This week, SEIU launched a major six-figure ad campaign to demand the release of a Turkish national, Tufts University Ph.D. student Rumeysa Ozturk, a member of SEIU 509, who had been involved in Palestinian protests
Such a large ad buy by a union to protest the detention by ICE of one union member is unprecedented. Not only did SEIU buy the ads, but they organized 18 protests nationwide demanding her release.
“Where I grew up, we never ever leave family behind, do we?” SEIU President Verrett said at one rally. “We are going to make sure she feels this energy, she feels this love all the way to where she is in Louisiana.”
(See a map of the rallies here)
As immigrants are illegally deported and detained, more and more unions are stepping up to protest these detentions.
The UAW denounced the illegal detention of Columbia University graduate employee Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian rights activist with permanent resident status in the country. Leaders of the independent farmworkers union Familias Unidas Por La Justicia, demanded the release of farmworkers organizer Alfredo “Lelo” Juarez in Skagit County, Washington.
However, it’s just not graduate employee and farmworker organizing unions demanding the release of immigrant members. Construction unions like SMART are getting engaged too.
This week, The Atlantic broke the story that the Trump Administration had illegally deported an immigrant from El Salvador, Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia. In 2019, a federal judge had granted him protected status, preventing him from being deported.
In a historic first, the Trump Administration admitted that they erred in deporting him. However, the Trump Administration argued that they could not bring him back because he was in administrative custody.
Kilmar’s union, SMART, is now mobilizing its members to demand his release.
“In his pursuit of the life promised by the American dream, Brother Kilmar was literally helping to build this great country. What did he get in return? Arrest and deportation to a nation whose prisons face outcry from human rights organizations. SMART condemns his treatment in the strongest possible terms, and we demand his rightful return.”
Other construction unions leaders just in the call for his release.
“In our movement, brother and sister extend beyond our own union,” tweeted Painters union President Jimmy Williams. “Today, I learned that a fellow union brother from the building trades, a first-year @smartunionworks apprentice, was unjustly taken by ICE and deported to a prison in El Salvador.”
