What The Hell America!

On April 14, federal agents snatched seafood processing worker Juan Francisco Mendez from his vehicle in New Bedford, Massachusetts, breaking the rear window with a sledgehammer while he and his wife were sitting in the car, pleading with the agents to wait for their lawyer and showing them their asylum application paperwork.

“They didn’t wait for the lawyer to arrive here to be with us and broke the window,” said his wife Marilú Méndez, who recorded the incident on her cell phone. “We have the right to be here too. What they did was unfair.”

On the cell-phone video, Juan Francisco Mendez can be seen fidgeting with his fingers, telling the armed agents wearing green bulletproof vests that he can’t speak until his lawyer is present, that she’s on her way, and that he’ll comply. They ask the federal agents if they have a warrant. Husband and wife assure one another the agents won’t break down the window because they’re being recorded. Moments later, the camera shows shards of broken glass on the back seats.

“They are acting with total impunity,” said their lawyer Ondine Gálvez about federal agents in the cell-phone video once she arrived on the scene. The arrest appears to have been random as federal agents were looking for someone else, but as the couple left their home, they saw men parked outside their house, who began to follow in pursuit.

Mendez had no criminal record and was in the process of applying for asylum. He was fingerprinted in December as part of a process to apply for “derivative asylum,” because his wife and nine-year-old son already had been given protection under asylum status over fears of facing persecution in Guatemala.

Fear is the point. The Trump administration, falling short of its goals to deport millions of immigrants regardless of immigration status, has created brazen scenes of kidnapping, deploying tactics meant to incite people to self-deport. In New Bedford, this appears to be working among some workers. The playbook has a long history going back to the 1930s, when an estimated 300,000 to 2 million Mexican workers were forced to leave the country. Since taking office, Donald Trump’s federal agents have arrested and detained 370 people in Massachusetts. Of those arrests, fifteen have occurred in New Bedford.

Among them are José Antonio Garcia Garcia and Miguel Ordoñez Sorocop, who were detained after Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents broke down their apartment door, using a battering ram and wearing military-style fatigues. Teenagers in the room said the agents pointed their guns at the children’s faces while they were eating breakfast before school, reported the New Bedford Light.

Adrian Ventura, director of New Bedford immigrant advocacy group Centro Comunitario de Trabajadores, says that around two dozen workers have been detained by federal agents, among them eleven workers from the local seafood processing plants that have been a site of recent worker organizing. In 2023, workers marched on the bosses at one of their employers, Eastern Fisheries, demanding that management reconsider using the E-Verify system — a system to check employment verification that workers’ advocates say is rife with mistakes and potential for discrimination — to screen current workers for eligibility to work in the United States.

The workers alleged that the threat of reverifying workers’ statuses was retaliation for their exercise of legal rights to organize. The workers had been organizing years earlier against rampant sexual harassment in 2019 and for protective equipment during the pandemic in 2020. Workers formed a committee called Pescando Por Justicia (Fishing for Justice) to keep organizing to improve their jobs.

The industry is replete with violations of workers’ rights and other abuses. Teens aged fourteen and sixteen from Guatemala have been found working twelve-hour days, seven days a week, making $16.50 an hour. It’s grueling work. “Over time, doing it every day, the body can’t take it,” one of the teens told Rhode Island Public Radio in 2023.

The Biden administration issued streamlined guidelines in 2023 to protect immigrant workers from deportation when they have experienced abuse on the job or are participating as witnesses in an investigation of workplace violations. Seven hundred workers in the food processing industry were eligible for work permits and legal status. At the 2024 Labor Notes Conference, more than 4,500 participants learned about their fight as organizers with Fishing for Justice were honored with a “Troublemakers’ Award.”

“After attaining their working papers, they have continued to organize on the shop floor, acting like a union to improve their working conditions and fight back [against] workplace abuses by managers who would threaten them because of their immigration status,” reads the conference program.

Thomas Smith from Justice at Work, a labor advocacy nonprofit, says no one who has applied for deferred action, meaning work permits and a reprieve from deportation, has been targeted based on those applications.

“The main workplace issue is that ‘tips’ have led to ICE visits at work that lead to arrests. No one eligible for deferred action based on their applications, status, or denial dates has been targeted to date,” Smith said.

The Trump administration appears to be targeting dissidents, from students in the country on visas to green card holders to citizens. There’s no concrete link yet established between these attacks and workplace organizing. But Trump knows that organized workers have the power to push back against him, and there’s nothing he wants to snuff out more right now than that potential exertion of collective power to cause massive disruptions — the likes of which we haven’t seen since the mass immigrant strikes in 2006.

“We are in New Bedford, the number-one port of seafood imports and exports worldwide,” said Ventura in Spanish. “Like 2006, we are working to awaken the giant to demonstrate to Trump that we immigrants make the economy run.”