Cristian Farias:
Hi, Cristian here. Welcome to The Bully’s Pulpit, Trump v. The First Amendment.
It’s never a dull moment for freedom of speech and association. And on the same day the president threw himself a military parade in Washington for his birthday, as one does, millions took to the streets across the country for a different purpose, to protest this government and make it clear who holds the real power. And many of those who came out were there to protest ICE, the agency the administration has unleashed in Los Angeles to terrorize immigrants in their communities.
But what’s happening in LA and other cities across the nation goes beyond immigration. ICE is targeting work itself, where people work, where workers congregate to seek work, and the right of immigrant workers to look for work out in the open.
In this week’s episode, we’re going to learn how day laborers in California fought hard for the First Amendment right to be day laborers. That is to stand in a street corner and seek a day’s pay, and to do this without fear the government will harass or criminalize them. The Trump regime is disrupting that reality, which was won after many years of organizing and litigation.
Pablo Alvarado:
The more they dehumanize people, the more they dehumanize themselves. Los Angeles has a long history of organizing and there is an immigrant rights infrastructure. People have mobilized in large numbers, and I believe they chose the wrong place to mess with.
Cristian Farias:
That was Pablo Alvarado, a longtime LA community organizer that I can’t wait for you to hear more from. But before we get to him and another genius guest, let’s go over the First Amendment news rocking our world.
In a bizarre twist, Mahmoud Khalil, the Columbia graduate and permanent resident who was targeted over his pro-Palestinian advocacy on campus is still not free. In a move that stunned me and many others, the judge accepted the government’s shifting rationale for his continued detention, that he misrepresented facts in his immigration application thus justifying keeping him locked up. The saga continues and we’ll stay on top of it.
The Association of American University Professors, AAUP for short, has been really active in the court since Trump took office. They got good news and bad news. The good one, one judge in Boston agreed with them that funding cuts to the National Institutes of Health and other agencies they work with are unlawful. That’s not strictly a First Amendment case, but there’s a big open question in the courts right now about whether these cuts violate the First Amendment.
Can the government target university’s funding because of specific subjects or topics of research? What about the First Amendment right to academic freedom? And on this score, came the bad news. A Trump-appointed judge in New York dismissed a lawsuit by AAUP challenging the unlawful funding cuts to Columbia University. I read the ruling. It was a very rude opinion that took Trump’s actions almost as if they were in good faith, not a retribution campaign against a school that Trump wants to punish for not falling in line.
Keep an eye out for these cases which are being appealed, as well as a third one brought by Knight Institute against the State Department over its policy to detain and deport students over the pro-Palestinian advocacy. That one is going to trial in a couple of weeks.
Meanwhile, in Los Angeles, where people have been protesting the assault in immigrant communities, California challenged the president’s deployment of the National Guard. An appeals court seemed inclined to let him keep doing that. And yes, two of the judges on the panel were appointed by Trump during his first term. Another judge last week declared the deployment illegal, but his order has been on pause while the appeal plays out.
Naturally, such brazen display of military power when we’re not at war or being invaded by a foreign adversary is wrong and unlawful, and it chills people’s right to peaceably protest.
Speaking of that, two organizations representing journalists, including the [inaudible 00:04:23] Los Angeles Press Club, sued both the City of Los Angeles and the chief of the LAPD for violating the First Amendment and other rights of journalists covering the anti-ICE protests in LA. That’s an interesting development, in part because as we learn in today’s show, LA authorities have taken a very strong stance against working with the feds on immigration.
Reuters additionally reported that since ICE started invading work sites and local businesses, immigrant workers have gone into hiding and the local economy is suffering. One person there even said that things are worse today than they were during the COVID pandemic. Los Angeles, thanks to legal protections that have been fought and won over decades, has a strong policy of non-cooperation with ICE. And that’s one reason Trump has sought to make an example of it. It’s all show. It’s all cruelty for cruelty’s sake, and immigrant workers are bearing the brunt of it.
