The arrest and violent manhandling of David Huerta, the president of the Service Employees International Union of California, or SEIU, suggests that Donald Trump, that proud tribune of the working class, is targeting union leaders for arrest.
Huerta wasn’t the first. In March, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested Alfredo “Lelo” Juarez Zeferino, a labor organizer; founder of Familias Unidas por la Justicia, a farmworkers’ union in Bellingham, Washington; and former member of that city’s now-defunct Immigration Advisory Board. As Kate Aronoff reported in The New Republic at the time of Zeferino’s arrest, he was instrumental in securing state protections against excessive heat exposure. Zeferino is now being detained without bail.
Labor unions in Washington state are infuriated by Zeferino’s detention, and also by ICE’s February arrest of Lewelyn Dixon (imprisoned for three months and then released), a lab technician at the University of Washington and, according to Local 925 of the Service Employees International Union, a “dedicated” member of that union. Dixon was born in the Philippines but for half a century has been a legal permanent resident. Then there was Maximo Londonio, a forklift driver in Lacey, Washington, and a member of Local 695 of the Machinists. Londonio, who was also born in the Philippines, is, like Dixon, a legal permanent resident, but he’s been an ICE detainee since mid-May.
In Zeferino’s case, ICE can claim he ignored a 2018 immigration removal order (his lawyer says Zeferino never heard about it). In Dixon’s and Londonio’s cases, ICE can claim they committed (nonviolent) criminal offenses—Dixon embezzled; it’s not clear what Londonio did—but that was more than 20 years ago, and the government long ago prosecuted and punished them both.
Huerta is different. He was born and raised in the United States, and his only offense appears to be observing and protesting how ICE treated members of his union during an immigration raid in Los Angeles. Clearly the Trump administration wants to make an example of him. But an example for whom? ICE arrests are typically intended to intimidate immigrants and prospective immigrants. But in this case (and probably Zeferino’s too), ICE looks like it’s trying to drive a wedge between undocumented immigrants and the labor movement.
It’s a bit late for that. Before the 1980s, labor might have been receptive because it tended to oppose immigration, believing undocumented and even legal immigrants cost native-born Americans jobs or lowered their wages. Cesar Chavez, a more complex figure than is generally acknowledged, called undocumented immigrants traveling north from Mexico “wetbacks.” Chavez created a private security patrol to keep them out and bribed Mexican police to look the other way when his thuggish enforcers (nicknamed cesarchavezistas) roughed somebody up. Richard Strout, the liberal author of The New Republic’s “TRB From Washington” column from 1943 to 1983 (I followed him, in 2011–13), was rabidly anti-immigration. “Failure to enforce immigration laws,” Strout wrote in a July 1977 column, “is a scandal.” Strout even endorsed, long before E-Verify, legal sanctions against businesses that employed undocumented immigrants.
But subsequent research showed immigration’s financial cost to native-born Americans was minimal in most instances, and union leaders shifted from opposing undocumented immigrants to representing them. Among the voices today protesting most loudly the wrongful deportation of Kilmar Abrego Garcia are his fellow union members and their leaders. Since 1994, foreign-born workers have grown from 8.4 percent of union members to 15.4 percent, according to the nonprofit Center for Economic and Policy Research. If for no other reason, labor unions won’t turn back the clock.
ICE’s criminal complaint against Huerta, which charges him with conspiracy to impede an officer, is shockingly thin. It makes much of the fact that Huerta and other protesters appear to have been summoned by an unidentified woman on the scene, and that these protesters all “appeared to be communicating to each other” by cell phone. Apparently one ICE officer has incriminating video of Huerta “typing text into his digital device while present at the protest”—more commonly known as exercising his First Amendment rights.
At one point, according to the complaint, Huerta paced in front of a vehicle entrance gate, sat down, and urged other protesters to sit down alongside him, saying, “Stop the vehicles” and “It’s a public sidewalk, they can’t stop us.” That sounds less like a conspiracy than like a nonviolent protest. If the purpose was to impede, all it impeded was a parking spot, which, even in Los Angeles, is not a felony. (You might get a ticket for a first offense.)
One ICE officer warned Huerta that if he didn’t move he’d be arrested, to which Huerta replied, “I can’t hear you through your fucking mask.” The officer registered this as defiance, but it strikes me as entirely plausible that Huerta really couldn’t hear the officer through his fucking mask.
Huerta’s other offenses include “making an offensive gesture to law enforcement officers,” which I assume means he flipped them the bird, and unauthorized banging on the entrance gate. Huerta was finally arrested, according to the complaint, after an officer pushed him and Huerta pushed the officer back. Huerta was arraigned late Monday and released on a $50,000 bond.
I’m no lawyer, but one obvious difficulty with the conspiracy charge is that Huerta is one person, and a conspiracy requires at least two. Who were Huerta’s partners in this crime? Surely not the activists texting back and forth about the ICE raid; bearing witness is not a conspiracy. Neither is protesting. The relevant statute, 18 U.S. Code § 372, talks about preventing a person from holding an office, or inducing that person to leave the place where his duties are to be discharged, or injuring that officer or his property, none of which apply. A shove (assuming it really happened) doesn’t typically cause injury, and anyway the only party sent to the hospital was Huerta himself. Unless ICE is withholding additional significant facts, this prosecution looks very unpromising.
But whoever said the Trump administration gave a damn what happens in a courtroom? The point is to intimidate union leaders away from attending, witnessing, and recording ICE raids. So far, the strategy isn’t succeeding. Huerta’s manhandling inspired protests not only in Los Angeles but also in Seattle, Minneapolis, Raleigh, and elsewhere. Far from terrorizing the labor movement, Trump is galvanizing it.
