STATEMENT OF SOLIDARITY WITH ABDUCTED UNION ORGANIZER

On Tuesday March 25th around 7:25 am Alfredo “Lelo” Juarez Zeferino, indigenous Mixteco immigrant berry picker, community leader, and farmworker union organizer, was violently arrested and kidnapped by ICE. As of writing, Lelo is being held in the notorious Northwest Federal Detention Facility in Takoma where he is being processed for deportation. His tight knit community believes he is a political prisoner targeted for his union organizing. They are rallying support and advocating for his immediate release. Organized labor must also make a powerful stand against the forced disappearance and abduction of our fellow worker. An attack on a union organizer, a food caretaker and a farmworker, is an attack on the entire working class.  

Assuredly by now, everyone has witnessed how their fellow workers and community members are being targeted by this administration’s extensive authoritarian assault. ICE has always been an oppressive arm of the state serving capitalist interests and weaponizing working people’s immigration status against them to break apart communities, spread terror, weaken every worker’s rights, repress political opposition and maintain their status as second class citizens forced to serve racial capitalism. For Lelo and many others, from Bellingham Washington to Columbia University, this iron boot is meant to break and crush not only their spirit, but the movements they have worked so tirelessly to create. But they forget we are seeds…

However this statement is not only to give our unrelenting solidarity to those who, like Lelo, have been targeted by ICE, but to stand in fierce opposition to this police state terror. We as workers will be increasingly targeted for any vocal opposition to the boss or the state, and we should brace and prepare for worsening repression. Now is the time to look out for each other, especially those who are most vulnerable and likely to be the next target in our communities. We cannot passively wait for this to happen. We must build connective tissue strengthening an unwavering, militant solidarity that demands action–now, tomorrow, forever– against the violence of racial capitalism and the techno-fascists that currently serve it. 

The DC General Membership Branch of the Industrial Workers of the World stands in Solidarity with Lelo, Familias Unidas por la Justicia, and all those captured by La Migra’s continued reign of terror on our communities, especially immigrant union members. Disappearing Lelo or any immigrant worker stokes a flame of fear, destroying workplace organizing and permitting the thorny vines of exploitation to propagate. Immigration enforcement is class warfare disproportionately targeting and harming black and brown workers and communities. Our fellow workers are more than just workers, they are multi-dimensional human beings, and we demand they are returned to their communities, their workplaces, and their loved ones. Free them all and let weeds turn the concentration camps to rubble. 

Furthermore we shall continue our fight against these injustices within our own workplaces and industries, creating more robust pillars of defense from these attacks and terror tactics. An Injury To One Is An Injury To All, and the IWW has a proud and storied history of standing in solidarity with undocumented workers, and we continue this unabated work of our political ancestors. We demand immediate amnesty and legal status for all workers in the country, and the tilling of a new future without harmful, violent, inhumane borders. 

From Factory to Field we shall struggle together, and only through our collective, revolutionary struggle can we truly be free from the shackles of Capital and wage slavery.

Una clase, Una lucha, Contra Fronteras. 

Do not deport our fellow workers.

Solidaridad pa’ sempre
Solidarity Forever,

DC GMB
DC IWW Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee

If you are looking to get involved with some of the actions and initiatives we are building in the DC IWW, here is a list of some of our campaigns: AWOC or the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee is here to help organize workers in agricultural workplaces to build better protections, solidarity, and worker power for all agriculture workers and their communities. Alongside this we have Shift Change which seeks to build the same for restaurant and hospitality industry workplaces. The IWW Free School is an upcoming program designed to help build up working class power by using participatory education, including issues of building trade skills, worker cooperative development, and workplace organizing, especially around defence of fellow workers from entities such as ICE.