Day Laborers Are In The Vanguard Of Fight To Defend The Constitution
Roving gangs of armed, masked government troops terrorizing the community are hallmarks of authoritarian regimes throughout history and across the globe. Beginning on June 6, immigrant communities throughout the Los Angeles region were subject to the same sort of government terrorism until a federal judge ordered a halt in a July 11 ruling that could prove crucial in preserving American democracy.
At the same time, the economic impacts could cripple the country in a way not seen since the Great Recession, as the nation’s roughly 11-12 million undocumented immigrants are vital to its food system, construction industry and service sector. In fact, at the state level, job losses are greater than those already for the first month of ICE raids, according to Census data analyzed by UC Merced researchers.
But we’ve had terrible recessions before; they take time to develop, and we know we can recover. What we haven’t had is the loss of our democracy.
Two aspects of the ICE raids blatantly violate the Constitution’s Bill of Rights: mass arrests without reasonable suspicion of individual criminal guilt and denial of legal representation.
But, “What the federal government would have this Court believe—in the face of a mountain of evidence—is that none of this is actually happening,” U.S. District Judge Maame Ewusi-Mensah Frimpong wrote in her ruling. Because the plaintiffs were likely to succeed at trial and would suffer irreparable harm in the meantime, she issued two temporary restraining orders (TROs) halting the mass arrests and the detention without access to counsel.
The morning of the ruling, Trump’s border czar Tom Homan went on Fox to claim that ICE agents “don’t need probable cause to walk up to somebody, briefly detain them and question them,” as if that were all they were doing, which is clearly false. “They just go through the observations, get articulable facts, based on their location, their occupation, their physical appearance, their actions,” Homan said.
But that is precisely what the judge ruled they could not do — because that would apply to a broad class of people, the very kind of sweeping police power that the British abused in pre-revolutionary America and that the founders prohibited in the Fourth Amendment.
Afterwards, one of the plaintiff attorney organizations, the National Day Laborer Organizing Network (NDLON), issued a statement saying, “In the coming days, it will be up to the people of Los Angeles—the rapid response networks, the community organizations, and the neighborhood associations—to make this win real by holding ICE accountable to the Court’s order.”
“The work of NDLON and other day laborer advocates … is of extreme importance today,” Victor Narro, project director at the UCLA Labor Center, told Random Lengths. “One of the Trump administration’s major agendas with its mass deportation policy is the eradication of our rights under the Fourth Amendment (protection against unreasonable search and seizure) and Fifth Amendment (right to remain silent, access to counsel, and due process). Day laborers have become the vanguard in the fight to preserve and protect our Fourth and Fifth Amendment rights, which is why we must all get involved to support them and the day laborer advocates,” Narro said.
“This is a similar situation with other ‘open air’ workers like carwash workers and street vendors,” he added. “This is why we must come behind them and support advocates like the CLEAN Carwash Worker Center and the Los Angeles Street Vendor Coalition. They are all in the trenches at the front line in the fight against the attacks on our constitutional rights.”
Although baseless immigration fears — about “invasion,” criminality and job loss — were crucial in electing Trump, public opinion has turned sharply against him as his actual policies have rolled out. Undocumented immigrants’ crime rates are much lower than native-born Americans, and so to meet arbitrary quotas, ICE has turned to mass arrests of the easy-to-grab — such as day laborers — most of whom are hardworking, with deep roots in their communities.
A survey of 330 Mexican immigrants held in ICE detention conducted by the LA Mexican consul general found that more than half of detainees (52%) have lived in the U.S. for at least a decade, and a third (36%) have been here for more than 20 years, while almost one third (31%) have U.S.-born children. They work in a variety of industries, including car washing, construction, factory work, and landscaping.
“There is no hiding the truth about the hardworking immigrants who are being hunted, chased, and locked away by this administration,” said NDLON Co-Executive Director Pablo Alvarado. “They are not the ‘worst of the worst,’ as the administration dishonestly calls them. They are the best of the best. Their hard work supports their families, this country, and, through remittances, the country of their birth.”
Initial approval of Trump’s immigration policies turned negative in early June in IPSOS/Reuters polling, with 51-41% disapproval in mid-July. Specific aspects are even more unpopular. Workplace arrests are opposed 54-28%, and military-style arrests are opposed 53-30%.
A Quinnipiac poll had similar findings: ICE enforcement actions are disapproved 56-39%, Trump’s deployment of Marines in LA is disapproved 60-37%, and his overall handling of deportations is disapproved 59-39%.