I wrote about that very issue this week in New York Magazine, and we’ll put a link to that piece in the show notes. The reality for immigrant workers in Los Angeles and the city’s long history of labor and immigrant rights advocacy is a good segue to the meat of today’s show. And to set the stage for it, we invited a friend of the Knight Institute to help us think through key issues coming out of LA.
Ahilan Arulanantham is a long-time human rights lawyer and a law professor at UCLA, where he’s the co-faculty director of the Center for Immigration Law and Policy, which keeps him very busy. Before that, he was a litigator for the ACLU of Southern California for many years, a public defender, and a person who, for virtually his entire career, has been challenging the government in court. He was also a MacArthur Fellow, so he’s officially a genius.
He and I actually shared the stage last fall at a Knight Institute symposium, where the two of us and other panelists talked about an issue of people’s minds these days, the First Amendment right of non-citizens to speak.
Ahilan, so great to have you on the show, and this is my first time interviewing a genius, I think. What is it like to be a legal scholar and a litigator in Los Angeles these days with everything going on?
Ahilan Arulanantham:
Well, thanks a lot for having me, Cristian. It’s great to do this with you. It’s hard to be a legal scholar in Los Angeles right now, because people always ask you what the law is, and for so many times, your answer to the question is that the law is being completely disregarded. There’s blatant disregard, it seems, with the Fourth Amendment, with ICE agents operating essentially sweeps and doing lots of detention and interrogation without any suspicion, even though that’s a violation of the Fourth Amendment.
We’ve got the military, the National Guard, and the Marines walking around downtown LA. That’s clearly contrary to statute and to longstanding practice. There’s no rebellion or invasion happening here in LA, and certainly, no insurrection. So, it’s strange. It’s a strange time to say what the law is, and then people look on the street and they’re like, “No, it’s not. What are you talking about?” That’s hard.
Cristian Farias:
You’re not new to challenging the Trump administration nor Democratic administrations for that matter. I was actually in the courtroom when you first argued an important immigration detention case at the Supreme Court, Jennings v. Rodriguez, in the waning days of the Obama years. And later, you are back to re-argue the same case during the first Trump administration.
Now, immigrant rights advocates know this well, but one thing a lot of people don’t know is that criminalizing immigration and detaining immigrants, it’s kind of a bipartisan affair and I want you to tell me more about that.
Ahilan Arulanantham:
It’s a very common misconception, and I think driven in part by the fact that the way that two parties talk about immigration can be pretty different. I mean, the Trump administration treats all immigrants as invaders, sometimes as though where you’re born has something to do with your national security threat or something like that.
I mean, it’s certainly not the way that the Biden administration or the Obama administration talked about immigration generally. But if you leave the rhetoric aside and look at the actual practice, it’s a much more complicated picture. I do think what we’re seeing now is more repressive and more draconian disregard of due process protections than I think we’ve seen in the past.
But the largest number of deportations by far occurred during the Obama administration, and the first Trump administration didn’t come anywhere near what the Obama administration did in either of its two terms. And even if you go back earlier, the very repressive immigration enforcement authorities that the Trump administration is using now to conduct a lot of its enforcement, particularly its interior enforcement and the crackdown on asylum, comes from a law enacted in 1996 that was signed, of course then, by Bill Clinton.
That law was really the most repressive set of immigration laws in a generation, in 100 years.
Cristian Farias:
And just earlier this year, we saw both Democrats and Republicans rallying behind the Laken Riley Act, and then obviously Trump signing it. This is not something confined to a president or to one party, but both of them in a way are responsible for it.
Ahilan Arulanantham:
Yeah, I think that’s right. George W. Bush favored legalization, what people now derisively call amnesty, and of course, the last large legalization by statute was signed by President Reagan. Yeah, it’s definitely a complicated picture.
Cristian Farias:
But as you just noted, despite this bipartisanship, this moment feels different. Trump feels unbound by the law in many ways. Now, you just rattled off a list of legal issues that are on your mind and that people ask you questions about, but if there’s one issue in the law that keeps you up at night with all of this, what would that issue be?
