SEIU Local 509 President Dave Foley and Dr. A. Naomi Paik on how worker solidarity can overcome Trump’s war on immigrants.
US federal agents working for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detain immigrants and asylum seekers reporting for immigration court proceedings at the Jacob K. Javits Federal Building’s US Immigration Court in New York, New York, Thursday, July 24, 2025.
(Dominic Gwinn / Middle East Images / AFP via Getty Images)
Rumeysa Ozturk’s seizure by plainclothes masked agents outside of her home in Somerville, Massachusetts, in March 2025 had all the hallmarks of a kidnapping. The PhD student, originally from Turkey, was flown to a detention facility in Louisiana, stripped of her F1 student visa, and slated for deportation—all as part of a larger effort by the Trump administration targeting international students for pro-Palestine speech. The draconian arrest sparked outrage among elected officials, advocacy groups, and more. It signaled a frightening escalation—and served as a signal that more was to come.
After two months, however, and due to relentless mobilizing work conducted by a coalition of pro-Palestine activists, free speech advocates, labor organizers, and more, Ozturk was released on bail. She remains free today.
“If you want to know what [rapid response] looks like, it’s getting a call at 10 pm that your member was kidnapped off the street, there’s video of it that’s going to hit the new—and springing into action,” says Dave Foley, president of SEIU Local 509. Foley, whose local represents nearly 30,000 workers in human services and education across Massachusetts, was on the front lines in fighting for Ozturk’s release.
Ozturk’s arrest came as just one of many escalations in the Trump administration’s crusade against immigrants in the United States—including the illegal military occupation of Democratic-controlled cities, the repurposing of prison camps, and the use of detention to third-party nations. However, the expansion of ICE, immigrant detention, and rollbacks to civil liberties that’ve been at the center of Donald Trump’s second presidential administration are not entirely new. They build atop histories of anti-immigrant sentiment and policies—some more recent than others.
“It’s built on other layers of foundation,” says Dr. A. Naomi Paik, a historian at the University of Illinois at Chicago. “But the escalation and the rapidity—how quickly this is happening—that feels new.”
Dr. Paik’s research centers immigration and detention within the United States. She is the author of Rightlessness: Testimony and Redress in U.S. Prison Camps Since World War II and Bans, Walls, Raids, Sanctuary: Understanding U.S. Immigration for the Twenty-First Century.
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In this August interview, Foley and Paik sat down for a conversation on the evolving threat that escalating immigrant detention poses to our communities—as well as new and historic lessons for our solidarity movements.
This interview has been condensed and edited lightly for clarity.
—Henry Hicks IV
Henry Hicks IV: Dr. Paik, how is what we’re seeing today unprecedented—and in what ways have we been here before?
Dr. A. Naomi Paik: One is the technological advances that have really escalated and accelerated the surveillance of not just migrants but of all of us; and the profiteering from these new surveillance technologies. This has been going on for quite some time, but Big Data and the advancement of AI has accelerated things so much, in such a way that it’s actually hard to keep up with what’s even happening.
In terms of detention, the extraordinary rendition of migrants from United States territory to extraterritorial sites of detention—like CECOT in El Salvador, or Uganda, or even Guantánamo—is new. Having said that, extraterritorial detention itself is not new. During the 1990s, the United States detained Haitian and Cuban migrants at Guantánamo during refugee crises. So, that set the precedent, not only for migrant detention in extraterritorial spaces, but also the indefinite detention of men captured under the War on Terror.
Under Trump, the US is taking migrants from the United States territory. That’s the new thing. [They are taking migrants] to this site now that is now synonymous with torture, whereas before, we would intercept migrants in international waters and then bring them to Guantánamo to prevent them from getting to the United States territory, where they have things like claims to asylum. Again, it’s an advancement. It’s an escalation of ideas that were already there.
HH: Dave, from your perspective as someone who’s doing work on the ground, how is what you’re seeing new?