More broadly, a recent Gallup poll found that almost eight in 10 Americans, 79%, now say immigration is “a good thing” for the country, up from 64% a year ago and a high point this century.
Given this broad public sentiment, popular resistance here in the LA region may prove crucial, not only in holding ICE accountable to this temporary order, but also in preserving the rights at issue before the Supreme Court, which is likely to get involved sooner or later. While the Trump administration has lost the overwhelming majority of cases in lower court rulings, the Supreme Court has repeatedly overturned settled law to favor Trump, as it did when it granted him 17th-century king-like criminal immunity for “official acts.” And it’s likely to continue doing so unless it deems the blowback too severe, constitutional law professor Eric Segall told Random Lengths.
Segall is the author of the 2012 book, Supreme Myths: Why the Supreme Court Is Not a Court and Its Justices Are Not Judges, which argued that the Court, not being subject to review or any other outside constraint, acts more as a political body, and has throughout its history. While it seemed like a left-field view when first published, it’s a view now widely shared by Court critics. But that was an argument about the role of political ideology. What’s unfolding now is more sordid — purely partisan rulings.
If the case comes to the Supreme Court, “they will do whatever they think is in the best interests of the Republican Party,” Segall said, after describing the broader pattern of their decision-making as “procedurally incomprehensible.” Above all, he pointed to their use of the “shadow docket” to issue temporary stays without explanation, effectively allowing plainly illegal and unconstitutional government action to continue.
“The district courts are preserving the status quo,” Segall said, protecting people’s rights before an issue goes to trial. “The Supreme Court is coming in and destroying the status quo. And that’s not how appellate courts are supposed to work. You preserve the status quo until it’s worked out at the end. What the court is doing is procedurally completely unjustifiable and I don’t think they could give reasons,” he said. “They can’t give reasons for interfering with district courts in a way no Supreme Court has ever done in history.”
A recent example involved allowing the Trump administration to effectively destroy the Department of Education via mass firings. “It’s illegal to end the Department of Education. Everybody knows that. All the district courts are doing is trying to preserve the status quo until a final ruling on the merits and the [Supreme] Court comes in and says ‘No! Destroy the status quo!’ and the only reason they’re doing that is to help the Republicans. I don’t think it’s complicated.
“The Court has become ‘a subset’ or an arm of the Republican party,” Segall said. “It doesn’t mean the Republican Party always wins in the Court because they know they can’t get away with that. But they’ll do whatever is in the best interest of the Republican Party,” a pattern that’s been in place “since Amy Coney Barrett was confirmed,” he noted. “There are some things he [Trump] does that in the long run will hurt the Republican Party,” and so they could rule against him.
This is precisely where mobilized opposition aligned with public opinion could prove crucial.
Not only has Trump come after undocumented immigrants, but those who stand in solidarity with them are also attacked, because authoritarians always attack anyone who opposes them, one way or another. This includes U.S. citizens observing the raids, but also judges — as happened in Minnesota — and elected officials, as happened in New Jersey, and here in LA when Sen. Alex Padilla was wrestled to the ground by government goons when he tried to ask Interior Secretary Kristie Noem a question at a press conference.
At the time, Noem’s authoritarian message was clear. “We are not going away. We are staying here to liberate the city from the socialist and burdensome leadership that this governor and this mayor have imposed.”
Using armed troops to “liberate the city” from its elected leadership is a classic authoritarian move. Touting it while your armed thugs wrestle an elected U.S. senator to the ground only serves to make the message unmistakably clear.
In a similar vein, Noem has also criticized Bass for calling LA what it is: a city of immigrants.
“Now she’s holding press conferences talking about the fact that people have the right to peacefully protest, and that they’re a city of immigrants,” Noem said about Bass on Fox’s Hannity show. “Well, they’re not a city of immigrants; they’re a city of criminals,” she continued. “Because she has protected them for so many years.”
In reality, Bass has only been mayor for a little over two years, and in that time, crime has declined dramatically. Homicides are down 30.89%, rapes down 13.60%, total violent crimes down 11.04%, and property crime down 10.22%.
But Noem was hardly alone in threatening California self-government. On July 17, ICE raided a Sacramento-area Home Depot — hundreds of miles north of any previous raids — detaining at least one U.S. citizen while Border Patrol El Centro Sector Chief Gregory Bovino released a video filmed in front of the state capitol building, saying, “There is no such thing as a sanctuary city. There is no such thing as a sanctuary state,” alongside images of masked agents arresting men. “This is how and why we secure the homeland for Ma and Pa America. We’ve got your back, whether it’s here in Sacramento or nationwide, we’re here and we’re not going anywhere.”