Ahilan Arulanantham:
It’s hard. The thing that just objectively keeps me up at night literally is the attacks on temporary protective status, because I currently am one of the counsel representing this organization called the National TPS Alliance.
It includes people from all the countries that have TPS at the present moment. I think it’s 16 countries, but in particular, includes 600,000 Venezuelans, 500,000 Haitians, and those were the first two groups that the Trump administration aggressively targeted, just trying to de-document those people, take away their immigration status and their right to work in this country, and then use that then to create a vulnerable population that could be the targets of mass deportation.
They’re refugees. They’re fleeing countries that have just been through so much violence and political instability and economic dislocation. This seems particularly cruel to target those people for deportation, but that is what the administration is doing.
I also think that the way they have tried to take away TPS status is clearly unlawful. It’s unprecedented. There’s never been, what they’re doing here, what they’re clawing back extensions protection that the Biden administration did for these populations. We won a very good order protecting the Venezuelan community, and the Supreme Court stated, with no opinion, just in two paragraphs, which has now rendered several hundred thousand of those Venezuelan TPS holders vulnerable.
Also, I went out for drinks for the first time in a long time with a friend last night, and I got a notice on my phone that there’s a curfew from downtown LA, because I live about less than 15 miles from downtown LA. That curfew is a product of all this political theater which has happened, and the particular curfew order is a city order, so it’s not literally the federal government’s order, but it’s there only because the city was feeling pressured to try and respond to so much of the political theater, which was produced by the ICE raids themselves and all of that.
Cristian Farias:
And because of the political theater, because of the reality of the National Guard being on the ground, there’s almost this split screen reality, what people see on the screen, but what’s happening in the broader LA area. This to me goes beyond immigration. At the heart of it, as I’ve written very recently, ICE is going to war against work and workers, particularly daily laborers, unit organizers, work sites such as car washes and hotels and garment factories.
Notice in that list that I just gave you, I didn’t qualify any of that by attaching the word non-citizen or undocumented to any of it. The reason I don’t is the reality of ICE targeting work and workers, and that affects everyone. To me, that’s the reason Los Angeles right now is rising. I’m curious, can you reflect on that a little bit?
Ahilan Arulanantham:
David Huerta was a very prominent union leader here in Southern California, who is a citizen, and he got arrested. As you say, the way ICE is conducting these raids when they’re walking into work sites or going into Home Depot parking lots, they are detaining and interrogating every person, not every non-citizen. They don’t know who’s a citizen, who’s a non-citizen because you can’t tell.
Cristian Farias:
Yeah, totally.
Ahilan Arulanantham:
You can racially profile and guess, but in LA, you’re going to be wrong a lot because this is a very racially-diverse city. So, they are detaining everyone and then interrogating them, and then taking away the people who they think are unlawfully present based on that. I do think it’s an attack on the city.
I have lived here most of my life. I lived in Southern California most of my life, and I’ve lived here continuously since 2004. It’s been more than 20 years that I’ve been in LA. I have cousins who live in downtown, and they’re like me. They’re Sri Lankan [inaudible 00:13:53], dark skinned. One was born here, one was born abroad, but they’re now walking around with their passports, and they just feel like that’s the safest thing to do, which is sad. It’s so sad. That’s what’s become of this part of our city.
But yeah, absolutely, I think it is a war on much more than just non-citizens in Southern California.
Cristian Farias:
Now, this intersection of labor and immigration is especially rich in Los Angeles. Harry Bridges, a famed Australian-born labor organizer in the 1940s, was also an immigrant and someone who the government tried to deport for many, many years. I want you to reflect on the history a little bit and share with our listeners why Harry Bridges and his story is so important to immigration and First Amendment law specifically.
Ahilan Arulanantham:
Yeah. Harry Bridges is very important because there are two Supreme Court cases with the name Bridges that are about Harry Bridges, Bridges v. California and Bridges v. Wixon. Those cases established, among other things, that non-citizens are protected by the First Amendment and also that non-citizens are protected by other forms of protection under the Due Process Clause and that the government has a very high standard of proof, clear and convincing evidence that it’s trying to deport somebody to show that they’re unlawfully present.
