On the streets of New York City, tens of thousands of delivery workers are constantly shuttling everything from take-out dinners to groceries. Most of the workers plying this trade are immigrants, and a substantial portion—no one knows exactly how many—are undocumented. These days, with President Trump imposing harsher immigration policies and ICE launching raids, those workers are afraid.
“There are a lot of people who are scared,” said Gustavo Ajche, a longtime delivery worker. “But there is no choice. They need money—they have to work.”
Trump’s reascension to the Oval Office has added an anxiety-inducing layer of labor to what was already a difficult job. Delivery drivers have little choice but to help watch each other’s backs. They are warning one another about where ICE agents have been spotted while scanning the news for the latest information about government raids. Advocates are out trying to bring these workers up to speed about their rights. But resources are tight. The thing that would help the most, access to immigration lawyers, is in short supply.
But the greatest frustration may be that while these workers keep doing the actual delivering for the billion-dollar delivery companies, those companies—like Uber Eats, DoorDash, and Grubhub—are offering them no immigration help.
Unlike the early months of Trump’s first term, when these companies lined up to proclaim the importance of immigrants and promise legal help for their immigrant workers, the companies have been silent on civil rights this time around—though some have spoken a different way, through big donations to support Trump.
In November, Uber gave $1 million to Trump’s inaugural committee, contributing to a no-limits fund that paid for inaugural festivities. The fund’s leftover cash can be used for other things, possibly a Trump presidential library. Uber’s CEO, Dara Khosrowshahi, kicked in another $1 million. Instacart, another major delivery company that largely relies on immigrant workers, gave $100,000 to the Trump inaugural fund. The companies did not respond to questions about why they made the donations.
Workers for these firms say those large gifts were disappointing—but no surprise.
“They don’t care about workers,” Ajche said of the app companies. “They don’t care about anything. They just focus on making money, and that’s it.” Ligia Guallpa, executive director of the advocacy group the Worker’s Justice Project, said the gifts to Trump were part of a long pattern. “I wasn’t surprised to see the companies aligned themselves with a president who has, since day one, been clear that he’s not representing working-class Americans,” she said.
They point to more than just the donations to the president as evidence of the companies’ attitude toward immigrant workers. Despite the rising fear of deportations, none of the major delivery app companies—including Uber, DoorDash, Grubhub, and Instacart—are offering any kind of help to their delivery workers.
The companies’ silence this year is a big departure from the first months of Trump’s first term. At the time, many of these firms made conspicuous public pronouncements about their concern for immigrants. They promised to protect their workforce, and they backed those pledges with capital.
Uber put out a statement in January 2017 deriding Trump’s “unjust immigration ban” and announced it would “create a $3 million legal defense fund to help drivers with immigration and translation services.” Instacart’s CEO, Apoorva Mehta, announced a $100,000 donation to the ACLU and said the company would pay for “office hours with immigration counsels for employees and their families in need.” On January 29, 2017, DoorDash’s CEO said the company would give “free food to any lawyers or advocates working this weekend to support immigrants, refugees.” None of the companies have made similar public announcements or monetary commitments at the start of Trump’s second term. (Uber, DoorDash, Grubhub, and Instacart did not respond to The New Republic’s questions about their support for immigrant workers or about criticisms from workers like Ajche.)
Even those 2017 promises were little more than P.R. stunts, according to the workers’ advocates. They were part of a pattern of donations aimed at buying goodwill in the companies’ fight against efforts to strengthen workers’ rights, according to Guallpa. If the companies wanted to really help workers, she said, they would take their donation money “and put it back into the pockets of workers.”
The workers say they are under no illusions: The delivery companies are not going to help, and immigrants who fear Immigration and Customs Enforcement are on their own. In response, they are banding together. Manny Ramirez, an experienced delivery worker and advocate, said workers are in large WhatsApp groups where they warn one another about ICE sightings. People try to avoid areas with ICE or hide out for a day at home, choosing to lose that day’s wages rather than risk deportation, he said. And community leaders like Ramirez and Ajche are doing whatever they can to help others understand their rights. Ajche, who helped found the advocacy group Los Deliveristas Unidos, said he wants workers to know that “there is an organization that is supporting them, that is fighting for them. We just have to keep moving forward. We’re not going to be scared.”
Against some tough odds, the workers can point to limited wins against the delivery companies. Last month, DoorDash agreed to settle a lawsuit brought by the New York attorney general that claimed the company deceptively used tips from customers to reduce its own payments to delivery workers—if DoorDash promised a worker $10 for a delivery and the customer provided no tip, DoorDash would pay the full $10 to the worker, but if the customer provided a $3 tip, DoorDash would only pay $7, according to the attorney general. As part of the settlement, DoorDash will pay more than $16 million in restitution to the workers.
While this victory doesn’t directly address the new stresses of Trump’s deportation plans, it demonstrated to workers that the companies are not invincible. Guallpa said the settlement was a key example of “standing up to greedy bullies who are attempting to exploit workers.” More organizing is needed, she said, “to fight back against the oligarchy and corporate power.”
But the workers’ fight to protect themselves from the government and the delivery companies can feel like a lonely one. “The city said ‘thank you’ to the immigrant delivery workers for working during the pandemic,” Ramirez said, but now it feels like “the companies, and the city too, everyone is against the immigrant people.”
