California Workers Get Ready For Workplace Immigration Raids

Abstract

16 | International Union Rights | 24/2 FOCUS | UNITED STATES California Workers Get Ready For Workplace Immigration Raids At the end of February immigration agents descended on a handful of Japanese and Chinese restaurants in the suburbs of Jackson, Mississippi and in nearby Meridian. Fifty-five immigrant cooks, dishwashers, servers and bussers were loaded into vans and taken to a detention centre 158 miles away in Jena, Louisiana. Their arrest and subsequent treatment did more than provoke outrage among Jackson’s immigrant rights activists. Worker advocates in California also took note of the incident, fearing that it marked the beginning of a new wave of immigrant raids and enforcement actions in workplaces. In response, they’ve written a Bill with legal protections for workers, to keep the experience from being duplicated here. At the same time, training sessions have started to ensure workers know their rights during any jobrelated immigration enforcement action. Once the Mississippi restaurant workers had been arrested, they essentially fell off the radar screen for several days. Jackson lawyer Jeremy Litton, who represented three Guatemalan workers picked up in the raid, could not get the government to schedule hearing dates for them. He was unable to verify that the other detained immigrants were being held in the same centre, or even who they were. The Geo Corporation, formerly known as the Wackenhut Corporation, operates the LaSalle Detention Center. Geo’s roots go back to the Pinkerton Detective Agency, which became notorious in the first half of the twentieth century for brutal, violent assaults on unions and strikes. Today Geo operates 16 immigrant detention centres around the country, according to its 2015 annual report. It runs privatised prisons as well, some of which have been investigated by the Federal government over bad conditions and understaffing. The LaSalle facility has 1160 beds. Litton says it is normally full, so taking in an additional 55 detainees would result in severe overcrowding. The use of Jena’s immigrant jail to hold workers detained in workplace raids has a bitter history in Mississippi. In 2008, 481 workers were arrested at a Howard Industries electrical equipment factory, in Laurel, Mississippi, in the middle of union negotiations. They too were taken to the La Salle detention centre. There they were fed peanut butter sandwiches at mealtimes, and according to Patricia Ice, attorney for the Mississippi Immigrant Rights Alliance (MIRA), “there weren’t even enough beds and people were sleeping on the floor”. Eight workers detained in that raid were charged with aggravated identity theft in Federal court, for having given a false Social Security number to the employer when they were hired. “This latest raid is causing a lot of fear in our community”, according to MIRA director Bill Chandler. “There’s fear everywhere now because of the threats from Trump, but here in Mississippi our history of racism makes fear even stronger”. Agustin Ramirez, an organiser for the International Longshore and Warehouse Union in California, says the Mississippi raid has heightened fear here too. “What we have seen in the past, and the threats from Trump, tell us this is coming. We may not have had a raid like this here yet, but we can see the sky is dark, and we know it’s going to rain. We just don’t know when”. The legislative response in California came from United Service Workers West, the union for janitors, security guards and airport workers affiliated with the Service Employees International Union. “We want to lead the nation with the strongest resistance efforts to protect workers, not just in the community, but in the workplace”, explained David Huerta, USWW President. In California, with many times the immigrant population of Mississippi, the potential impact of workplace raids is enormous. Of the nation’s estimated eleven million undocumented immigrants, over 2.6 million live in this state. They make up almost half of its farm workers, and over twenty percent of its construction workers. Almost one in every ten California workers is undocumented. The National Restaurant Association says that of the country’s twelve million restaurant workers, nine percent are undocumented, while the Restaurant Opportunities Center estimates that in large cities they make up almost half of...