The cases grow out of this history where employers in Los Angeles were fighting labor organizing, and they were going to the courts to win the right to break strikes. In some cases, these courts were essentially sanctioning violence. They weren’t literally in the court orders, but the effect of what they were doing was allowing unrestrained corporate power and corporations to use police power as well to break strikes. And Harry Bridges was then criticizing the court decisions that were authorizing this kind of anti-union activity.
So then, the court tried to shut him up, sanction him for talking, criticizing the court decision ,and jail him, if I remember the whole history right. He said that that violated the First Amendment, and he was right and he won. This is the First Amendment right to criticize government actors, including courts as well. And then later, as you said, the government tried to deport him for this kind of activity. That’s what led to Bridges v. Wixon, which is the case of establishing very important due process rules.
That, I think, is important for its doctrinal significance. It’s also important because it underscores its long history in Southern California, which is that immigrants were very heavily involved in the labor movement, because so much of the workforce of the city has been an immigrant workforce, both in industrial context and also in agricultural sector, because agriculture has been a huge part of the greater Southern California and California produces a huge amount of the nation’s produce even to this day.
When people talk about the connection between immigrants rights and workers’ rights, often what they’re thinking of is Southern California and places where people have been engines of the economy, absolutely central to the very robust economic forces of California who are also part of immigrant communities.
Cristian Farias:
Now, another First Amendment precedent that for the past almost 15 years has been of immense value to immigrant workers and day laborers in particular is a ruling with a wonderful case named Comite de Jornaleros de Redondo Beach v. City of Redondo Beach. Now, Ahilan, tell me why this case matters so much in California and elsewhere in the Ninth Circuit, which, by the way, has huge appellate jurisdiction that includes federal courts in the entire western United States.
Ahilan Arulanantham:
Redondo Beach is extremely important and it’s really the culmination of a set of cases that were litigated by day laborers by the National Day Laborer Organizing Network. Essentially, what the case has established was that people have a First Amendment right to solicit business to do day labor. So, businesses and individuals want to be able to hire day laborers. There’s a market of workers who want to do this work. It’s not a setup which provides adequate employer protections and the end along would be the first people to tell you that.
But while they continue to advocate for those kinds of employer protections, there’s also a set of people who want to do work, and cities try to suppress this. They tried to push it out of their cities, push these people away, even though their own residents were wanting to hire them. So, what happened was the cities tried to ban day laborers from standing on street corners anywhere in cities in order to solicit business.
They didn’t target the employers. They didn’t want to go after the people who were hiring these folks to go pick their strawberries or construction work on their building sites, but they wanted to target the people who were doing the work and ban them and push them out of the city.
And the City of Redondo Beach and cases that preceded it really established that there’s a First Amendment right to engage in this activity. It’s classic commercial speech. I want to work and if you want to hire me, let’s go. The effect of it over time has been that cities create centers, locations, often ironically, the parking lot of a Home Depot, which is why ICE is going and targeting Home Depots in some of these very recent raids that we’ve seen.
Cristian Farias:
I was very struck and taken back when I learned that Stephen Miller and the Trump administration were deliberately targeting these sites where day laborers get together to seek work. I’m curious if there’s something that listeners should take away from how vicious this targeting is.
Ahilan Arulanantham:
To me, what it shows is that the administration’s ultimate goal really is to create the fear that accompanies the big raid. So they want the political theater, they’re happy to have the military there and walking around with the ICE agents, which seems to be happening now, I think because all the show of it scares everyone. There’s about 1 million undocumented people in LA County, a county of about 11 to 12 million people. So, there’s a huge portion of the population here in Southern California.
I don’t think the administration believes they can deport a million of those people. Even if they were here for months and doing these suspicionless raids in violation of the Fourth Amendment, they still wouldn’t get anywhere near that number. What they can accomplish is to keep that population scared, keep them in the shadows, make it hard for them to advocate for greater workplace protections.
