WORLD WORLDWIDE US USA - news journal UPDATE - (en) US, BRRN: Organizing to Keep ICE Out of Your Workplace by Keith Robertson (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

 This article was written by a member of Black Rose / Rosa Negra (BRRN)

with experience in both workplace organizing and neighborhood based
organizing against ICE. Drawing on this background, the author describes
a series of steps you can start taking today to defend yourself and your
coworkers from ICE. ---- Introduction ---- When ICE comes to your
workplace, it can be over before you know it. Because they know that the
community is opposed to them, ICE has adapted their tactics to be sneaky
and fast. That's why we need to be organized and ready to stand up to
them the second they show up. The solidarity of immediate bystanders can
mean the difference between deportation and freedom, and, as we've seen,
can spark waves of resistance.  So when ICE comes to your workplace, be
organized to stop them.

Blocking Trump's deportation raids is one of the most critical tactics
in this moment. Trump's approach to his first six months in office has
been to "flood the zone" with so many outrageous attacks that his
opposition doesn't know where to focus and respond. At this point,
almost all of us have been affected by one or more of the assaults Trump
has made to advance his vision of autocratic, white-male, billionaire
rule. And of course we are all witness to the crushing genocide in Gaza
and widening Israeli war across the Middle East that Trump is facilitating.

Despite this, opposition was disappointingly frail until neighbors and
coworkers began physically standing up to la migra and disrupting their
deportation operations. This is because these raids are both massively
hated, and are a concrete manifestation of Trump's policy that we can
directly impact. When neighbors confront immigration raids, it is a
direct confrontation with Trump's core policy of mass deportation. Even
though it only involved a few hundred people at first, the confrontation
with ICE and CBP in Los Angeles arguably had a bigger impact than the
hundreds of thousands who marched in the No Kings protests a week later.

Seeing that it is possible to stand up to Trump and defend our neighbors
and coworkers has a massive mobilizing effect on everyone who has been
overwhelmed by the past six months and doesn't know where to start.

Step 1: Start Simple, Talk to Your Coworkers
The most basic thing to prepare to challenge immigration raids at or
near your workplace is to talk to your coworkers. Without this, you
can't do anything! Try starting with simple things, like having lunch
with coworkers who you haven't talked to much before; learning about
each other's families and sharing snacks.

Once you know each other, you will need to create a way for your
coworkers to communicate quickly with each other and mobilize a
response. At its simplest, this could be a groupchat among your
coworkers who share a concern about immigration raids.

Recently, when a Zionist organization showed up outside an Oakland, CA
hospital to harass a worker and union member, hospital workers were able
to utilize the communication networks they had built through workplace
Palestine organizing to quickly respond and shut them down. This is the
kind of value that creating horizontal communication structures in your
workplace has. If you are in a union, it is also valuable to use its
structures to organize your workplace response - like creating a health
and safety committee that responds to the safety issue of federal agents
coming to kidnap workers.

Step 2: Know Your Rights
Second, familiarize yourself with your rights, with ICE tactics (which
are changing all the time), and with local resources. If possible,
attend trainings with local rapid-response networks and become trained
first responders. It's important to connect with groups like rapid
response networks that have been doing this work for years and that are
particularly skilled at dispelling the false rumors that cause so much
panic in our communities. But it's equally important to be aware of
their limitations. One is the limitation that no matter how rapid the
rapid response network, ICE raids will almost always be over by the time
they make it to the scene.

The deeper limitation is that most - but not all - rapid response
networks and mainstream immigrant-rights organizations are nonprofits,
with many receiving their funding from local governments, and their
objective is strictly to observe raids and provide legal resources,
rather than to risk their funding by intervening and taking direct
action to disrupt raids. That's why we should do our best to maintain
our independence, and be clear about our own goals and strategy, while
collaborating where it makes sense.

Step 3: Make a Plan
Now you can make plans! It doesn't usually make sense to overplan,
because it's impossible to predict all the possible scenarios. Really,
the most important thing is talking to your coworkers and connecting
each other together in an organizing structure, more so than the most
perfect plan ever.

But it is very useful to put your rapid response training to use and
develop some protocols around the following:

How you will verify that an immigration raid is indeed happening at your
workplace. The SALUTE/ALERTA method can be useful here. Remember that
there are different agencies doing raids, with Homeland Security
Investigation[HSI]often coming to workplaces, and they often will be in
plainclothes and will straight up lie about who they are and what
they're doing.
How you will protect the most at-risk workers.
How you will secure entrances and exits.
How you will notify community allies.
How you will connect with legal support.
How you will deal with management.
How you will respond to ICE presence that is in the neighborhood but not
at your workplace specifically.
Roleplaying responses to an immigration raid as a group can be a good
way to build confidence and cohesion. Doing things like sitting down in
front of an ICE van are very scary steps to take, but can become easier
when you've practiced ahead of time and know that you have coworkers
beside you who will be with you arm-in-arm. Remember the muscle memory
you developed during monthly fire drills in fifth grade? That's what you
want to replicate.

Thinking Bigger
We always need to keep in mind the difference between mobilization and
organization. Challenging ICE with your coworkers who are pissed off at
federal agents kidnapping kids is mobilizing: getting people who already
agree on an issue to take action together. Working with those coworkers
to go out and get everyone else to join you in marching on your boss to
demand that they stop using e-Verify requires organizing: transforming
individual isolation, apathy, and hopelessness into the power to win change.

What we've seen in past years is cycle after cycle of mass mobilization,
where individuals come into the streets to fight for change, and then
they go back home still as disconnected individuals, without the
relationships and knowledge to create lasting change in their lives. As
revolutionaries, we need to be attuned to when the moment is right for
mobilization, to be there leading our coworkers into the fight, and then
to be creating organizing structures that can hold people together and
give them the tools to lead their own fights over the long term.

With that in mind, as you talk to coworkers and build your communication
structures and workplace defense plans, you can also begin thinking of
what's over the horizon - about structure, campaigns, and bigger goals.
If you're in a nonunion workplace, maybe this is the beginning of your
union organizing committee. Mobilize the informal leaders in your
workplace into raids defense, and then invite them to a workplace
organizing training put on by the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW),
Labor Notes, or Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee (EWOC).

If you're already in a union, maybe this is the beginning of an
independent rank-and-file caucus ready to take direct action against
other workplace issues related to Trump's America - like a transphobic
supervisor who refuses to use your coworker's correct pronouns. Or maybe
this is a way to build out the organizing you're already doing in your
workplace, and you can use this to build momentum to winning contract
protections for undocumented workers.

Whatever your situation, we want to remind every freedom-loving,
border-hating worker out there that when we stand together, we can
defeat ICE, and we can show the whole working class that we have the
power to win.

Keith Robertson is a healthcare worker and member of the San Francisco
Bay Area Local of Black Rose / Rosa Negra. This article was partly based
on the experiences of creating and running the Koreatown Rapid Response
Network during the first Trump administration.

Keith would like to thank fellow members of BRRN for their feedback on
an earlier draft of this article.

https://www.blackrosefed.org/keep-ice-out-workplace-guide/
_________________________________________
A - I N F O S  N E W S  S E R V I C E
By, For, and About Anarchists
Send news reports to A-infos-en mailing list
A-infos-en@ainfos.ca