Resolution to Stop Anti-Union Detentions of Immigrant Workers

April 17, 2025

WHEREAS,  On March 25, 2025,  Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detained Alfredo (Lelo) Juarez, an outspoken leader in Familias Unidas por la Justicia, the farmworker union in the Skagit valley,  who lead a successful push for new rules around heat exposure for farmworkers in WA after the deadly 2021 heat dome, and spoke to the press during the successful 2022 tulip festival strike, and

WHEREAS, Alfredo Juarez was pulled over and detained while on his way to drop his partner off at work, and when he attempted to exercise his rights, ICE broke his window to detain him, and 

WHEREAS, on April 2, 2025, ICE raided Mt. Baker Roofing in Bellingham, WA, where in 2023 some  employees protested the company’s past failures to provide bathrooms, breaks, and water on job sites, and 

WHEREAS, gun-wielding ICE officers detained 37 Mt. Baker Roofing workers using a list and pictures of those they were targeting, including workers undergoing the asylum process and/or fleeing violence in their home countries, and

WHEREAS, ICE detained, and is holding at the Northwest Detention Center in Tacoma, Lewelyn Dixon, who is an SEIU Local 925 member, who works as a lab technician at UW Medicine, has lived in the United States for more than five decades, is a green card holder, and was returning from a trip to the Philippines visiting family, and

WHEREAS, Immigrant labor is and always has been an essential part of the US economy, such as agriculture and care-giving, jobs shunned by native born workers, but ICE is casting a broad net designed to strike fear into the hearts of immigrants, documented or undocumented, and

WHEREAS, some of these appear to be targeted actions and intentional attacks on the labor and immigrant rights movement, and attacks on one group of workers weaken the rights of all workers, and 

WHEREAS, a bipartisan immigration reform bill that was poised to pass in 2024 was sabotaged by opposition from the current president

THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED that this union organization calls for the release from detention of Alfredo (Lelo) Juarez, Lewelyn Dixon, and detainees employed by Mt. Baker Roofing, to allow for any legal proceedings, such as asylum applications, to be carried out in a non-criminalized way, and be it further 

BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED that we call on the labor movement and the community to unite to defend the rights of workers, regardless of nation of birth, to speak out and organize in defense of their interests, without fear, and further be it

BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED that we support continued efforts to reform immigration proceedings to make them more fair and to expedite them so families are not left in legal limbo for long periods.