California has extremely progressive and generous workplace protection laws that make immigration status irrelevant. There is a policy in the state law to say it does not matter what your immigration status is, you’re entitled to the same workplace protections. But of course, to enforce those laws is much harder if you’re undocumented. It’s particularly harder if you know the federal government is there, they’re trying to get you.
One thing on that I should mention, in California, especially in Southern California, I found a lot of the undocumented population has lived here for decades. I know this as a university professor in the law school now, there are undocumented lawyers, there are undocumented accountants, there are undocumented doctors, lots of small business owners, some people with advanced degrees. So, the attack is felt actually throughout the social and economic fabric of the city.
It’s crazy what the social effect of these raids has been, in part because the undocumented population here is not the stereotypical somebody who just came day before yesterday. It’s people who are deeply embedded into the fabric of this community.
Cristian Farias:
Ahilan, it has been wonderful speaking to you today. Ahilan Arulanantham. He is a law professor at UCLA, and he’s the co-executive director of the Center for Immigration Law and Policy. It’s been wonderful having you on the show.
Ahilan Arulanantham:
Thanks so much for having me, Cristian. I really, really enjoyed the conversation.
Cristian Farias:
And to go even deeper on Trump’s war on immigrant workers, we’ve invited Pablo Alvarado. He’s the co-executive director of the National Day Laborer Organizing Network, and he has been extremely busy since the start of the Trump administration, even more so since the LA protests began in earnest. He’s a day laborer at heart. You probably know or have seen day laborers. They’re the hardworking, dedicated immigrants, who seek up honest day’s pay outside of your local Home Depot or other public spaces. I see them in my own community and have hired them myself. Day laborers do great work.
Pablo, thank you for coming on the show, for making time for us.
Pablo Alvarado:
Thank you for inviting me.
Cristian Farias:
Pablo, how about we start at the very beginning? Can you tell me your journey from El Salvador to the United States, and when did you arrive here and what was it like for you at the time?
Pablo Alvarado:
Sure. I’m El Salvadorian, and I came to the States when I was 22. I came to North Hollywood in December 1989. I worked as a day laborer from that time to 1995, until I got my first paid job as an organizer.
Cristian Farias:
That’s wonderful. Tell me about those early days as a day laborer. What kind of jobs did you specialize in?
Pablo Alvarado:
I did painting, demolition. I also worked at factories. I worked as a gardener, and also as a driver.
Cristian Farias:
What was it like in those early days for you? Obviously, right now, it’s the Trump era. But in the late ’80s, early ’90s, what were people’s attitudes towards day laborers in general?
Pablo Alvarado:
Day laborers have always been under siege, and if it’s not by federal agents or the security guards at Home Depot, it’s the police and oftentimes anti-immigrant groups that can harass their laborers. So, the first days were, as they have always been, very full of uncertainties. When you go to a day laborer corner, you don’t know if you’re going to get a job or not, or whether you’re going to get paid or not, or if you’re going to have an injury at the workplace and receive proper medical care.
There’s so much uncertainty when you are a day laborer. It’s rough to be in the streets, and because day laborers are highly invisible, people deem them as the symbols of the immigration system. No one likes to be a symbol of anything, but that’s how day laborers are deemed.
Cristian Farias:
Absolutely. When did you realize as you were working as a day laborer then, actually maybe I can be an organizer and become involved that way with the day laborer movement?
Pablo Alvarado:
I have always been an organizer since I was a little boy. I grew up in a country within the Civil War and I saw my own village being ripped apart by ideology, by politics. Families been split in one spectrum of the political line or the other. So, it’s been, since I was 10 years old, there have been moments throughout my... I don’t know if I should call it a career. Throughout my work. There’s certain moments when you actually accumulate power and you have to use it.
Sometimes, it’s not political power, it’s moral power, like let me share this story to illustrate what I’m talking about. Back when we were fighting for the $15 minimum wage in Pasadena, we mobilized in large numbers to go to the city council meeting, and the main opponents of the measure were two brothers who own the most expensive restaurants in the city who have private jets.
