By Mark Gruenberg
Photos: YouTube Screenshots\Wikimedia Commons
CHICAGO—With millions of migrant workers caught between corporate exploitation and GOP Trump regime deportations, activists gathered last night at the first-ever Chicago Labor Forum brainstormed ideas for the entire working class to come to their aid and protection.
And if there was one theme that ran through the hour-long session at the Unity Center on Chicago’s South Side, it was that, given that the Trump tyranny is thinking “outside the box” in rounding up anyone and everyone with a brown skin—including kidnapping kids from schools, invading hospitals and dragging drivers from cars—defenders must “think outside the box” for new tactics, too.
Trump’s tactics aren’t new, but they are intensified, one of the two guest speakers, Chicago Federation of Labor Vice President Don Villar, himself from a migrant family, told the group on February 18.
“We saw this played out in 2017” with “the drama of a 10-year-old kid coming out of school and finding there’s no one there to pick him up” because Trump’s federal agents during the convicted felon’s first term in the White House had arrested and deported the kid’s parents.
For that kid, “it was having your world turned upside down,” and now the situation has gotten even worse with Trump’s return to the presidency and with his “enforcer” making migrants in Chicago their #1 national target, due to the Windy City’s “sanctuary city” status and active resistance.
Among the new ideas floated, and in some cases, implemented, and discussed at the session:
Mass education of the migrants. The Chicago Federation of Labor pioneered that with “know your rights” flash cards for migrants, telling them the law protects them from federal agents without a warrant, from being split from other workers, from being denied a lawyer and it mandates they can demand immigration hearings….Read More
