Arrest of union leader highlights link between workers’ and immigrants’ rights

The arrest and apparent injury of a prominent California union leader at an immigration protest has drawn condemnation from across the labor movement.

David Huerta, the president of the Service Employees International Union of California, was detained by federal agents Friday while protesting an immigration raid at a work site in downtown Los Angeles. Video of the incident shows Huerta being knocked down and lying with his head on the curb. He was hospitalized and released Friday, the union said in a statement, but remained in custody.

Federal officials said Huerta had been deliberately blocking a law enforcement vehicle and had been arrested for interfering with federal officers. He is expected to be arraigned in federal court Monday.

“I don’t care who you are — if you impede federal agents, you will be arrested and prosecuted,” Bill Essayli, U.S. attorney for the Los Angeles region, wrote in a social media post Friday. “No one has the right to assault, obstruct, or interfere with federal authorities carrying out their duties.”

The union, however, said Huerta was arrested while acting as a peaceful “community observer” at the raids. Union leaders across the country released statements demanding his release, as did prominent Democratic elected officials including Gov. Gavin Newsom of California and U.S. Rep. Hakeem Jeffries of New York, the House minority leader.

“He was doing what he has always done, and what we do in unions: putting solidarity into practice and defending our fellow workers,” the leaders of the AFL-CIO, the largest federation of U.S. labor unions, said in a statement.

Huerta is a well-known figure in the California labor movement. He began his union career with Justice for Janitors, an effort to organize the largely immigrant workers, many of whom lack permanent legal resident status, who clean offices and other commercial buildings.

“He’s always been at the forefront of really advocating for all types of immigrant workers,” said Lorena Gonzalez, president of the California Labor Federation.

Immigration has long been a divisive issue in the labor movement, including in California. Cesar Chavez, the Mexican American labor leader who helped organize farmworkers in the 1950s and 1960s, campaigned against illegal immigration, believing that it was a source of low-wage labor that undermined workers’ bargaining power.

In recent decades, however, many union leaders, particularly in California, have come to see labor and immigrant rights as intertwined. If the authorities do not enforce minimum wage laws, safety regulations and other protections for immigrants who lack legal status, they argue, that will undermine labor standards for union members as well.

Organized labor’s embrace of immigrants’ rights is also a numbers game: In California and many other parts of the country, immigrants — those who do and do not have permanent legal status — dominate the workforce, especially in the service sector.

“There’s been a real reckoning over the past 25 years with the history of xenophobia in California labor unions,” said Veena Dubal, a law professor at the University of California, Irvine, who studies the labor movement. “If labor wants to grow its strength, if it wants to be powerful, it cannot see itself as just representing the white working class.”

Republicans under President Donald Trump have made inroads with rank-and-file union members in recent elections, even as labor leaders have mostly continued to back Democrats.

But Dubal said Huerta’s arrest — and the recent immigration raids more generally — seemed to be drawing protest in a way that some of the other policies that Trump has enacted early in his term have not. The SEIU planned to hold a rally to demand Huerta’s release on Monday.

“His arrest has ignited even the more conservative elements of the labor movement,” Dubal said. “If they can go after him, the head of the largest labor union in the largest economy in a labor friendly state, who is the government not going to go after?”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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