Marta Salazar, this day laborer, went and testified and she stood up in front of the city council and the city, the entire city. And then she said, “My name is Marta Salazar, and I know the owners of the most expensive restaurants here in Pasadena. I worked for them for seven years, and they were there in the audience, and I bet you they don’t know my name. And I have the proof to demonstrate that I worked for them. I made pizzas for them for seven years, and I have the scars.”
She showed her arms and then she said, “I lost part of my vision working there, and I bet you they don’t even know who I am.” In that moment, Marta Salazar was the most powerful woman in Pasadena, and the need to pass the $15 minimum wage became a moral imperative. So, there are moments when oppressed communities accumulate that power and then that’s when you push and use it the right way.
Similarly, after the murder of George Floyd, Latinos and African Americans came together and push for a police commission for instance, and also having a police independent auditor and making sure that the commission will have subpoena power. Well, the political class didn’t want that, and both the Black and brown communities came together with other allies. This was during the pandemic. So, we did a caravan. We mobilized about 3000 vehicles. We shut down the city, and of course, the politicians had to come and face the people and speak to the people.
I remember telling them, “This is the moment for you to do the right thing,” and they couldn’t bear the power of people coming together. So, there are these moments when you have to push for change, when oppressed communities can accumulate power because that’s all we have oftentimes. Rich people, they have money to buy politicians. They have money to pay for their campaigns. We don’t. The only power that we have is the morality of who we are and what we do, but we also have the power of mobilizing power of numbers.
Building unity among people is one of the most difficult tasks because people are oftentimes split along many lines, politics, identities, et cetera, et cetera. So, it’s unity, in my view, is an act of decolonization.
Cristian Farias:
That’s incredible, Pablo. One of those organizations where you got your start in a way as a community organizer is The Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles. And in the 1990s, this organization, CHIRLA, was at the forefront of organizing against Los Angeles’s anti-day labor ordinance. Can you tell me about these ordinances and who was behind them, and how did day laborers decide to take them to court?
Pablo Alvarado:
When I was the organizer running the campaign at the time, and anti-day labor solicitation ordinances are local laws that ban labor solicitation on public right-of-ways. That means that people cannot stand on street corners to offer their labor to solicit work. At that time, it was the early ’90s, we were at the hype of Proposition 187, one of the first extreme anti-immigrant measures in the country.
Many municipalities, because of the high visibility of day laborers, they were using the exact same language that the president is using now, that here they’re invading our community. They’re invaders. They’re criminals.
Cristian Farias:
In the ’80s and ’90s, just for our audience, is when immigration law became crazy in our country at the national level. What you’re telling me is that at the local level, these same forces were manifesting themselves with these ordinances and other measures, right?
Pablo Alvarado:
I think it’s the other way around. It started at the local level. These voices who call immigrants terrorists, invaders, criminals. At that time, they were marginal. It wasn’t until 2004, 2005, and ’06 when they actually became more visible and they had an organization that built that was called [inaudible 00:30:39] Project, and they targeted the daily laborers.
They went to the daily laborers to harass them, to call them names, to film their employers to intimidate. That was already happening in 1991, 1994, and the police, the crackdown, the police and the sheriff, every day, I spent hours and hours getting people out of jail basically because these laws made it a crime to look for work.
Now, those voices were marginal at that time. Now, they’re no longer marginal. They have the power, because it’s exactly that group of people that have attacked day laborers over the years, is the same people that attacked the Capitol in January 6th. Exactly the same people, and they brought to the day laborer corners and day laborer centers the same symbols that they bring, the swastikas, the Confederate flag. I mean, they didn’t hide at that time.
Cristian Farias:
And the moment these ordinances started popping up, your organization and others started challenging them in court. You had some setbacks in the ’80s, but then in the ’90s, you began to win. First in Los Angeles, and then in other places. Can you tell me what these wins in court slowly meant for your movement as you began to defeat these ordinances?
Pablo Alvarado:
Well, it’s a campaign that took us 20 years to win. At that time, it was so bad that the sheriff were descending on the day laborers, chasing them with helicopters, with police on horses, doing these crazy sophisticated ambushes. And at that time, the economy was booming, so there was a lot of work in that particular place, and the workers were subjected to so much uncertainty and indignities.
