Casino workers resist Trump's immigration crackdown with union training sessions

ICE arrests have spiked about 40 percent, and the pool of targets considered priorities for deportation has vastly expanded, Bloomberg reported. “If you are in this country illegally,” Acting ICE Director Thomas Homan testified in May, then “you need to be worried.”

Labor groups are at the forefront of the resistance, staging rallies and walkouts against Trump’s travel ban and lobbying for such bills as a California measure restricting law enforcement from collaborating with ICE and a proposed Orlando ordinance limiting immigrant detention. In May the national AFL-CIO offered its affiliates a 200-page toolkit explaining how to train workers to respond to immigration raids.

Unions also are trying to use collective bargaining to tie companies’ hands.

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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, Bloomberg reported

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“We know the companies that we have relationships with are going to comply with the law,” D. Taylor, the union’s international president said. “We just don’t want them to do anything that makes it easier for ICE to come in and just take people away.” Union leaders say that along with safeguarding individual rights, the protections help employees organize without immigration being used as a pretext to punish them.

Earlier this month, Unite Here! leaders also raised their voices against Trump's decision to terminate the Deferred Childhood Arrivals Act (DACA). Following is the statement:

"Donald Trump’s announcement that Deferred Childhood Arrivals Act (DACA) will be terminated in six months barring congressional intervention is an astounding act of political cowardice, and a missed opportunity to make a significant step towards comprehensive immigration reform. Donald Trump has passed the buck to Congress on what even he has acknowledged is a humanitarian crisis, because of his lack of political courage. Donald Trump, by failing to perform as a leader, has placed the fates of the 800,000 law abiding, tax-paying immigrant workers with DACA status in the hands of a dysfunctional Congress.

Because of Trump’s refusal to show political courage, it is now incumbent upon the American Congress to take immediate action to save DACA. The American hospitality industry relies heavily on DACA and Temporary Protective Status (TPS) workers to run, and the termination of DACA will have serious negative consequences for the tourism industry because of this. Under DACA, 800,000 immigrants have received work authorizations, including many hospitality workers and their families. Through this program, young people have been able to fulfill their dreams to live, work, study, and contribute legally to America without fear of deportation. Elimination of legal worker status will not result in immigrants self-deporting. It will result in preventing hospitality industry workers from working lawfully and force them into the underground economy of undocumented workers exploited by bad businesses.

Because of Donald Trump, 800,000 legal workers are now facing loss of their ability to work legally, and face deportation and loss of their families. It is imperative that the Congress act immediately to protect the 800,000 DACA workers whose fate is now in their hands. It is now up to Congress whether these nearly one million immigrants, who contribute to the American economy, live productive and meaningful lives, and attain education and employment at higher levels than natural born Americans, lose their most basic rights to live in a country they were brought to as children. UNITE HERE resoundingly condemns the termination of DACA, as well as Trump’s lack of political courage, and will take to the streets, lobby our congressional members in UNITE-HERE dense districts across the country, and activate and mobilize our 270,000 workers in every state in the nation to advocate tirelessly to Congress to save DACA."