Dave Foley: [SEIU has] always had connections with the different ICE Watch networks. Where we’re seeing things differently today is statuses being revoked. We had a member of ours on an F-1 student visa. Her F-1 student visa was terminated in a very high-profile, public way—and that’s new to us. It really scared a lot of people. The administration will constantly announce new things that leaves us scrambling.
HH: How are unions and different community groups well-positioned to be doing this kind of resistance work?
DF: Unions are fundamentally built on one-on-one relationships in a workplace. You can move people politically. You can give people a real political education that you can’t do through TV, or ads, or newspapers, or anything like that, in the actual worksite, because you have organic leaders there. So, you might have someone that you know that is a real xenophobe or a real racist, and you figure that they can’t be moved on something like immigration justice, but if anybody can do it, it’s the union steward who sits with them through a disciplinary hearing and saves their job. Or it’s the on-the-ground worksite leader who rallies the rest of the workplace to get a better raise or better rates on the health insurance premiums in a contract. These people can see real leaders, who can then give them a political education.
The other important thing that unions provide is two-way communication, in an organized way. We hear from our members. For instance, when our member was kidnapped off the streets by ICE, we knew about it before anybody did, really, because our steward network was plugged into it and knew to call the union very early, so we could spring into action and provide as much assistance as possible. We’ve got organized lists and can communicate with our members, so we can mobilize and turn people out to a rally or in the streets very, very rapidly—like within 24 hours.
And then, finally, a union like ours, with the size and resources that we have, we’re in a powerful position to actually talk to elected leaders and push them into positions that might make them feel uncomfortable. [We can] leverage the political power that we get from our rank-and-file members and turn our voting power into real political action.
HH: Dr Paik, how have you seen effective resistance movements manifest in prior moments that echo what we’re seeing today?
ANP: A lot of the resistance that we’re seeing—on the streets of DC, in Chicago, with community defense, people coming out on the streets to prevent ICE from taking somebody, or to chase ICE away, or recording them in the Home Depot parking lot—that didn’t come out of nowhere. It [builds] on previous eras and again. It’s not just from Trump 1.0. It’s also from Obama. The formation of those community defense groups, of rapid response networks, of these different kinds of communication—using social media, using email—that has already been built. When Trump got reelected, it could be activated once again.
And there’s muscle memory there—not only in organizing leadership but also just regular people. I am not one of the main organizers of any of the rapid response networks in Chicago, but when the call is made, I am going to show up for the trainings. The fact that they can make the call, that they know where to make it, and that people actually show up, that is, again, that kind of community muscle memory that’s being activated in this moment. People have learned over time what kinds of tactics and what kind of strategies are going to be effective.
In the Obama era, we saw more of this kind of “good immigrant, bad immigrant,” “were they here legally,” “did they commit a crime before,” etc. We should defend immigrants because they’re “good,” and they go to church, and they work hard, and whatever. In this moment, it makes zero sense to make those kinds of arguments—because anybody who is without status or is not a citizen is at risk.
HH: We’re talking about the role that unions are playing in defending immigrants—when citizen workers and immigrants are often positioned against each other. Why is rejecting that narrative of incompatibility so important?
DF: I think it’s something that has to be confronted and rejected very consciously at every opportunity. We have a whole lot more in common with our immigrant neighbors, brothers, sisters, and siblings than we do with those that try to divide us. We, as workers, have a common enemy that is raising prices and keeping our wages down consciously—and it’s not your immigrant neighbor. It is the billionaire who owns your company and probably owns the property that you rent from.
ANP: The kind of “citizen-worker versus immigrant-worker” is a total distraction, and it keeps us fighting each other so that we are not directing our ire where it should be: to the actual culprits who are making our lives worse.
The whole point of having borders is to keep wages low and to keep labor extraction for profit high. This isn’t just about immigrant workers coming to places like the United States, or the UK, or Western Europe. It’s also about our corporations going into poorer places, colonized places, and extracting low wage labor there as well. We have to think about how labor is working globally to extract wealth from the bottom and concentrate it at the top. One of the functions of borders is to divide the global working class.
