Federal Raids Against Immigrant Workers on the Rise

Fri, Jan 7, 2011
By David Bacon

While the criminalization of undocumented people in Arizona continues to draw headlines, the actual punishment of workers because of their immigration status has become an increasingly bitter fact of life across the country. The number of workplace raids carried out by the Obama administration is staggering. Tens, maybe even hundreds of thousands of workers have been fired for not having papers.

According to public records obtained by Syracuse University, the latest available data from the Justice Department show that criminal immigration enforcement by the two largest investigative agencies within the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has increased to levels comparable to the highest seen during the Bush Administration. Homeland Secretary Janet Napolitano announced that almost 400,000 people were deported last year, the highest number in the country’s history.

But deportations are only part of the story. Much less visible is the other arm of current immigration enforcement policy — the firing of workers. The justification is brutal — if immigrant workers can’t work, and therefore can’t eat, pay rent, or provide for their families, they’ll have no alternative but to leave the country.

In a recent action DHS pressured one of San Francisco’s major building service companies, ABM, into firing hundreds of its own workers. Some 475 janitors have been told that unless they can show legal immigration status, they will lose their jobs in the near future.

ABM has been a union company for decades, and many of the workers have been there for years. “They’ve been working in this industry for 15, 20, some as many as 27 years in the buildings downtown,â€