Unions are stepping up dramatically in the fight against Donald Trump’s bigoted, brutal immigration policies. Unite Here, the hotel workers’ union, is training workers to face down immigration raids and using contract negotiations to protect workers from ICE:

Hotel workers in cities such as Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York have been gathering for training sessions recently on how to handle visits from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The sessions, organized by the labor union Unite Here!, teach workers how to effectively stonewall ICE agents, emphasizing employees’ right to refuse to answer questions or show identification. [...] Unions also are trying to use collective bargaining to tie companies’ hands. Unite Here says curbing collaboration with ICE will be a priority in bargaining for the 270,000 hotel, casino, and food-service workers it represents, almost half of whose contracts expire within the next year.

In New York, after the deportation of one of their workers—a deportation they fought hard—a Teamsters regional council declared itself a sanctuary union. The regional council’s president, George Miranda, told Sarah Jaffe that:

Immigrants’’ rights and labor rights are explicitly tied together. You can’t have one without the other. If you lose on one issue, whether it is immigrants or labor, you lose the other. It is obvious that we are tied together, and there is no way that we could say that we are not a union of immigrants. It seems to us that we need to protect our members. We are all immigrants, but we need to protect our members now more than ever, since this administration has taken the position that they have taken on immigrants. So we have decided to be a sanctuary union, meaning that we protect our members. They are working, they are earning their living, they are supporting their families, and they are not doing anything that is criminal or whatever. We are not going to cooperate with the immigration service whatsoever in going after our members. We are going to indoctrinate our members and help them with attorneys and whatever other expertise they need in order to protect them and their families and, hopefully, get them out of the mess that they may find themselves in. That is what sanctuary unions mean. We are going to indoctrinate all of our members, all our stewards, as to exactly what that means.

Miranda’s union will also be using contract negotiations to try to establish workplace protections for immigrant workers.