By Dan Albright, with additional reporting by Siobhan M.
How will the labor movement and the left more broadly respond as Trump takes unionists for political prisoners and threatens martial law?
BOSTON, MA – Hundreds rallied at City Hall Plaza on Monday in solidarity with actions across the nation demanding the release of Los Angeles union leader David Huerta, president of SEIU United Service Workers West, jailed by ICE Friday for protesting a workplace raid.
“As ICE conducted terror raids against workers across Los Angeles on Friday,” said David Foley, SEIU Local 509 President, in an interview with Working Mass. “Among the protesters was my brother, David Huerta. They pushed him to the ground, beat and detained him. We’re out here to demand an end to the ICE raids and to demand immigration justice.”
ICE’s actions in Los Angeles on Friday – targeting day laborers outside a Home Depot, lining up and cuffing garment workers indiscriminately at a Fashion District wholesaler, firing flash grenades at protesters as they marched in full military garb along with hulking armored tanks, as well as detaining Huerta – inflamed the community and spurred massive protests over the weekend and continuing this week. President Trump ordered 2,000 National Guard and 700 Marines on standby as protesters escalated the rebellion, briefly shutting down a major freeway and setting several ICE-allied vehicles and robot-operated taxis aflame.
Huerta, 58, is a prominent leader in the California labor movement and Latino community. He represents 45,000 janitors, security officers and airport service workers in California, many of whom are immigrants. Huerta was serving as a community observer at one of the Fashion District raids when he was arrested. He faces up to six years in federal prison for “conspiracy to impede an officer.”
Shortly after the Monday rally, Huerta was released on $50,000 bail. However, the protests in Los Angeles are raging, and criticism of ICE is intensifying, with more and more solidarity rallies and marches taking place nationally.
Boston-based SEIU Local 509, representing 20,000 health and human service workers and educators in Massachusetts, organized Monday’s rally at Government Center. This spring, Local 509 made national headlines as it condemned the fascistic ICE imprisonment of its member Rümeysa Öztürk, a Tufts University graduate worker. Her sole “offense” was in 2024 writing an op-ed criticizing the college’s complicity with genocide in Gaza; one year later, plainclothes agents kidnapped her in Somerville and shipped her to a Louisiana prison cell for six weeks.
In a parallel, Huerta was among the SEIU leaders who advocated for pro-Palestine resolutions in the union, helping put the highly influential 2-million-member Service Employees International Union at the forefront of Palestine solidarity within the labor movement.
Other union members and leaders have been targeted too, taken as political prisoners in what can only be seen as overt suppression of organizing workers across national origin: Lewelyn Dixon, 10-year SEIU Local 925 member in Seattle detained by ICE February 28; Mahmoud Khalil, a former member of the Student Workers of Columbia (SWOC), UAW Local 2710, detained in New York March 8; Lelo Juarez, Washington state farmworker organizer taken March 25; undergraduate worker Mohsen Mahdawi in Vermont, April 14. Of them, concerted campaigns by UAW and SEIU helped contribute to Dixon and Mahdawi’s later release.
“We are facing an enormous amount of repression right now,” Foley continued at the Boston rally Monday, “The billionaire class is trying to divide working people based off of immigration status and documentation status. We will not tolerate it, and we’ll continue to escalate. We’ll disrupt as much as we can to end these terror raids. Free David Huerta. Free them all.”
Leaders from all SEIU unions in the Massachusetts State Council, including 32BJ SEIU, 1199SEIU, SEIU Local 888 and CIR/SEIU, also spoke at the Boston rally, as well as Chrissy Lynch, Mass. AFL-CIO state federation president, Darlene Lombos of the Boston AFL-CIO Central Labor Council (GBLC), and Chaton Green, Business Agent of the Greater Boston Building Trades Unions. Members from various area unions, community groups and socialist organizations made up the crowd.
“Community members need to know they are not alone,” said Tefa Galvis, co-chair of the Boston chapter of Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). “Whether we’re in a union or not, socialists or just capitalism-critical, or whether this is the first time you’ve felt activated, Boston DSA is here to lend a hand to those itching to take action.”
