WASHINGTON — “Bring Kilmar Home,” the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA posted on its Facebook page April 27. “Flight attendant, union apprentice, farmworker. It doesn’t matter where you work. An injury to one is an injury to all.”
They joined a growing number of unions who are backing the fight to bring Kilmar Abrego Garcia, an apprentice sheet metal worker and member of the SMART union, back to the U.S. after the government “mistakenly” deported him to El Salvador March 15.
The AFA has had firsthand experience with injustices like Abrego Garcia is facing. In 2019, Selene Saavedra Roman, a flight attendant and AFA member, was wrongfully detained by immigration authorities for over a month, despite the fact that she was protected by having received Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals status. Her employer, Mesa Airlines, insisted she could legally fly outside the U.S., but when she returned from working a flight to Mexico, she was arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. After a union-led campaign, she won her freedom.
Abrego Garcia is being held in prison in El Salvador. He was flown there without being given the right to a hearing, even though he was protected by a court order barring him from being deported. The AFL-CIO, SMART, UNITE HERE and International Union of Painters and Allied Trades issued a May Day statement demanding his release.
The Trump administration says it’s powerless to do anything, even after the U.S. Supreme Court ordered the White House to “facilitate” his return. The next hearing in the case, scheduled for May 16, will discuss the government’s claim that state secrets privileges allows officials to refuse to answer an order by Judge Paula Xinis to report regularly on what they are doing to meet the Supreme Court’s ruling.
Defense of the rights of immigrant workers, including the need for an amnesty for all workers without papers in the U.S., is crucial for uniting the working class. This is a topic of discussion on the job. A co-worker of this correspondent told me his cousin has been in prison in El Salvador for almost a month. “He has a clean record, 100%. No charges have been filed against him. But no one can see him. The family is paying $250 a month for his food, and hired a lawyer for $4,000 to see if anything can be done, but he has no rights,” the worker said.
Due process rights, the U.S. Constitution says, is for everyone in the country, regardless of their legal status. Abrego Garcia was supposed to have been given written notice that he had a right to challenge the deportation order in court, and given enough time to organize to do so.
In 1993, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia wrote in Reno v. Flores that the Fifth Amendment grants immigrants “due process of law in deportation proceedings.” The Supreme Court reaffirmed this in its ruling that the government bring Abrego Garcia back.
The U.S. capitalist rulers’ immigration policy is bipartisan. They vary the rate of migration to meet the needs of the bosses and to create a special, second-class part of the working class to better exploit all workers.
As newly arrived immigrants join the labor force they become part of the working class here and its struggles. Fighting side by side, native- and foreign-born workers develop confidence in themselves and strengthen class consciousness.
While many workers defend Abrego Garcia, others don’t. The current administration has waged a relentless campaign of slander against him and insists immigrant workers are to blame for low wages and bad working conditions. A new tape of a 2022 Tennessee traffic stop that resulted in a ticket for driving with an expired license is presented as proof that Abrego Garcia is a “human trafficker.” Tapes of a domestic squabble, an invasion of his privacy and that of his wife, are used to bolster an image of him as a “wife-beater.”
Abrego Garcia was first picked up in 2019 in a Home Depot parking lot where he was looking for work, which the immigration police claimed was a gang hangout. The main justification for the charge that workers like Abrego Garcia are gang members is their tattoos and the hoodies they wear. It has been proven that the pictures of his tattoos circulated by the government have been doctored.
“Defending and extending the freedoms protected by the US Constitution is at the center of the class struggle today. Workers and farmers must organize and act to prevent the federal government’s assault on these freedoms, which we have won in class battles over some two and a half centuries.” This is the first sentence in The Low Point of Labor Resistance Is Behind Us: The Socialist Workers Party Looks Forward by SWP leaders Jack Barnes, Mary-Alice Waters and Steve Clark. Working-class solidarity with Abrego Garcia and other immigrant workers under attack today is an important part of that defense.
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Release farmworker union leader ‘Lelo’ Juarez from prison
Godinez told the press, “When he gets out, he wants to continue doing his work in the community and with the union.”
At a May 8 bond hearing, Immigration Court Judge Teresa Scala ruled that she didn’t have jurisdiction to grant a $5,000 bond request, later telling the press that if she did, she would have granted it and released Juarez. The attorney for the Department of Homeland Security argued that Scala did have jurisdiction, and that bond should be denied.
Judges at the center, one of the largest in the U.S., deny bond requests at the highest rate in the country. They approved just 3% in 2023. Juarez has joined a federal class action lawsuit over the issue, seeking a ruling that Tacoma Immigration Court judges can grant bond. Hundreds of immigrant workers here are forced to defend their rights while locked up, or give up altogether and “self-deport.”
Some 60 people marched outside the facility after the hearing, shouting “Free Lelo!” and “Sí, se puede” (yes, we can). A farmworker from the age of 12, Juarez began speaking up for immigrants and farmworkers as a teenager.
“We’ve known him since he was 14 years old. He believes in farmworkers’ right to bargain,” Rosalinda Guillen, a leader of Community to Community Development, told the rally. “His being in there is a waste of leadership and humanity that our community needs so bad.”
Union members from United Food and Commercial Workers Local 3000; International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers; Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers union; International Longshore and Warehouse Union; Ironworkers; and Sheet Metal, Air, Rail and Transportation union; and other groups joined the rally.
“It’s important to show solidarity for all workers, to stand up against any disruption of workers’ ability to live in dignity free from violence and oppression,” Sol, a restaurant worker from Blaine, told this Militant correspondent. She said she didn’t want her last name used due to a struggle at work. “When I heard about a union leader being detained and subject to deportation, I wanted to show up to say that’s not OK.”
Lady Hernandez came in a carload from Skagit Valley. “My family is from there and that’s where Lelo was detained. I came because I want to make Skagit a safe space for immigrant workers,” she said.