Where once building unions would tip off Ice agents, now some are embracing their increasingly immigrant workforce

As the Trump administration takes its fight against undocumented workers to the workplace, some US unions are stepping in to protect their members and creating a new battlefront between the Republican party and organized labor.

Last May Hugo Mejía Murguía, an undocumented worker from northern California, got a call to report to work. It was a shift that would change his life and launch a national campaign.



When he arrived at the Travis air force base in Fairfield, California, military police called Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) after seeing his California driver’s license indicated his undocumented status. Ice also detained a second worker, Rodrigo Núñez.



“My life just changed in only five or 10 minutes. I felt like I lost everything,” the father of three told the Guardian.

Two weeks later when his wife came to visit him in an immigration detention center, much to his amazement, he learned that his union, the Painters Union Local 82, was hiring a lawyer to represent him.



“I just thought that I was a member of the union for work and so I could get insurance for my kids. I never thought that my union would help me in a case like this. It was amazing,” said Mejía Murguía.



Under the banner #FreeHugo, his union went all out on his behalf, holding rallies around the country to stop his deportation.



The pressure was intense. “A couple times I tried to quit. It was just so hard to stay far from my family. It was hard when they came to visit me because of the glass when I saw them crying and I couldn’t touch them,” he said. “When they gave me letters and this support, that got me excited and I didn’t feel so alone about my case.”



Finally, on 22 November, after 204 days in detention, he was released as a result of his union’s activism in public and in court, winning a stay on political asylum grounds.



Rodrigo Núñez was less fortunate and was deported back to Mexico.

'The struggle has no borders': immigrant workers battle union busting tactics Read more

Their different fates highlight a split in the union movement and its attitude to undocumented workers who are increasingly running into difficulties under the Trump administration.

Núñez’s union, the United Brotherhood of Carpenters, did not defend him. While the Painters Union has chosen to embrace their increasingly immigrant workforce over the last few decades, the UBC has a much more strained relationship with immigrants.

In March 2017, Bill Bing, a representative for the Northeast Regional Carpenters Council representative, even admitted in the Buffalo News that the union routinely called Ice to report undocumented workers on construction sites in upstate New York.



“There are very good local union and nonunion contractors who suffer the fallout from dirty business,” Bing told the Buffalo News.



The leadership of North America’s Building Trades Unions has traditionally been one of the whitest sectors of the labor movement. Civil rights groups have repeatedly sued construction unions to admit African Americans, and for decades, unions like the Carpenters would call immigration authorities to deport undocumented workers.



However, over the last two decades as construction unions sought to organize larger numbers of undocumented workers, the attitude of labor has changed. Now, in the era of Trump, many labor leaders see an opportunity to accelerate those changes.



“Has the Trump era accelerated our efforts? Absolutely,” said the Painters Union president, Ken Rigmaiden. “There are too many reasons to mention but one, in particular, is forcing 11 million immigrants back into the dark side of the construction economy, where wage theft and intimidation thrive.”



Since being elected in 2013 as the union’s first African American president, Rigmaiden has led efforts to get construction unions to embrace immigrant labor.

In July 2017, Rigmaiden hired 30-year-old Neidi Dominguez, who immigrated to the US from Mexico when she was nine and lived here undocumented until she was 25, as the Painters Union’s national strategic campaign coordinator.



As the first Latina woman to head a major department at the Painters Union, Dominguez has led efforts not only to make her union more vocal and active on immigration, but to push other unions to be more proactive. Labor leaders like Dominguez say that since the majority of new members in the construction workforce are Latinos, building trades unions must do more to embrace immigrant workers if they are going to survive.

“In the building trades for too long, it’s been almost nothing but a bunch of white guys. It’s changing but not quick enough,” said Dominguez.

Under Dominguez’s leadership, the union helped to launch the Working Families United coalition, that has helped lead labor’s effort to protect workers facing threats of deportation while pushing unions to be more inclusive of immigrants.

Because of Trump administration policy shifts regarding undocumented workers, the Painters Union is one of many that has become a sanctuary union and developed programs to defend their membership against the threat of deportation.

Not only have the unions become more engaged in assisting their immigrant members facing deportation within their union, but externally their politics have also begun to shift.



During the 2013 immigration debates, the AFL-CIO officially embraced the use of E-Verify system to check documentation of workers on construction. Some unions still embrace E-Verify, but many labor leaders have noticed a shift.



One factor that has helped promote the leftward shift of the building trades has been the emergence of Latino labor leaders within their unions. One of the most prominent of those is Randy Bryce, a half Mexican, half Polish ironworker from Racine, Wisconsin, known as the “Iron Stache” for his distinctive facial hair, who has become a social media hit with his grassroots campaign against the House speaker, Paul Ryan.



Despite living in a district in south-eastern Wisconsin that is only 5% Latino, Bryce has made immigration reform a central issue of his campaign; getting arrested recently during a protest against Ryan’s refusal to pass the Dream Act to protect undocumented children raised in the US.



“People are getting the message,” said Bryce. “I tell people everybody is trying to gain access to the American dream. It’s getting harder and harder to find, but it’s not other people risking their lives trying to come over here to find it. It’s not their fault, it’s the boss trying to keep their foot on all of our necks.”