It wasn’t until I met my very dear friend and my compadre, Tom Saenz. I remember Tom came with a brilliant argument, and that is that day laborers possess the same free speech rights than the Girl Scouts who sell lemonades in streets. So, we took the Los Angeles County for their ordinance to federal court, and that was our first victory. Then after that, we began challenging city by city.
Cristian Farias:
It became the template, right, for the other cases later?
Pablo Alvarado:
That was the precedent.
Cristian Farias:
The precedent.
Pablo Alvarado:
And it became a campaign too, because it was not just litigation, it was organizing. Both things together. So, we will come and talk to the workers, and we would ask them if there’s a way to fight but this is what we got to do. And in every corner, we organized a day labor committee, and it had the name of the city, Committee of Day Laborers of Redondo Beach, Committee of Day Laborers of Glendale.
I think we challenged more than 15 localities. The first litigation that, I think it was in 1992, the one that we lost, and then for a while, we just took all the attacks. But in 2000, that’s when we won the first one, and then we went to the next municipality and we challenged the next municipality, and then the next, and the next, and the next, until one of the localities decided to appeal the decision of the judges. It ended up going to the entire Ninth Circuit.
Cristian Farias:
Yep. This is in 2011, and the full U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled in favor of Jornaleros in the Redondo Beach case. And then, the Supreme Court declined to review that ruling and it became the law for the rest of the country. Now, can you reflect on that, when and what it meant for you at the time?
Pablo Alvarado:
I mean, obviously, it’s the greatest legal victory that we’ve had, the greatest victory of day laborers in the history of the country. I mean, New York was built by day laborers. There were men standing on public sidewalks looking for work at the beginning when they were building the skyscrapers. That’s a tradition that has been maintained for decades. So, day laborers have been part of the landscape.
But winning in court, plus the organizing, plus everything that we’ve done in addition to that, humanizing the story of who the day laborers are, it’s become, I think, acceptable that being a day laborer is not a crime. That being a day laborer is honorable. That it takes courage to stand under this hot sun, under the weather, and there’s so many uncertainties, but you stand there offering the only thing that you possess, which is your labor.
I remember exactly when we received the notification that Supreme Court has rejected the appeal of Redondo Beach. I think it was the fourth National Day Laborer Assembly. We were together here in LA. There were about 400 day laborers together, and I saw everybody standing up and there were tears, and that reaction was quite incredible, so it was a beautiful moment. So, the next step in the campaign was sending letters to those cities that kept their ordinances, and we told them, “This is what’s going to happen to you if you don’t dismantle the ordinances.” One by one, they begin dismantling their ordinances.
I want to reflect on this because it’s not just when poor people fight, they don’t fight for themselves, they fight for everybody else. When the housing market collapsed in 2008, many contractors who are US citizens and many US citizens had to go to a day laborer corner to stand up and look for work. And the only reason he could do that was because an undocumented worker had defended that constitutional right. To me, that is real social change.
Cristian Farias:
That is truly beautiful to hear, Pablo, the whole campaign and the way you’re reflecting on it. Obviously, there’s lots of day laborer centers and other organizations that are part of your network across the country. Bringing it back to today, what is it like for day laborers at this moment, given all these victories, now all of a sudden it seems like we’re going back, what do you make of this whiplash?
Pablo Alvarado:
It’s quite difficult to describe. We’ve always known that we won the right to stand on a sidewalk and look for work, but we’ve always known that the adversaries never give up. It’s not like they left. For instance, in Home Depot, they push people to the sidewalks and they painted the curves in red so that the employers couldn’t stop and pick up day laborers. So, employers continue to be targeted. Our adversaries have never going to wait. They’re still around. They just have adapted new strategies.
Cristian Farias:
Indeed, as a result of what’s happening with LA, one thing that I’ve seen is that you have a whole rapid response network to almost bring the community to protect sometimes other community members who may be at risk. Can you tell us how that network operates in defense of immigrants who might be at risk?
