The US Deportation Machine Undermines Workers’ Rights
Despite America's self-image as a land of immigrants, over its history, the United States has deported more people than any other nation in the world. Yet migrant workers have found ways to sabotage the deportation machine to win their dignity and rights.
An ICE agent detains a man. ice.gov / Wikimedia Commons
On May 17, 1978, forty investigators with the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the precursor to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), raided the Sbicca shoe factory in Los Angeles. Less than a week earlier, the factory workers had voted in a union election filed by the Retail Clerks Union. The election was still under review when the INS came rolling in “like gestapo,” in the words of one union organizer.
The INS that day was relying on tactics US authorities had developed over more than a century of expelling immigrants: detain and deport targeted groups (especially Mexican workers) without due process, before broadcasting news of such actions (and potential future actions) to terrorize other immigrants into leaving the country or receding further into the shadows.
Only this time, the immigrants refused to play their parts.
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