On Tuesday, November 4, nearly a dozen cars surrounded a car wash in the Boston neighborhood of Allston-Brighton where masked agents blocked entrances and prohibited anyone from leaving. They quickly detained nine people working outside during the raid, including six women, while kids inside the car wash watched as their mother was taken away. Workers were not allowed to go inside to retrieve their work permits or identification, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) made no effort to enter the facility to identify anyone they were arresting. These workers were kidnapped and whisked away in one of the largest workplace ICE raids Massachusetts has ever seen.
Boston is the new of major cities, such as Chicago and Los Angeles, targeted by the Trump administration with brutal repression and anti-immigrant crackdowns. Somerville, a small city within the Boston metropolitan area, was the site of the arrest of Rumeysa Ozturk in March, and Boston mayor Michelle Wu was brought to Congress around the same time to testify on its immigration policies. However, the Trump administration started planning a new phase of immigration repression in late August, and ICE arrested over 1,400 people across Massachusetts in September. With the escalation of attacks on different cities and the Supreme Court authorizing the racial profiling of ICE victims, this is sure to continue.
Victims of the car wash kidnapping were taken to an ICE facility in Burlington, MA, where an immigration office building has been turned into an impromptu prison. ICE has denied victims lawyer visits, while failing to provide beds, sinks, or showers to the people they are holding. In addition, only seven of the nine workers kidnapped have been located, and two of the workers say they were denied food and phone calls for over two days.
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These abhorrent attacks on the immigrant community are deliberate. The Allston-Brighton neighborhood of Boston is one of the most diverse neighborhoods in the city, with 30 to 50 percent of the population born outside of the United States. ICE is clearly sowing the seeds of intimidation in the city, and chose to target these workers without having access to any warrants or identification.
Despite Boston being a sanctuary city, ICE has been allowed to operate within its borders and has met little to no resistance from local Democratic officials. Congressional representatives have only offered legal assistance to individual victims, an insufficient response given the scale of the repression.
However, over 100 people attended a vigil for the kidnapped workers, organized by local activists affiliated with LUCE, an immigrant justice network with a defense hotline for ICE sightings. While hotlines are crucial to report sightings and document arrests in real time, it’s crucial that we also begin self-organizing independent of Democrats and failed legal strategies in the face of mounting repression. The local labor movement has a large role to play, shown by Boston SEIU members rallying in solidarity with Los Angeles and in defense of David Huerta.
By uniting the labor and immigrant rights movements, we can begin to build spaces of self-organization for community members to democratically discuss a strategy to resist these attacks. Resistance in LA, Chicago, and Detroit shows that this is not only possible, but imperative.
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