But the raid that day appeared to be a clear violation of a similar court order in a different federal district, which was issued in April in a case brought by the United Farm Workers and the ACLU. And its impact — along with other such raids — is the exact opposite of what Bovino claimed. Arresting day laborers at a Home Depot does nothing to “secure the homeland for Ma and Pa America,” who are presumably white. But it might put them out of a job.
During the campaign, Trump not only lied about immigrants invading the country and being “the worst of the worst” criminals, emptied out foreign jails. He also claimed that all the jobs created under Joe Biden since 2022 had been taken by undocumented immigrants. “They’re taking your jobs, they’re taking your jobs,” Trump told a crowd in Wilmington, N.C., on Sept. 21. “Every job produced in this country over the last two years has gone to illegal aliens, every job, think of it,” Trump lied.
“We’re going to save you. We’re going to save you. We’re going to save you,” he lied some more.
For a reality check, Random Lengths consulted economist Dean Baker, co-founder of the Center for Economic and Policy Research.
“The economy created over 9 million jobs from January 2022 to January 2025,” Baker said. “By our best estimates, 3.8 million of those went to immigrants, leaving over 5 million for native-born workers. Trump may be confused on this issue, but the data are very clear. Native born workers were getting jobs at a very rapid pace in these years.”
But that may be coming to an end. Not only are the raids scaring immigrants away from worksites, but the raids are also having ripple effects, putting even more citizens than non-citizens out of work, according to Census Bureau statistics analyzed by UC Merced researchers, who found a 3.1% drop in private-sector employment the week immediately after the immigration raids began in the state. The dramatic drop is second only to that during the onset of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020, and is greater than during the Great Recession.
While the drop in noncitizen workers (including documented green-card holders) was more dramatic percentage-wise, almost 80,000 more citizens lost their jobs. Noncitizen employment saw “a decline of 193,428 workers (or -7.2%),” while Californian citizen employment saw “a loss of 271,541 (or -2.2%),” according to the report. This compares to a nationwide decline of just 0.2%.
The researchers recommended that state policymakers consider “significant action” such as economic stimulus and disaster relief, similar to that during the pandemic.
Still, things could get much worse than they already are — and not just for California. A story in the Guardian, “How Trump’s anti-immigrant policies could collapse the US food industry – visualized,” summed things up like this:
If the Trump administration oversees even a fraction of its promised mass deportation of 11 million undocumented immigrants, it could lead to major disruptions across the food system: crops left to spoil in the fields, supermarket shelves unstocked, takeout deliveries delayed and food prices soaring even higher. It could also upend rural economies that depend on migrant workers and their families who live, work, and go to school in small declining communities.
Baker agreed. “We will see the impact of Trump’s mass deportations most immediately in higher food prices, as many crops are likely to go unharvested,” he said. “We will also see some increase in the price of meats and processed foods, as many of the workers in slaughterhouses and processing factories are immigrants. Some of these will close, and others will end up paying far higher wages to replace immigrant workers. Also, many restaurants are likely to close since they won’t be able to get the workers they need.”
And while food is incredibly central to the economy, impacts would be devastating in other sectors as well, a point he makes in a recent Substack post. Baker cites major impacts to the healthcare, construction and hotel, and restaurant industries, each of which is facing other problems as well. But that doesn’t mean immediate catastrophe, he says, recalling the example of the housing bubble, whose collapse caused the Great Recession. Baker first began writing about it in 2002, and by the time it began to collapse, insiders were fully aware of how unsustainable it was. Even so, it took two years from the start of the collapse to the full-blown panic in the closing days of the 2008 election.
“Even when you have a clearly disastrous situation, it takes a long time for the impact to be felt,” he writes.
And speaking of a clearly disastrous situation, Trump now has the money to make things much worse.
A week before the ICE TROs were issued, Trump signed the GOP murder budget, which not only will throw up to 17 million Americans off of health insurance, while giving trillions in tax breaks to multi-millionaires, it will also dramatically expand the size of ICE (adding 10,000 new officers) and the Border Patrol agents (adding 3,000 agents).
This massive increase is sure to cause problems, as past ones have significantly lowered standards, even to the level of outright criminality. A 2012 Government Accountability Office report said that an earlier high surge in 2006-2009 recruited an unknown number of criminal underworld figures, who applied for — and received — jobs as border agents and officers “solely to engage in mission-compromising activity.”
At the time, that was seen as a serious problem. But authoritarian governments see things differently. For Trump, an influx of over-eager criminal thugs will be a feature, not a bug.
