Micaela is a co-president of GEO (AFT) Local 6297 in Chicago.

On June 22, Socialist Alternative held a national organizing meeting to discuss how the labor movement can escalate the fight against Trump and his deportations. It was an initiative called Union Members Against ICE, which began with a petition calling on unions to organize a national one-day strike to shut down Trump and ICE. The organizing meeting was attended by workers, students, and union members from across the country who were excited to build on the mass anti-Trump protests that took place on June 14.

If you missed the meeting, you can get involved with the next steps we discussed here!

The recent escalation of conflict in the Middle East underlines the fact that there’s no time to waste to get organized against Trump and the billionaires who profit from war, destruction, and deportations.

The Union Members Against ICE petition calls for union contingents at anti-ICE protests, mass meetings of union and non-union workers to plan out strategy to resist deportations, and for a national one-day strike. In just a few days, over 1,000 union members and non-union workers across the world signed this petition, including signatures from Argentina, Australia, Canada, India, and Amazon workers in Poland. As a co-president of a graduate student union in Chicago, I signed the petition and joined this meeting to connect with other union workers across the country in a common struggle against the far right.

Socialist Alternative members helped build for the meeting in our workplaces and at the “No Kings” protests nationally, which drew out an estimated 5-10 million people wanting to take action in response to Trump’s attacks on immigrants and protesters. These massive protests showed the hunger of the working class for a way to defeat Trump’s far-right authoritarian regime and the need for an escalation plan, which is why we launched Union Members Against ICE.

Union Members & Social Movements

To kick off the meeting, several workers shared their experiences as union organizers in the Amalgamated Transit Union, the National Association of Letter Carriers, and Amazon Teamsters. They gave examples of how union members can use our position as organized workers to fight for broader social issues.

During the George Floyd Rebellion, rank-and-file ATU bus drivers in Socialist Alternative organized with their coworkers to refuse to transport arrested protestors to jail. Around the same time, letter carriers for USPS in Minneapolis organized a rally and march to demand justice for Floyd’s murder after a post office was burned down, with slogans like, “You can rebuild a post office, but you can’t bring back the life of a man who was murdered by the police.” In Kentucky, Amazon workers at KCVG have won victories for immigrant workers, including more translation of workplace communications and washing stations for prayer rooms used by Muslim workers. 

Alondra Garcia, a Milwaukee Teachers’ Education Association member, spoke about her experience campaigning alongside Socialist Alternative after her right-wing principal retaliated against her for offering support resources to immigrant families. Across the country, workers are connecting their workplace struggles to the broader fight for justice for working-class people and against the far right.

Attendees at the meeting agreed that unions must play a leading role in mass movements. This connection is seen organically in Alondra Garcia’s work as both a union member and the president of an immigrant rights organization named Voces de la Frontera. In sharing her work, she advised of the importance of community defense networks that provide services like “Migra watch” and “know your rights” trainings for working families. The need for deportation defense committees in unions was echoed by Ian Rivero, an immigrant and ramp worker at Amazon. These are important steps to take to protect our communities from ICE, but we can use even stronger tools as workers to actually shut down ICE for good. This is why we also discussed organizing to put pressure on union leaders to build strike action in solidarity with our immigrant brothers and sisters. 

Rebuilding Fighting Unions

Unfortunately, the potential for a more militant labor movement is cut across by leaders who do not fight for genuine solidarity across all workers, or in the worst case, stand against it. Many workers in the meeting had already come to this conclusion, criticizing Teamsters President Sean O’Brien for siding with Trump and supporting deportations. But this realization was not accompanied by despair, instead many attendees affirmed the necessity of rank-and-file organizing that challenges and pressures union leadership into taking action.

Similarly, we can’t put our faith in the Democratic Party or the courts to actually stop Trump. The only thing that has pushed back Trump in the past has been working-class action, like the taxi drivers’ strike and airport occupations that stopped his “Muslim ban” in 2017. Democratic presidents like Obama are well known for carrying out historic levels of deportations, and it was Democratic Mayor Karen Bass in LA who ordered police officers to violently repress anti-ICE protesters this month. The Democrats and Republicans are thoroughly capitalist parties which exist to serve the billionaires, not working people, which is why unions have no business donating to either of them and should instead be fighting to build a new, working-class party.

The militarization of ICE and the resulting emboldened bigotry of this administration lay bare the racism that underlies this system, which relies on exploitation for the sake of profit. Capitalism relies on division, whether it be on the basis of race, gender, sexuality, or nationality. In sharing his experience with building the reform caucus Build a Fighting NALC, Tyler Vasseur noted, “the existence of a super-exploited class weakens all workers.” The bosses succeed when we give into these divisions instead of uniting as workers to oppose our common enemy. To rebuild a fighting labor movement, unions need to fight back against bigotry like racism and sexism to raise the quality of all workers’ conditions.

To rebuild the US labor movement, we need to start with both union and non-union workers bringing political struggles from around the world into their workplace. A deportation anywhere is an attack on all workers. Our struggle is connected to the imperialist aggression in Iran and genocide in Gaza. In order to build a united, international working-class struggle, our unions need to lead the way.

Joining Socialist Alternative empowered me to bring international working-class politics into my graduate student union, helping to bridge the gap that many attendees noted between labor and the wider community. To fight back against an administration that won’t rest until our communities are torn apart, we need:

• Mass meetings of union AND non-union workers and community members to plan out strategy and next steps in the fight against Trump!
• A national one-day strike to shut down ICE and shut down the imperialist US war machine!
• A working-class party independent of both the Democrats and Republicans!