This article is a joint publication of Workday Magazine and The American Prospect. WHITING, INDIANA—Elizabeth Piña has been at her union hall since 4:00 a.m., checking in picketers, organizing the food pantry, and chatting with her coworkers. She is wearing a black t-shirt, and sitting behind a table filled with schedules and stickers that say “end the lockout.”. She hasn’t “had much of a summer,” she tells me; it’s been dominated by the early-morning shift, Monday through Friday. When I ask her if she is tired, she says, “Nope.
Minnesota trade unionists active in worker assemblies are among the 15 people indicted by the federal government today, as part of a sweeping crackdown on organizing in opposition to the ICE and Border Patrol since December 2025. Among a slew of other allegations, the indictment cited some of the individuals’ participation in assemblies of trade unionists and other workers held at the United Labor Centre in Minneapolis as evidence that the activists participated in a criminal conspiracy.
All 15 of the people indicted are charged with “conspiracy to impede or injure a federal officer,” which activists describe as an effort to use draconian charges to crush Minnesota’s widely celebrated organizing against the armed federal agents who descended on the state this past winter. “Trade unionists active in worker assemblies are among those who were arrested,” says Kieran Knutson, president of Communications Workers of America Local 7250. “The trade unionists I’ve known for years are stand-up people who believe in solidarity. They believe an injury to one is an injury to all.
This article is a joint publication of Workday Magazine and In These Times. First, she started checking for suspicious cars each day before leaving the house for work. Then, she began skipping work whenever she saw Facebook posts about Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents nearby. By the end of December, she wasn’t working at all. And since the first week of January, Anain, who declined to use her last name, has barely left the home she shares with her spouse and two young daughters in South Minneapolis, the neighborhood where she’s lived for more than 20 years.
To pay their rent, Anain and her spouse have had to dip into their savings.
Agentes federales de inmigración han secuestrado a Eustaquio Orozco Verdusco, un organizador de derechos de los trabajadores muy conocido en Minnesota por luchar contra el robo de salarios y la trata laboral.
Su abogada y su hijo dicen que actualmente está detenido en el Centro Correccional del Condado de Cibola en Nuevo México, dirigido por CoreCivic, una de las mayores compañías privadas de prisiones en los Estados Unidos. Por primera vez, su familia va a la prensa mientras el apoyo de la comunidad para su liberación está aumentando. −Lo único que nos importa es tenerlo de vuelta con nosotros, en casa en Minnesota −me dijo su hijo, Gerardo Orozco Guzmán−. Eso es lo único que queremos. Nuestra entrevista se produjo tras el fallo de un juez en el Tribunal de Distrito de Minnesota el miércoles que negó y desestimó la petición de hábeas corpus de Orozco Verdusco, petición que pretendía impugnar su detención ilegal.
This article is a joint publication of Workday Magazine and In These Times. Federal immigration agents have abducted Eustaquio Orozco Verdusco, a workers’ rights organizer well known in Minnesota for fighting wage theft and labor trafficking.
His attorney and son say he is currently held at the Cibola County Correctional Center in New Mexico, run by CoreCivic, one of the largest private prison companies in the United States. For the first time, his family is going to the press as community support for his release is swelling. “All we care about is having him back with us, at home in Minnesota,” his son, Gerardo Orozco Guzman, told me. “That’s all we want.”
Our interview followed a judge’s ruling in the District Court of Minnesota on Wednesday that denied and dismissed Orozco Verdusco’s habeas corpus petition challenging his unlawful detention.
This article is a joint publication of Workday Magazine and The American Prospect. Rob doesn’t want anyone else to experience what his co-workers at the Target store in the Minneapolis suburb of Richfield went through. On January 8, federal immigration agents violently tackled and detained two Target workers during their shift. Rob was on the clock that day, and while he did not see the abductions, he did witness the aftermath. “We had a lot of people who were scared,” says Rob, who is using a pseudonym to protect him from retaliation.
This article is a joint publication of Workday Magazine and In These Times. The most significant U.S. labor strike in the past two years in solidarity with Palestinians started with a simple premise. According to Nate Edenhofer, a graduate student at the University of California, Santa Cruz, “Everybody has some sort of vision of how they think the society we live in should be — most of them don’t think of it as being a genocide.” Edenhofer was part of organizing that strike, the only major strike so far from U.S. labor to defend the Gaza protest encampments and oppose the mass killing of Palestinians since Oct. 7, 2023. It included thousands of academic workers across the University of California system, echoing recent tactics of dockworkers — from Spain to Greece to France to Morocco—who have refused to handle military equipment and items they believe will be used against Palestinians.
The strike rolled through one of the largest public university systems in the United States, with 19,780 workers voting to authorize the work action. The University of California campuses became sites of a pitched labor battle and a broader student struggle to stand with Palestinians.
For nearly two years, Palestinian trade unionists have been urging workers — especially American workers, given the role of the United States in arming, funding and politically supporting Israel’s military actions — to take workplace action to stop the onslaught.
This article is a joint publication of Workday Magazine and Jewish Currents. On January 24th, Border Patrol agents shot and killed Veterans Affairs ICU nurse and ICE observer Alex Pretti in Minneapolis—firing at least 10 shots within five seconds while Pretti was pinned to the ground. About six hours later, Pretti’s labor union, the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), released a statement about his murder. “We have received confirmation that a member of AFGE Local 3669, Alex J. Pretti, was the man killed during the incident,” it read. But while referring to Pretti’s killing as a “tragedy,” the statement fell short of condemning the federal immigration agents behind the shooting.
