How Employers and Labor Groups Are Trying to Protect Workers From ICE

This story is part of ICE vs. LA, a collaborative reporting project by LA Public Press, CALÓ News, Capital & Main, Capital B, LA Taco and Q Voice.

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A lot of undocumented immigrants — and their employers — remember when the siege began.Federal immigration agents equipped with tactical gear and rifles descended on downtown Los Angeles in armored trucks on June 6, arresting dozens of workers at an apparel factory. Within hours, another group of agents raided a Home Depot a few miles away, arresting day laborers who were looking for work. 

Those operations quickly became a flashpoint, sparking spontaneous large-scale street protests. But President Donald Trump’s administration doubled down, and more high-profile raids followed as the White House sought to make good on the president’s promise to conduct the largest mass deportation program in the nation’s history. 

Immigration agents have since conducted sweeps at construction sites, restaurants, factories, car washes and farms, upending life for undocumented workers nationwide. California estimates that nearly 1.5 million undocumented workers call the state home.

As militarized crackdowns have become more common in many parts of the country, employers and unions alike have taken new steps to protect their workers. In industries ranging from farmwork to garment production to food service, they have begun organizing defenses to make it harder for ICE to identify, detain and deport unauthorized immigrant employees who help keep their workplaces in business. 

While the strategies vary, they share common goals: to find ways to inform immigrant workers about threats and, when possible, to shield them from detainment and deportation. 

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Adopt a Corner

On Aug. 6, day laborers gathered in front of the same Home Depot in Los Angeles that had been raided two months earlier. Tensions were still high in the city with ongoing ICE and Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) actions, but the workers needed some income. 

Suddenly, the back door of a Penske rental truck slid open from the inside to reveal nearly a dozen CBP agents in body armor lying in wait. They surged toward unsuspecting laborers, many of whom scattered in fear. 
The raid, dubbed “Operation Trojan Horse” by the Department of Homeland Security and captured on camera by a Fox News reporter embedded with the agents inside the truck, resulted in the arrests of more than a dozen undocumented immigrants.

Similar raids earlier in the year inspired the National Day Laborer Organizing Network, a labor group that advocates for improved working conditions, to create the “Adopt a Corner” campaign. 

Jose Madera, the director of the NDLON-affiliated Pasadena Community Job Center, said that the campaign encourages volunteers to go to places where immigrants regularly gather in search of work, to teach people about their rights. So far, volunteers have visited more than 100 locations across the country, Madera said.

The group’s volunteers hand out “Know Your Rights” materials like red cards, which are pocket-sized cutouts that explain what anyone — regardless of immigration status — can do when confronted by an immigration officer. But since ICE officers frequently violate immigrants’ rights, Madera alleged, people who adopt a corner can help workers in a more immediate way. 

The Pasadena Community Job Center also tells people in the community to record actions by authorities on cell phones so that when there is a raid, “there can be someone documenting the abuse, the violence, people’s constitutional rights being violated,” Madera said.

Organizers hope that documentation can serve both as evidence in lawsuits or in immigration courts, and as proof to show the public how the Trump administration is conducting immigration enforcement operations.

“Many Americans do not want to see this type of violence — masked men in unmarked cars, armed to the teeth, going into communities and causing this terror,” he said. 

The Department of Homeland Security did not respond to Capital & Main’s requests for comment. 

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In the Fields

Federal agents staged massive immigration raids on a pair of California cannabis farms in the cities of Carpinteria and Camarillo on July 10, blocking roads with armored vehicles, launching tear gas and firing crowd control munitions at protesters. 

Amid the chaos, Jaime Alanis Garcia — who had worked at Glass House Farms for a decade — was fleeing from immigration officers when he fell 30 feet from the roof of a greenhouse, fracturing his neck and skull, according to NBC. Two days later, he died. 

At those raids, federal agents arrested 361 people including American citizen and U.S. Army veteran George Retes. 

More than a quarter of the state’s large agricultural workforce is undocumented — and nearly two-thirds are immigrants, more generally — leaving hundreds of thousands of laborers vulnerable to immigration crackdowns at work. 

Since even before the Glass House Farms raids, the United Farm Workers union has been reaching out to employers to suggest ways to protect their employees. 

Elizabeth Strater, vice president of UFW, told Capital & Main that one of the simplest things farmers can do is put up gates and fences to keep intruders out. For large fields that are too difficult or costly to encircle, Strater recommends a more impromptu tactic that, ironically, is sometimes used by law enforcement. 

