President Trump’s roundup of undocumented workers has spread fear though immigrant communities unsure what to expect as federal agents coordinate with local police to hunt people down, reports Dennis J Bernstein.
By Dennis J Bernstein
There is “widespread fear” in the undocumented community, says Pablo Alvarado, executive director of the National Day Laborer Organizing Network (NDLON), whose work in the first two months of the Trump administration has focused on keeping people from panicking while informing them of their rights and how to defend themselves if U.S. immigration agents show up at their workplace or home or intercept them on their way to work or while taking their children to school.
Pablo Alvarado, Executive Director of the National Day Laborer Organizing Network. (Screenshot from YouTube)
Alvarado is often compared to Cesar Chavez in terms of his leadership and organizing power in the undocumented community. NDLON represents tens of thousands of day-laborers. I spoke to Alvarado on March 10.
Dennis Bernstein: Help us put a face on what it looks like now at ground level. What are the discussions like in the community? Give us a sense of how people are responding to this first salvo, or series of salvos from this anti-immigrant administration.
Pablo Alvarado: Yes, well, there is widespread fear. And, because of the aggressiveness nature of the Trump’s immigration policies, the bans, the executive decisions that he’s made. And the fact that ICE agents are going all over the country picking people up. They claim that they were going to go after people who have had previous criminal convictions, and violent criminals. That’s what they said, but it’s not true.
A lot of people who don’t have any convictions have been detained. And some people who have had previous convictions like DUIs, dating 15 – 20 years ago are coming back. These folks don’t represent a threat to public safety, but yet they’re being targeted. They are being separated from their loved ones.
DB: Just to keep the human face on it, in that regard. There was, in fact, a dad who was here 20 – 22 years who was taking, I guess, his kid… he had three or…