As the rebellion unfolds in Los Angeles – and as the nation anxiously anticipates martial law, Trump’s promised turning of the military against the American people – time will tell how the labor movement and the broader left will meet the moment. Will we buy the billionaires’ narrative that rebellion is unlawful, anti-patriotic, or detrimental to “shared” progress? Will we be inspired by our LA brothers and sisters’ courage and organization, or will we sit this one out and fade further into cultural irrelevance?
The established national labor movement in recent years has, in a sea-change from past nativist stances, started to embrace immigrant workers. The SEIU was one of the leaders in this effort in the early 2000s, which partially culminated in the SEIU departing the AFL-CIO in 2005, particularly through the Justice for Janitors campaign beginning in 1990. Low-wage immigrant workers were crushed by L.A. cops in the same streets as the rebellion today in the Battle for Century City, which then led to a long-term base-building campaign beyond the limits of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) process to build immigrant worker power under the SEIU umbrella. David Huerta began his career as an organizer for Justice for Janitors, and since leading SEIU in California, has overseen organizing campaigns involving thousands of janitors and English classes for union members to integrate immigrant workers. Meanwhile, the largest federation has also traveled far: today, the national AFL-CIO distributes Know Your Rights, organizing resources, and hosts immigrant worker working groups.
Nonetheless, accountability for union-backed politicians engaging in anti-immigrant politics has been limited. Though the tactics and optics may be different, President Biden oversaw more deportations (4 million) than Trump did in his first term (1.9 million), and Trump’s current pace of deportations still lags Biden’s. Biden and congressional Democrats increased ICE’s budget by 20% in Biden’s term; Kamala Harris’s campaign even sought to outflank Trump on immigration ”toughness.”
In a telling irony, many unions distributing the AFL-CIO’s new Know Your Rights cards have found themselves in a dilemma. The cards instruct the user to hand the card to the enforcement officer if approached. The bottom of the card has a fill-in-the-blank spot for the number of a local immigration defense lawyer or advocate. But immigration lawyers are so overwhelmed and unions so under-resourced that local unions often don’t have a number they can reliably list there. This dilemma, though, also points to a solution: less reliance on legalistic strategies by unions, and greater investment in organizational strength, i.e., to what extent is the membership prepared to flex the basic, collective union power of shutting down business-as-usual to win demands? And further, to what extent are we organizing across divisions of language, immigrant and documentation status to build power that shatters capitalists’ ability to divide and conquer?
While unions represent only about 10% of the workforce, trending downwards even in recent years as public approval of unions has risen, the labor movement still represents the best hope in the fight against fascism. Unions, at their best, go beyond the negotiation of wages and benefits and give workers a real say in how things are done in the workplace. The workplace, where we spend most of our lives, is otherwise a site of unrestricted authoritarian dictatorship (of the boss). When workers act in unity across worksites, even if often largely illegalized in America, ever larger demands and grander victories are possible. Labor history shows unions’ greatest rise – and, subsequently, working people’s highest point of prosperity – came at a time of widespread, technically illegal, strike action. The corporate media, then, as today with the LA protests, often cast and derided these strikes as violent.
As Trump’s administration presses union-busting full throttle, gutting what’s left of a broken NLRB and attempting to slash public sector bargaining rights, legalistic defenses seem unlikely to hold organized labor’s fort, and with it, democracy itself. Vice President Vance recently advised the President that if the courts stopped him, he should make “like Andrew Jackson” and tell the courts to raise their own army to enforce it. Maybe, at this moment, working people need our own kind of army, too.
Dan Albright is an editor of Working Mass, union media producer and organizer, DSA member, and Recording Secretary of IUPAT Local 939.
CORRECTION: A previous version of this report listed Mahmoud Khalil as past president of the Student Workers of Columbia; he was a member. Mohsen Mahdawi was listed as a grad union member; he is an undergraduate.
Great reporting work, Dan and Siobhan!