CHICAGO—With millions of migrant workers caught between corporate exploitation and GOP Trump regime deportations, activists gathered last night at the first-ever Chicago Labor Forum to brainstorm ideas for the entire working class to come to their aid and protection.
And if there was one theme that ran through the hour-long session at the Unity Center on Chicago’s South Side, it was that given that the Trump tyranny is thinking “outside the box” in rounding up anyone and everyone with brown skin—including kidnapping kids from schools, invading hospitals and dragging drivers from cars—defenders must “think outside the box” for new tactics, too.
Trump’s tactics aren’t new, but they are intensified, one of the two guest speakers, Chicago Federation of Labor Secretary-Treasurer Don Villar, himself from a migrant family, told the group on February 18.
“We saw this played out in 2017” with “the drama of a 10-year-old kid coming out of school and finding there’s no one there to pick him up” because Trump’s federal agents during the convicted felon’s first term in the White House had arrested and deported the kid’s parents.
For that kid, “it was having your world turned upside down,” and now the situation has gotten even worse with Trump’s return to the presidency and with his “enforcer” making migrants in Chicago their #1 national target, due to the Windy City’s “sanctuary city” status and active resistance.
Among the new ideas floated, and in some cases, implemented, and discussed at the session:
Mass education of the migrants. The Chicago Federation of Labor pioneered that with “know your rights” cards for migrants, telling them the law protects them from federal agents without a warrant, from being split from other workers, from being denied a lawyer and it mandates they can demand immigration hearings.
Trump “wants to scare us and push us back,” declared the other guest speaker, veteran journalist, labor book writer, and filmmaker David Bacon, a sector chair of the Northern California Media Workers Guild.
Training began in January
CFL’s training of migrants, and other unionists, began on January 3, even before Trump took over the White House. The CFL’s know-your-right cards, since adopted by other local federations and labor councils, are in English, Spanish, Vietnamese, Polish, Tagalog, and Creole.
Organize, organize, organize. Migrants seeking protection are increasingly turning to unions for aid, support, and structure against the Trump-named raiders. That’s particularly true for another group of workers, most of them non-migrants: Federal workers.
The federal government is an “open shop” and Trump and his minions have been firing workers in droves. Remaining workers are now ringing the phones off the hook at federal worker unions. Though nobody mentioned it, the main union, the Government Employees, had 300,000 members at the start of 2025, and set a goal of 325,000 net by the end of this year, after retirements and recruitment. It’s already passed that figure.
Get out in the streets and put on bottom-up pressure to change immigration laws, making it easier to help people without documents attain them or adjust their status.
Bacon pointed out that the civil rights revolution of the 1960s produced an end to both discriminatory white nationalist immigration “quotas,” which existed since 1924, and the hated “bracero” system which began two decades later to provide imported Spanish-speaking farm workers. That legalized corporate exploitation lasted through 1964.
But when those workers began to organize for themselves, their leaders—and often their native allies, too—were detained and deported, just as alleged Communists were deported at the same time, during the Joe McCarthy era of the 1950s. Deportations reached a high of a million a year in the Eisenhower administration in 1954, at the same time growers imported 450,000 braceros yearly to work the nation’s farms.
“Trump is trying to bring us back to the Cold War and McCarthyism,” with migrants and labor leaders, rather than Reds and labor leaders, as targets, Bacon said.
Trump’s hatred of migrants was reinforced even as the Chicago session concluded. The White House gleefully posted on social media a video of migrants, in chains, forced onto a jetliner at Boeing Field outside Seattle. Destination not reported, but some migrants have wound up behind barbed wire and living in tents at the leading relic of U.S imperialism in Cuba, the Guantanamo Bay Naval Station.
“They tried for years to deport” legendary and radical International Longshore and Warehouse Leader Harry Bridges, plus “the New Mexico Empire zinc mine movie Salt of the Earth actress Rosaura Revueltas, and [organizer] Claudia Jones of New York,” said Bacon. “That’s what Trump has in mind, now.”
Campaign in the streets to modernize migration law. The 1965 immigration reform and its 1986 successor, which further reformed migration, had one big loophole, Bacon said. It legalized the undocumented people already in the U.S. at that time, but made employment of future undocumented people illegal.
