On Friday, the President of my union, David Huerta, was brutally assaulted and arrested by federal immigration agents in Los Angeles while defending undocumented workers.
Huerta, who represents more than 750,000 members of the California Service Employees International Union (SEIU), was helping a group of people block the entrance to a worksite in Downtown Los Angeles when immigration officials pushed him to the curb, tased him, and arrested him. He has since been detained all weekend after being released from the hospital and is facing criminal charges in court on Monday.
Attorneys for the federal government argue that the 58-year-old Huerta was obstructing justice, but there is nothing just about the regular violence that ICE agents perpetrate against immigrants; there is nothing just about President Trump’s attempts to arrest, detain, and deport thousands of working people every day because of where they happened to be born; and there is nothing just about splitting up families and tearing parents away from their children in the service of nationalism and capitalist profits.
On the contrary, It was Huerta who was acting on the side of justice that day and his actions should be an example for all of us. He was doing what every labor leader and union member should and must be doing at this moment: clearly standing up against Trump’s authoritarian agenda and standing with and in defense of the most vulnerable among us. Huerta not only condemned the ICE raids that took place in Los Angeles on Friday, he took action to stop them. He put his freedom and his body on the line to defend immigrant workers. Wherever ICE goes, we must be there too, to confront them like Huerta and thousands of people in LA did, to stand in their way, and to use every means at our disposal to force them out of our cities, our communities, and our workplaces.
Since Friday, tens of thousands of Anegelinos have taken to the streets to protest and to actively confront the federal immigration agents who have invaded our city, and who are kidnapping our coworkers, our friends, our neighbors, and our family members. This uprising, like the protests in Minneapolis, San Diego, and other cities across the country, shows that there is in fact widespread discontent with Trump’s immigration policies and widespread ongoing disgust and hatred of ICE and the police that support them. The actions of those confronting ICE and the police on the streets of Los Angeles right now are an inspiration.
But such spontaneous actions, without the organized engagement of the masses of the working class and oppressed, can be easily repressed by the state. Trump has already sent 2,000 National Guard troops to the state in a show of force, and you can bet that Democrats like Governor Gavin Newsom and Mayor Karen Bass won’t hesitate to deploy more riot police to put an end to the protests and facilitate immigration raids. This is why we need organized labor to walk out and step up now.
Last April my local SEIU 721, which is part of the California SEIU, went on strike for two days. We marched in the streets 55,000 strong and unafraid, and our members stood up to the police and were arrested. Without our labor and the labor of our brothers and sisters in SEIU and other state and local labor unions the state would grind to a halt. As organized labor we have enormous power, and it is in times like this, when our basic rights and the basic rights of our loved ones, our neighbors, and our fellow workers are being violated, that we must use that power to its fullest.
Currently, the SEIU, which has approximately two million members, is helping organize dozens of protests across the country on Monday. This is an important and unprecedented advance of the labor movement into the political arena, and the rank and file of our union must be sure to make these actions our own and to take them to their logical conclusion. We cannot allow the bureaucrats, no matter how brave they may sometimes act, to lead us back into the arms of our enemies. To do that we must join forces and organize with the rank and file of the entire labor movement to build an independent united front with the youth in the streets to defend our union members and all of our immigrant brothers and sisters who are a vital part of our communities and of the U.S. labor force. This is a basic principle of labor, where an injury to one is an injury to all, and we need a nationwide response. Every single one of our members needs to be out of the workplace and in the streets to put an end to the deportations, the immigration raids, attacks on the right to protest, and the entire bipartisan reactionary, nationalist, anti-worker, anti-immigrant agenda once and for all.