HH: You described earlier that the practice of detention itself is something that’s happening across borders as well.
ANP: It’s becoming a global industry. Again, there are all these innovative ways of extracting profit from regular people—that don’t necessarily require labor. Our data is one source of profit extraction, and then also social control through things like detention, like policing, like surveillance networks. Those are other ways of extracting profit that don’t require us to work at subminimum wages. This is part of the technology thing that really worries me. They don’t even need to extract our labor. Then what?
DF: If I could add to that: Dr. Paik is saying that there’s no labor cost to this data collection—but that does not mean it’s free. We just saw in the Big Beautiful Bill a massive cut in what will be care work, what will be labor. The cuts that we’re going to see to Medicaid are going to translate into cuts to jobs in the fastest-growing industry in the United States right now, which is care work. And at the same time, we’re going to see a massive amount of money move right into ICE, into the building of new detention centers. Those facilities will be funded by cuts that will cost jobs. That’s the cost.
HH: There’s so much more time to go in this adminitration. How are y’all approaching the long-term nature of this fight? How are y’all thinking about how to withstand the continual escalation of these things over the next three years, at least?
DF: In the labor world, we use two different terms: “mobilizing” and “organizing.” Mobilizing is essentially turning people out, and organizing is really building that infrastructure so that when you need to, you can turn the maximum amount of people out or take the biggest action that you can. We’ve had to mobilize a lot lately, in these past seven months. But the real priority for us, is continual organizing.
No matter who the next president is and which party they come from, we know that we need to push beyond just defending against what Trump has done, and we need to really push for immigration reform—which has never happened in my lifetime. We have so many people in this country that have been waiting and waiting and waiting for justice to happen. We need to use a moment like this to really organize and to build, so that we can get beyond where we have been for my entire life. But you’re right, this is not a sprint. It’s a marathon. There’s a long way to go.
ANP: It’s so hard because the crises that we’re facing are so immense, and they have been building for so long. The roots of the crises that we’re facing go so deep. And so, to really extirpate those roots, it’s going to take so much effort. And it’s going to take everyone’s effort.
DF: It might feel like the forces arrayed against us are limitless, but you can outwork them. They’re not as resilient as us. They don’t work as hard. They’re not used to working as hard. I’ve seen it in so many fights—we can easily be outspent, but we can outwork them time and time and time again.
HH: Are there prior resistance movements or flash points of community strength that give you hope?
ANP: Going further back, [I think of] the abolitionist movement against slavery. They weren’t just demanding freedom for the enslaved. They wanted to overturn an entire global political economy based on enslaved labor. That’s huge! They were really trying to change the whole world. And they did it. That is remarkable to me. People who were not even considered people overturned an entire global political economic system based on their nonrecognition as humans.
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For more recent moments, I think of the summer of 2020. The lesson for me from that summer is that we don’t know how historical change is going to happen, and that it doesn’t necessarily happen in a linear fashion. I did not expect abolitionist thought to become a mainstream news item at all—ever. But it did. We also have to understand that even when movements don’t get the goods in the way that we would have liked to have seen, that they still make meaningful changes that we then build upon.
A lot of people criticize Occupy Wall Street because they weren’t organized enough, they didn’t move things in a certain direction, it didn’t have a durable life—but it gave us the language of “the 1%.” For me as a teacher, before Occupy Wall Street, if I said “the 1%,” no one would know what I’m talking about. I say it now and everyone knows exactly what I’m talking about. All of these movements build on each other and learn from each other.
DF: [I think of several], from the Haitian Revolution to the changes we’re seeing in public opinion when it comes to Israel and Gaza and the genocide. I get a lot of inspiration from historical reminders that popular opinion and people can be moved and they can be changed. Something that seems ubiquitous can change really, really quickly by the actions of very, very brave people.
We are seeing a level of disgust in what the Trump administration is doing, that is drawing people to action. This could be an inflection point. We don’t know where this is going to go, but it’s inspiring to know that this history isn’t written—and that we can shape it.
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