“We see these issues of protecting immigrants and protecting workers’ rights as totally connected,” said one Labor Day event attendee in New Mexico
Immigrant rights and the critical role that immigrant workers play in our economy were at the top of mind for many attendees at Labor Day events throughout the nation this past weekend. In New Mexico, rallygoers said that the right to defend immigrant rights is the fight to defend labor rights.
Indivisible Santa Fe member Gary Kowalski said that “the threat of ICE raids and other immigration enforcement activity has historically been used as a damper for labor organizing — employers can threaten to call authorities as a way to keep undocumented workers from advocating for fairer treatment,” the Santa Fe New Mexican reported. Participants distributed vital Know Your Rights information to local businesses, noting which establishments accepted the materials that could help protect their workers from unlawful searches and arrests by masked mass deportation agents – and which ones didn’t.
“We see these issues of protecting immigrants and protecting workers’ rights as totally connected,” Kowalski told the outlet, “and we’re trying to give citizens a chance to help build a stronger, safer community.” And he’s right: when abusive and exploitative employers are held accountable, it makes for a better workplace for all workers.
At the #WorkersOverBillionaires protest in Farmington NM Monday evening
— Joel in NW New Mexico 🌶🔯🕊🌹 (@joel-nm.bsky.social) 2025-09-02T05:23:09.415Z
In Oregon, Melissa Adams echoed similar words of solidarity with essential immigrant workers. “Well, there is no time like the present, and it’s important to stand up for workers’ rights and immigrants’ rights, and it’s all interconnected,” she told Fox 12 Oregon, which noted the outsized role that immigrant workers play in the state’s economy, including in the agricultural and service industries. Adams said that when these essential workers are scared to even go grocery shopping due to unsparing kidnappings, she sees it as critical to do her part.
“People are afraid to go out, some people are afraid to even go to the grocery store, people are being arrested when they are going to court doing the right thing and following the law, and so people are afraid,” she said. “I have some privilege here, so I feel like it’s my duty to use it.”
Our banner drop today was part of the Bridge Banner Challenge where groups from Mexico to Canada place banners on I-5 overpasses to show labor solidarity & protest corporate influence against workers & the environment. #SolidaritySeptember #WorkersOverBillionaires #BridgeBannerChallenge #LaborDay
— Salem Region Indivisible (@salemorindivisible.bsky.social) 2025-08-30T05:52:50.378Z
In Illinois, Labor Day attendees also condemned the administration’s masked kidnappings while fiercely pushing back against invasion threats from the Trump administration, which has threatened to send the kind of federal forces that are currently harassing D.C. neighborhoods to Chicago and other major U.S. cities governed by its perceived enemies. Just today, a federal judge ruled that Trump’s military deployment to Los Angeles in June violated federal law. “The deployment ‘willfully’ violated a more-than century old statute that restricts the use of federal troops to enforce domestic laws, US District Judge Charles Breyer ruled Tuesday,” Bloomberg Law reported.
“I do not want a government takeover, a military takeover of Chicago,” local resident Terry McCaskill told CBS News Chicago. “How do we come back from that? They’ve taken over the capital. We’re the only ones standing in the way of dictatorship.”
CHICAGO IS IN THE STREETS!#LaborDay#DefendHigherEd#WorkersOverBillionaires
Yesterday, UFW President Teresa Romero, AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler, CA AFL-CIO President Lorena Gonzalez and Central Coast Executive Director Jeremy Goldberg joined farm workers at the Central Coast Central Labor Council #LaborDay event held in the heart of Oxnard’s farm worker community.
— United Farm Workers (@ufw.bsky.social) 2025-09-02T00:48:41.021Z
In California, United Farm Workers (UFW) President Teresa Romero stood with workers and labor leaders to say that there is no economy without the skilled labor and immense contributions of immigrant workers. Not all of these workers enjoyed a day off on Monday, UFW noted, inviting viewers to watch a day in the life of some of the farmworkers whose hands feed our nation and help sustain the agricultural industry:
Not all workers get today off! While you enjoy your holiday, many agricultural workers are hard at work planting, harvesting, and packaging the food we eat every day. Today lest honor those workers and thank them for their amazing work. #WeFeedYou #LaborDay
— United Farm Workers (@ufw.bsky.social) 2025-09-02T00:24:44.182Z
But in farmworker hubs like Oxnard, the hands that feed us have been cuffed under Trump and mass deportation architect-in-chief Stephen Miller’s chaotic and frequently lawless agenda. In April, another federal court “issued a preliminary injunction forbidding the Border Patrol from conducting warrantless immigration stops throughout a wide swath of California,” CalMatters reported. The suit stemmed from racially-profiled raids, carried out the day after Trump’s 2024 win was certified by Congress, that targeted anyone perceived to “look” like an immigrant at businesses popular among farmworkers, we noted at the time. Not only were residents harassed for how they looked, local businesses suffered when enforcement actions scared away customers, in a trend we’re continuing to see today.
“They were slashing tires, smashing car windows,” said Bree Bernwanger, senior staff attorney at the ACLU Foundation of Northern California. “They pulled over cars, they grabbed people in parking lots, and there really didn’t seem to have any reason to do it except that people were brown. This was racial profiling at its most basic level.”
And make no mistake, we’re already seeing the entirely predictable harms that stem from the brutal targeting of the workers who help run our country’s economy. Experts Michael Ettlinger, Robert Lynch and Emma Sifre of Economic Insights and Research Consulting noted shifts in key industries that depend heavily on immigrant workers, such as agriculture. They found that employment in this industry plummeted from March to July 2025, reversing two years of growth seen toward the second half of the Biden administration.
They also noted downward shifts in construction. In the ten states with the highest reliance on undocumented workers, employment in construction has dropped. Meanwhile, Miller’s efforts to create undocumented immigrants by attempting to kill programs like TPS will be a blow to the healthcare industry, which has already been experiencing labor shortages and depends on the skills of immigrants to help provide care for patients.
About one in six hospital workers are immigrants, according to research from KFF. Thousands are home health aides, like Haitian TPS holder Gina Policard. She told Documented that she loves her job “because I love taking care of people the same way I do for my family.”
For many across the country, this past Labor Day was an opportunity to express solidarity with essential immigrant workers like Policard and reaffirm that immigration is good for our economy and key to our continued success. Many folks understand this – that’s why creating a pathway to citizenship for these families is such an overwhelmingly popular position. Instead, these essential workers and contributors are being targeted under the chaotic, self-destructive policies of this administration. This not only hurts immigrants who make our nation stronger, but all workers trying to just survive rising daily costs and the creeping infringement of our rights.
As Labor Day attendees said, solidarity among working people regardless of immigration status is critical.
“In times like this, coming together on Labor Day takes extra importance,” Veronica Castro of Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights told CBS News Chicago. “The movement for worker rights, racial justice and immigrant rights has to keep moving forward in the face of Trump’s overreach. While Trump tries to instill fear, our movements will continue to push back as we’ve been doing on Labor Day and beyond.”
