Los Angeles is a city of immigrants. It is also a city of unions. And in California, those two constituencies have essentially melded into one.
So it should come as no surprise that federal immigration raids on workplaces around Los Angeles County this week set off the largest protests to date against President Trump’s immigration crackdown.
On the first day of the protests, David Huerta, the president of the California chapter of the Service Employees International Union and the grandson of Mexican farmworkers, was arrested and hospitalized for a head injury after being pushed by a federal agent. Officials said he was blocking law enforcement carrying out an immigration raid, and his detention touched off a series of mobilizations nationwide.
At a hastily convened rally in front of the Justice Department in Washington on Monday, some of the labor movement’s top brass passed around a microphone to decry immigration enforcement operations and demand his release.
“Our country suffers when these military raids tear families apart,” said Liz Shuler, the president of the A.F.L.-C.I.O., standing in a cluster of signs reading, “Free David.” “One thing the administration should know about this community is that we do not leave anybody behind!” Mr. Huerta was released on bail later in the day and still faces charges.
It wasn’t always this way in American unions. Historically, they often viewed immigrants with suspicion, likely to undercut wages and to be unwilling to stand up to employers. While those attitudes still exist, union leadership has aligned itself with immigrants’ rights — and placed itself squarely in opposition to the Trump administration’s agenda of mass deportation.
Immigrants are now so heavily represented in many unions that even when nearly all have legal work status, deportations are keenly felt because many workers have undocumented family members.
That’s why, said Arnulfo De La Cruz, the president of a S.E.I.U. local that represents about half a million long-term-care workers in California, the reaction to immigration enforcement in Los Angeles has been so strong.
“The moment you execute actions that would separate families, that’s the worst outcome in the world,” Mr. De La Cruz said. “It’s life-changing. It throws your family finances, your loved ones into chaos.”
Many union contracts now protect undocumented immigrants. Some, for example, prescribe a process that prevents management from immediately terminating employees when the federal government flags a mismatch between immigration verification paperwork and official Social Security records. Others prevent employers from reverifying immigration status after a union member is hired.
Unions also maintain legal assistance funds to help their members with immigration issues and educate both workers and employers on what to do if immigration enforcement visits their workplaces.
Cecily Myart-Cruz, the president of the United Teachers of Los Angeles union, said some of her members were undocumented, as were many of their students. She felt the fear at her own son’s eighth-grade graduation ceremony this week.
“I had parents come up to me saying: ‘Hi, you don’t know me. I’m a teacher, but what do I do if ICE comes onto our community?’” Ms. Myart-Cruz said, using the acronym for Immigration and Customs Enforcement. “That makes it our business.”
The path to the merging of union and immigrant interests in Los Angeles began in the 1990s, as waves of immigrants from Latin America and Asia came to dominate low-paying industries such as hospitality, garment production, warehousing and construction.
Congress passed an immigration law in 1986 that granted amnesty to three million immigrants while making it illegal to employ people without proper documentation. That gave rise to the shadow work force that many companies have come to depend on.
“Labor has been more overtly embracing immigrant workers because they’re a larger part of the work force,” said Victor Sanchez, the executive director of the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy, an advocacy group founded by a coalition of labor and immigrant organizers. “More often they’re in low-wage sectors of the economy. The intersection of that fact as well as immigration status is very clear.”
New leaders arose from those communities to lead labor organizations. Miguel Contreras, who trained with the United Farm Workers and then moved on to hotel organizing, remade the political strategy of the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor around immigrants. He channeled the activism against Proposition 187, a 1994 ballot initiative that denied public services to undocumented immigrants and was ruled unconstitutional in 1998.
Maria Elena Durazo, Mr. Contreras’s wife and fellow hotel organizer, took over the federation after his death in 2005 and is now a state senator. Over that time, what had been a conservative city led by the business elite had started to take on a more progressive tinge. Politicians backed by the labor federation have campaigned against police enforcement of immigration laws and for increases in the minimum wage.
In recent years, unions and their allies have worked to expand into other places where many immigrants work when they first arrive in the country — as day laborers or in fast food restaurants. Although those efforts have generally not turned into legally recognized unions, they have yielded worker centers that try to protect workers’ rights on the job. In recent years, organizing was aided by a Biden administration policy that shielded immigrants from deportation while they cooperated in the investigation of abuses by their employers.
Victor Narro, a project director at the University of California, Los Angeles, Labor Center, led a campaign to organize carwash workers in Los Angeles, which then spread to Chicago and New York City. Mr. Narro has spent this week arranging aid for the families of undocumented carwash workers detained by federal officials, as well as educating those still on the job about their rights.
“We’re feeling the fear, but we’re also feeling a deep resilience, because we’re part of networks,” Mr. Narro said. “That solidarity becomes real, it’s a force.”
Unions in other parts of the country have also pushed for immigrant rights. In New York, for instance, unions have backed a bill that would prevent state officials from inquiring about immigration status.
That tight alignment between immigrants and labor unions, however, doesn’t extend equally across the country. Plenty of unions have not adopted immigrant rights as their own struggle. And in the South, where most states have so-called right-to-work laws that make organizing more difficult, both labor and immigrant advocates lack the political clout to protect undocumented immigrants.
Take Florida, where Gov. Ron DeSantis has mobilized state law enforcement officials to assist in immigration enforcement and where the Legislature has enacted a series of laws heightening criminal penalties for undocumented immigrants in the state. Florida labor unions resisted those efforts, to no avail.
Rich Templin, the political director for the state’s A.F.L.-C.I.O. chapter, said that his members hadn’t completely embraced immigrants, but that they were coming around. He calls it an evolution.
“I wouldn’t say that we’re there yet,” Mr. Templin said. “But it’s definitely moving from a space of them as ‘the other.’”
Madeline Janis, who co-founded the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy with Ms. Durazo, helped drive the city’s metamorphosis into a Democratic-led municipality driven by immigrant-centered unions. She is now a co-director of Jobs to Move America, a nonprofit that works to raise labor standards on publicly supported projects.
She’s working in Southern states as well, like Alabama, where there is much less support for immigrants and unions. With patient organizing, she suggests, attitudes can change.
“When I’m in Alabama, I’m reminded a lot of the L.A. I grew up in, which had a Republican mayor, where there was massive segregation and mistreatment of immigrants,” Ms. Janis said. “Which continues to this day, of course. But the difference between then and now is very significant.”
