Vol. 71/No. 33      September 10, 2007

Among the marchers were day laborers from across the country attending the fourth convention of the National Day Laborer Organizing Network, held August 2-5 in nearby Silver Spring, Maryland. Many had taken part in a press conference at the Capitol in Washington, D.C., where they called for a moratorium on immigration raids until the passage of a new federal immigration law.

In Herndon, anti-immigrant forces have opposed any hiring center for day laborers, while workers have insisted on their right to seek work without harassment. In 2005 the city set up a municipally funded hiring center, “to keep the people from congregating on sidewalks in the 7-Eleven parking lot looking for work,” as former mayor Michael O’Reilly recently put it.

On August 16 the Herndon town council voted to replace the center’s operator, a religious group called Reston Interfaith, with a new manager who will agree to check workers’ immigration status.

Workers who spoke at the Capitol and at the Herndon rally gave several examples of how raids by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents have been used to try to intimidate immigrant workers.

Luis Larín, a day laborer from Baltimore who spoke at the press conference, told the story of how immigration agents, posing as contractors, arrested day laborers in a January sweep. “There were workers of many nationalities there, but they only arrested the Latinos,” he said.

Germán Cruz was one of those who was arrested; he spent five months in an immigration jail. “I wasn’t looking for work that day, just waiting for the bus,” he said. “They came driving up saying ‘$10 for this,’ ‘$10 for that,’ but then we saw they had uniforms. One of them said to me, ‘You’re illegal, you’re coming too.’”

Eugenio Molina, 67, a Salvadoran worker, told the Militant he finds work in Wheaton, Maryland, at a street corner one block from El Pollo Rico restaurant, where nine workers were arrested in a July 12 ICE raid.

“Fewer people are coming to look for work now,” said Molina, who said he usually worked four days a week before the raid, but now is lucky to get one day’s work, gardening.  
 
Protests in other counties
In neighboring Prince William County, immigrant workers have been organizing protests to get the County Board of Supervisors to rescind a July 10 resolution that deputizes local cops as immigration agents and denies social services to undocumented immigrants. A similar resolution was passed the following week in neighboring Loudon County, and other Virginia counties are also considering anti-immigrant measures. Culpeper County passed a resolution August 8 affirming English as the official language for county government business.

Thousands of workers voted at meetings in late July in the towns of Manassas, Woodbridge, and Dumfries to carry out an economic boycott of businesses in the county not owned by Latinos or other immigrants.

They approved plans for a march and rally in Woodbridge on September 2 and a one-day county-wide work stoppage October 9. Caravans of workers from Prince William County are projected to visit surrounding areas in the coming weeks to build these actions more broadly. For more information, contact Mexicanos sin Fronteras at (703) 369-7427.
 
 
Related articles:
L.A. march: ‘No to raids, deportations!’
Day laborers in Virginia fight for right to seek work
At Nebraska meeting, meat packers denounce raids
Stop the raids and deportations!  
 
 
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