Pablo Alvarado:
I was having so much anxiety before Trump came to power in January 20th. I happened to live here in Pasadena, and our headquarters are here in Pasadena, and then the fires take place.
Cristian Farias:
The LA fires in general.
Pablo Alvarado:
The LA fires in general. They are a mile away from where I am sitting right now. It was actually they day laborers who went out and removed 2,300 tons of debris, because they saw that the authorities were overwhelmed, that disaster was colossal. Workers came to the center saying, “My only possessions in this life is what I have on right now, and I no longer have a job because the home of my employer was also burned down.” This is how interconnected we are, and we are part of the socioeconomic and cultural fabric of every community in this country. Whether the man who’s occupying the White House likes it or not, that is a fact.
So when communities saw what we were doing, because we created a fire relief brigade, we got thousands of people. In a period of four weeks, we had about 12,000 volunteers who came through the job center, through the worker center, who were led by day laborers to assist in the recovery, in the cleanup operation of both Altadena and Pasadena and parts of Sierra Madre. So, it’s essentially when we ask those people now, day laborers are under siege. We just come and volunteer to bear witness of what’s happening to them.
We don’t have to be organizing people anymore because they are coming together. Every time that they see ICE agents in their neighborhoods, communities don’t like it, and they come out and they protest and they are recording, and they are shaming those officers, who, by the way, they claim that the reason why they wear masks is because of their safety, because of their security, and they want to protect their identity. I believe it’s because they are ashamed of what they’re doing.
Who will want to remove a mom from a family, from children crying? The more they dehumanize people, the more they dehumanize themselves. Los Angeles has a long history of organizing and there is an immigrant rights infrastructure. People have mobilized in large numbers, and I believe they chose the wrong place to mess with.
Cristian Farias:
Pablo, one last question, how can people best support their laborers today and immigrant workers more generally?
Pablo Alvarado:
We have a program called Adopt a Corner. Visit our website and join and find a day laborer corner that you can help protect, bear witness to what happened in those places. Become friends of their laborers, talk to them. Don’t be afraid of going. I know that if you go, they’re probably going to think that you’re an employer, but just talk to them. That’s one way of helping, Adopt a Corner. This is a good moment to hire workers and pay them well. Respect their rights, treat them well. This is the moment to help families that are in deportation proceedings.
Donate. There are many organizations that are doing fundraising to help people. There are so many GoFundMe efforts that the money goes directly to the family who is impacted. And one of the most important thing is keep going to the streets, keep marching, keep walking. Let’s just do it peacefully and orderly. And always remember what the role of protest is, is not to go and take my selfie. It’s to make sure that we make the suffering and the cruelty visible so Americans can see it and understand that what’s happening is wrong. Today, it’s immigrants. Tomorrow, it’s going to be somebody else.
Cristian Farias:
Pablo Alvarado, the co-executive director of the National Day Laborer Organizing Network. It’s been a pleasure speaking with you today.
Pablo Alvarado:
Likewise, Cristian. Thank you for having me.
Cristian Farias:
That’s it for today’s show. In future episodes, we’ll stay on top of LA, its workers, and the fight against ICE. That fight is about the First Amendment and people’s ability to protest, protect each other, and shape their future. The Bully’s Pulpit is a production of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. I’m your host, Cristian Farias.
This episode was written by me and co-produced by Anne-Marie Awad, Matt Paikin, and Candice White. Our associate producer for this episode is Kushal Dev. Fact Checking by Kushal Dev, and Ella Sohn. Our sound engineer is Patrick McNameeking. Candice White is our executive producer. Our music comes from Epidemic Sound. The art for our show was designed by Astrid de Silva. Thanks to Pablo Alvarado and Ahilan Arulanantham who joined us for this episode.
The Bully’s Pulpit is available on Apple, Spotify, and wherever you listen to podcasts. Please subscribe and leave a review. We’d love to know what you think. To learn more about The Knight Institute, visit our website, knightcolumbia.org. That’s Knight with a K, and follow us on social media.