Those undocumented people are the ones Trump hates and rounds up. They’re also the most exploited since employers seeking to maximize profits pay them starvation wages, often house them in hovels, and threaten them with deportation should they speak up or go to the authorities. The flaw must end, Bacon said. Marching and pressuring for legalization should be a top goal.
He gave an example of how public political pressure worked. The “Dreamers” had been getting nowhere with their demand for “green cards,” work permits to let them get Social Security numbers, and driver’s licenses and live and work openly in the U.S. Democratic President Barack Obama, who had promised such reforms in his 2008 campaign, was stalling.
The Dreamers staged a sit-in at Obama’s 2012 Chicago campaign office. The publicity highly embarrassed Obama, a Chicago resident in a tough re-election drive. Bacon said the sit-in won them the right to stay—and work, go to school and even join the military—in the U.S.
May have to do it again
Though he did not say so, the Dreamers may have to do so again. Trump has vacillated back and forth about letting the Dreamers stay in the country. He plans to arrest, detain, and deport all other migrants, including asylum seekers and people fleeing wars, gangs, and natural catastrophes. Left unsaid: All those migrants, like the Dreamers, are people of color.
As one participant in the session put it, if Trump can succeed in deporting migrants, what’s to stop him from deporting anyone he hates: LGBTQ people, union leaders, civil rights warriors, workers, members of U.S. Labor Against War, and unionists who banded together to demand a ceasefire in the Middle East, for example.
Seek corporate partners, who will be stuck without a labor force if Trump deports all the migrants. Agriculture leads the list, said Bacon: One million of all farm workers, he stated, are undocumented migrants. But other industries that would suffer labor shortages include meatpacking, construction, day labor, and health care, especially home care. Migrant advocates can make the case to businesses that they can’t survive without enough workers, paid living wages.
If their workers are deported, Bacon said, “There would be massive dislocation…Make it clear to employers that we’ll stop production if there are those raids.” And if those migrant workers were all paid the median U.S. wage of $66,000 each—more than twice their median now—it would boost their income by $250 billion.
- Use the power of the ballot box and the threat of voter retribution. “We think of voting as a privilege. We need to think of it as a weapon for working people,” Bacon said.
- Reach and work with advocacy groups, such as workers’ centers and pro-migrant organizations. Bacon stressed there are more potential allies out there than the migrants realize: Women’s rights groups, LGBTQ rights groups, groups representing people of color, minority religious groups, civic groups, environmentalists, and unions.
There are two catches to that plan, though, as some participants at the session pointed out. One is the tendency of the separate groups to retreat into their own “silos,” concentrating on their own issues alone, once a mass campaign is over—and despite foreseeable backlashes.
The other, as one participant from Service Employees Local 73 put it, is that too many union members view their union strictly as a service organization where they pay their dues and let the staff do all the work. That’s not good for a mass movement.
The Chicago Federation of Labor’s Secretary-Treasurer Villar had one final warning for the workers at the session: Be prepared in case they lose what little legal protection exists from the boss-tangled and Republican-weakened National Labor Relations Act.
That New Deal-era law, though shot full of holes, still stands. Three top anti-union oligarchs and their companies are challenging it: Trump puppeteer Elon Musk, head of Tesla, SpaceX, and Twitter/X, Amazon anti-union hater Jeff Bezos and Starbucks founder and former CEO Howard Schultz.
The corporate honchos and their companies declare the NLRA—and the National Labor Relations Board—unconstitutional. It’s before Trump-named judges in deep-red Texas and Louisiana. It could eventually hit the Supreme Court and its right-wing majority, including three Trumpites. Another of the rightist bloc, Samuel Alito, is the leading labor hater among the jurists. The majority could well side with the oligarchs.
“It’ll be like when they overturned Roe v Wade,” stripping women of the federal constitutional right to an abortion in most circumstances, said Villar. “Then we’re back to the law of the jungle,” and to “The Memorial Day massacre” when rented cops shot down peaceful worker picnickers, who also had been striking for union recognition, near what was then the phalanx of steel plants on Chicago’s Southeast Side—in 1937.
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