MINNEAPOLIS—The AFL-CIO has again strongly endorsed a path to citizenship for undocumented people. Repeating a stand it took more than 13 years ago, the federation’s convention delegates, meeting in Minneapolis on June 8, also declared, as one Steelworker said, “When we come together to protect immigrants, it needs to happen all over the U.S.”
Discussion on the resolution revolved around two points, one positive and one negative. The positive point was that the AFL-CIO has been campaigning for the full legalization of all the estimated 10 to 11 million undocumented people in the U.S. That would open basic worker rights to them, including the right to organize.
“Economic justice cannot be won without racial and social justice,” said the Rev. Terry Melvin, a CSEA/AFSCME member who is president of the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists. “Decades of civil rights protections are being disabled, disassembled, and dropped by a fool with a pen.” He was referring to President Donald Trump.
“This resolution commits us to dismantling the discriminatory practices and workplace harassment,” he said. “It champions…a path to U.S. citizenship.
“The solution we are calling for crosses race, gender, and identity…. If we don’t work together, we lose together.”
Melvin’s statement wrapped the migrants’ rights issue in the larger theme of the convention’s second day: The close linkage between worker rights and civil rights. AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer Fred Redmond referenced the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King’s famous 1961 AFL-CIO Convention speech on that connection.
King said at that time: “The labor-hater and labor-baiter is virtually always a twin-headed creature spewing anti-Negro epithets from one mouth and anti-labor propaganda from the other mouth.”
“Civil rights and labor rights are deeply intertwined,” said Communications Workers President Claude Cummings. “We strengthen our communities through inclusivity and dignity,” added Steelworkers Vice President Kevin Mapp.
“We strive to see a restored Voting Rights Act,” which the Republican-named U.S. Supreme Court majority emasculated in rulings in 2012 and this year, added Mapp. “But the question is whether we can come up with something greater and better.”
With Latinos the fastest-growing and largest group of people of color in the U.S., and also among the most-exploited, that makes organizing them a top goal.
The discussion of the negative piece of the battle for immigrant rights focused, of course, on the anti-migrant Trump administration’s campaign to eject all undocumented people, large numbers of them Latino, from the U.S.
The resolution reiterated the labor federation’s strong pro-legalization stand and also denounced the proliferation of private prisons for the migrants whom Trump’s ICE agents beat, arrest, and detain—usually in foul conditions—before deportation.
“Communities of color are seeing their rights under attack, and women are seeing their reproductive rights under attack” by Trump, his GOP congressional majority, and the GOP-named majority of the U.S. Supreme Court, added Jeffery Freitas, president of the California Federation of Teachers.
But it’s not just communities of color whose rights are being trampled by the Trump administration, speakers said. Freitas noted “over 600 anti-trans bills have been introduced in 2025” in state legislatures, “by the same forces that fight labor rights.”
Another speaker said a prime mover against worker rights, against Latino rights, against rights for people of color and rights of LGBTQ people was the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a notorious secret cabal linking far-right state lawmakers and governors with corporate-backed right-wing lobbies.
ALEC drafts “model” legislation, which its puppet lawmakers introduce. That includes anti-worker measures, such as yearly union recertification, bans on union protections, weakening the Occupational Health and Safety Administration, and mandating minimum majorities of all bargaining unit members, not just those voting, to usher in the union’s victory in a recognition election.
Two stories symbolized the impact of Trump’s repressive campaign against Latinos, though. One, narrated by Smart-TD President Michael Coleman, was of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Smart-TD apprentice who has lived in the U.S. for more than 20 years, married a U.S. citizen, and fathered three children with her, one of them disabled.
The Laurel, Md., resident was on the way to pick up that child from school when Trump’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents grabbed him. They later let him go, but he was re-arrested on disproven and trumped-up charges that he was an MS-13 Salvadoran gang member engaged in human trafficking and summarily deported and thrown into a notorious Salvadoran prison. His imprisonment became a cause for not just immigrant rights groups but for the labor movement, determined not to forget the fight for one of its union members.
It took a U.S. Supreme Court decision to get Trump’s ICE to let him out, reluctantly, and they kept seeking excuses to rearrest and deport him again. The week before the AFL-CIO convention, he was finally cleared of all charges.
“Justice is powerful because it is meant to be impartial and fair,” Freitas added. “However, we have seen a malicious revision rear its ugly head of racism, sexism, transphobia, and homophobia…. It will take every union to counteract this.”
The other story occurred in Washington state, where Maximo Londonio, a Philippine native, a legal migrant, and a Machinist, was held in a detention center for weeks. ICE arrested him as he got off a plane from Manila at Sea-Tac International Airport.
His wife, Crystal, his union, and the entire Washington state labor movement mounted pressure for his release. He finally was let out, and a video showed a tearful reunion with Crystal and their three children, with IAM members waving flags and cheering in the background.
“I am honored to be here today,” Londonio said as he stood at the convention podium with Crystal. “I was separated from my family, but my wife brought my entire IAM to my side.” He thanked her—and his union.
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