) sought alternatives by negotiating protections as part of their contracts with employers, requiring managers to notify the union if immigration agents tried to enter, interrogate workers, or demand papers. The contract says the hotel has to keep agents out unless they have a warrant. California's janitors union, SEIU United Service Workers West, drafted the Immigrant Worker Protection Act, a state law requiring employers to ask for a judicial warrant before granting ICE agents access to a workplace. It prohibits employers from sharing confidential information, like Social Security numbers, without a court order. The act came after years of fighting workplace raids and immigration-related firings.
As Trump took office in 2017, the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, Filipino Advocates for Justice, and several other groups organized trainings to prepare workers for raids. Union members acted out scenarios that used job action to protect each other. Some were veterans of an earlier organizing campaign among recycling workers, in which they stopped work to keep the company from firing employees for not having papers.
What else do you foresee the new Trump administration doing on immigration? And what do workers need to do to fight back?
In the outpouring of fear and outrage over Trump's threat to deport millions of undocumented immigrants, many have drawn parallels to the mass deportations of 1932-33. At the height of the Great Depression, with hunger haunting the homes of millions of working-class people, the relief authorities of that era denied food to Mexican and Mexican American families. Racist bureaucrats appealed to the government to deport them, claiming that forcing them to leave would save money and open up jobs for citizens. These age-old lies have been recycled again and again for a century, repeated most recently by the MAGA campaign.
Hunger was really the most powerful weapon used to force people to leave. But thousands were also swept up in street raids, and many more fled because of the terror the raids produced. Voluntary or not, people were loaded into boxcars and dumped at the border gates. The euphemism of the 1930s was "repatriation." Today's immigration enforcers call it "self-deportation." The idea is the same, and Trump and Pence are only the latest in a long line of proponents of this inhuman idea.
So Trump's enforcement program intends to make the conditions of life for people without papers so bad that they will leave. He may need some mass raids to instill terror, but he can't, and doesn't have to, pick up every undocumented person in order to do this. This is important because just as the raids will target certain people, our resistance can also be targeted. This is part of our history of resistance.
People of faith hold a vigil outside the immigration building in San Francisco, California, where immigrants have their hearings before being deported. (Photo by David Bacon)
The working-class neighborhoods of Chicago, for instance, have a long history of launching huge marches to protest immigration raids. As Obama entered his second term in 2013, activists, including Occupy Chicago, blocked buses going to the immigration courts. Emma Lozano, from Centro sin Fronteras, and other labor activists were arrested. Similar direct-action tactics were used in Tucson, Arizona, by young people who chained themselves to buses carrying detainees to the notorious special immigration court.
Trump's 2016 campaign promised to make Chicago a focus for both enforcement and resistance. As anti-immigrant hysteria promoted by his campaign spread, ICE began detaining people during traffic stops, knocking on apartment doors and pulling people off the street for interrogation and detention. The enforcement wave included sweeps of the corners and sidewalks near Home Depot and other gathering sites for day labors looking for work. The public presence of day laborers has historically made them a particular target for immigration street sweeps.
Activists met the Trump threat with actions. In July 2019 thousands of people marched through the Loop chanting "Immigrants are welcome here!" A day earlier they'd shown up at the Federal Plaza after hearing that ICE agents were about to be deployed. Unions helped organize the resistance.
What about cross-border solidarity? Do you have any examples of international organizing that might be inspiring?
The relationship between cross-border solidarity and immigrant rights is based on an important reality. If we think of Mexico as being its people, and not simply a geographic place, then part of Mexico exists in the U.S. In Mexico this idea is called el gran México, or Greater Mexico. Mexican communities that are the home of migrants also increasingly discuss the existence of two rights-the right to social equality and labor rights in the U.S., and the right to stay home for people who don't want to be forced to leave in order to survive.
Increasingly, these rights animate the discussions of migrant organizations in the U.S. as well. The outpouring of support for Andrés Manuel López Obrador's campaigns among people north of the border, for instance, has been based not just on a love of democracy but on his promise to end the neoliberal reforms in Mexico imposed under pressure from the U.S and World Bank. Those reforms, intended to make Mexico profitable for foreign investors, have caused the poverty that forced people to leave in order to survive.
Organizations in U.S. communities of Mexican migrants often have, therefore, a more sophisticated analysis of what immigration justice requires. It means fighting for political change in both countries-against immigration-based repression in the U.S. and for change in Mexico, which creates the basis for a full life. In cities from Los Angeles to Fresno, from Chicago to New York, Mexican migrant organizations are among the most active organizers of demonstrations and resistance. The high point was undoubtedly May Day 2006, when millions of people marched to defeat the Sensenbrenner bill, a proposed law that would have made it a federal felony to be undocumented.