“If you’re out in flat, open fields where you can’t put a gate, what you can do is have the foreman, or whoever, park their vehicle so that it prevents access (by) someone who may not have your workers’ best interest at heart,” Strater said. 

Such physical barriers are critical, Strater said, because while undocumented workers are legally protected by constitutional and statutory rights, federal agents have repeatedly been recorded ignoring basic protections.

Undocumented workers “have a right not to answer questions, but what happens when they assert that right is these absolutely unhinged, untrained, uncontrolled agents smash their windows and drag them out of their cars,” Strater said. “The utter lawlessness on behalf of these agencies is just extreme.”

Beyond providing employers with resources, UFW has taken legal action against the DHS, which Strater said has helped reduce the number of indiscriminate raids on farmworkers in certain areas of California. 

Still, federal agencies can obtain criminal warrants to go after workers at specific sites, according to Strater.  

Not all farm owners are taking action in response to workplace raids, but Strater said that most, including nonunionized operations, have been receptive to UFW’s recommendations. Some have even hosted community meetings to develop plans that could lessen the impact of immigration enforcement on workers and, by extension, the businesses that employ them, some of which have been hit by labor shortages triggered by the raids. 

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The Factory Floor

Many clothing manufacturing businesses in Los Angeles have also been open to outreach aimed at protecting employees, according to Daisy Gonzalez, campaign director at the Garment Worker Center. 

“It’s a new sort of reaction to us … Garment Worker Center is a workers’ rights organization, and often employers are not that receptive to that,” Gonzalez said. “But I think information about what to do in this moment, employers understand it’s a resource for both their workers and themselves.” 

Since the high-profile raids in June, many of the Garment Worker Center’s members have been worried about being detained on the job. Some have opted to stay home from work — for months. 

In response, Gonzalez said, the Garment Worker Center has significantly ramped up its mutual aid programs, providing financial assistance to affected employees and even delivering resources to home-bound workers. 

One middle-aged undocumented worker in Los Angeles, who spoke to Capital & Main on the condition of anonymity for fear that immigration officials would detain him, said the garment factory where he was working closed permanently after immigration raids began. If it were not for the Garment Worker Center’s financial support, he added, he would not have been able to pay for food or rent. 

“The raids have deeply affected me, both psychologically and economically,” he said in an interview in Spanish. “There’s panic in the streets. I try to leave the house as infrequently as I can. I speak for myself, but there are thousands of people just like me, many in worse situations…this is a national emergency.”

Undocumented immigrants aren’t the only ones potentially impacted by raids. 

In September, the U.S. Supreme Court concluded that DHS officers could detain people without reasonable suspicion, despite Fourth Amendment protections against “unreasonable searches and seizures.” The decision allows agents to stop anyone they deem questionable based on race, ethnicity, spoken language abilities, presence at locations like car washes or occupation. 

The result is that many immigrants with residency, U.S. citizens and their American-born children can get caught up in aggressive raids. To Gonzalez, “Anyone who has a darker skin tone, or speaks a different language, or works in an industry that might be where certain people expect undocumented immigrants to work, are all targets.”

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Serve and Protect

On a busy street in L.A.’s Los Feliz neighborhood, customers line up to order tacos and burritos outside of a small hut. Yuca’s is a modest operation with no inside seating, but it has been in business for nearly half a century, becoming a staple of the city’s Mexican-food scene and even winning a prestigious James Beard Foundation Award. 

Dora Herrera, the restaurant’s co-owner, delights in being able to serve her local community, but since the Trump administration’s ramped-up immigration raids began, she has worried intensely about Yuca’s customers, vendors and workers, whom she considers “family.”

Herrera sought advice from organizations like the Latino Restaurant Association about how to protect her staff, regardless of their immigration status, as she has seen reports of federal agents arresting U.S. citizens, green-card holders and immigrants with work permits. 

She has provided her employees with Know Your Rights materials like red cards and, for the first time since the restaurant opened in 1976, installed signs on the outside of the building declaring it private property. The law requires officers to produce a warrant to gain access to private property.

“We haven’t been around for 50 years for nothing. You learn something, you adapt, and you keep adapting to make it work,” Herrera said. 

Such measures are far from foolproof but, according to Herrera, it is incumbent on people like her to do what they can to keep vulnerable workers as safe as possible. 

“We want to make sure everybody’s taken care of, protected, educated,” Herrera said. “As an employer, I believe you have to do everything, absolutely everything you can, to protect your people, even the smallest thing.”

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