On the day before Thanksgiving, California labor leader David Huerta was in a downtown Los Angeles federal courtroom pleading not guilty to a misdemeanor charge of obstruction, resistance, or opposition of a federal officer.
Huerta, President of California SEIU, had been arrested on June 6th, 2025, the first day of immigration raids in Los Angeles. One of the initial raids in the downtown Los Angeles garment district was where Huerta was arrested while protesting.
The raid also netted ICE dozens of garment workers. As you know, there have been many more migra raids at garment factories since then.
Huerta was released without bail, his charge reduced from a felony to a misdemeanor. He had to surrender his passport and is scheduled to go before U.S. District Judge Stanley Blumenfeld Jr., a Trump appointee, on January 20th.
Huerta was picked up on the day Los Angeles became the first ground zero of migra activity. The list of cities where ICE and DHS have moved in has since grown—Chicago, Washington DC, Memphis—among the cities to which ICE and Department of Homeland Security have dispatched masked and armed personnel.
In the LA area the migra are not only headed to garment factories, but have also done a showy raid with jeeps and horses at MacArthur Park a couple of miles from downtown and showed up at Dodger Stadium (in the parking lot and roads leading up to the stadium structure ) raided carwashes and Home Depot locations where day laborers wait for work—to name just a few favorite migra targets.
Carlos Roberto Montoya Valdez, a 52-year-old Guatemalan, ran across the freeway on August 15, 2025, after fleeing a Home Depot raid, and was fatally struck.
Community opposition in the LA area has been fierce, with activists there in many cases to meet immigration when they show up. That’s been the case at Dodger Stadium and Home Depot locations.
In Monrovia, 26 miles northeast of downtown LA, Carlos Roberto Montoya Valdez, a 52-year-old Guatemalan, ran across the freeway on August 15, 2025, after fleeing a Home Depot raid, and was fatally struck. Neighbors and the National Day Laborers Network organized vigils with candles and flowers near the place he lost his life and established a GofundMe page to get his remains back home to his family.
Recently those Monrovian ICE-resisters showed up by the dozens at the local Home Depot by for a little holiday shopping—they all bought ice-scrapers priced at $.71. Then they promptly lined up (pretty rambunctiously) to return them—and gum up the holiday works a little with the lines at the registers.
The ice-scraper shoppers argue that Home Depot benefits from having day laborers on the premises to attract customers who can pick up construction or landscaping supplies and enlist the jornaleros on site to help with a given project. Home Depot, amid calls for a boycott, released a statement in November disclaiming coordination with ICE. A post on X asserted that Home Depot “allowed [ICE] to work out of their parking lots,” charge the company called “untrue-we aren’t coordinating with ICE.”
(A plug here for the National Day Laborer Organizing Network (NDLON), which is on the case nationally to protect and support jornaleros and their rights and have been prominent in efforts to protect the Monrovia Home depot day laborers. If you go to their website you can find out more AND support them by buying some of their lovely merch for gifts for this holiday season.)
Like day laborers, carwash workers are also in a vulnerable occupation, essentially working in an open environment where it’s simple for masked ICE and DHS operatives to show up and scatter and arrest them.
Car wash employees have a robust organization to back them up. CLEAN Carwash Worker Center was established in 2007.
The car wash employees also have a robust organization to back them up. CLEAN Carwash Worker Center was established in 2007 to organize and provide legal and other support to carwasheros—or carwasherx, as CLEAN refers to the workforce that includes female carwash employees as well as males.
Carlos Amador is Economic Justice Manager at CLEAN, a DACA Dreamer who knows a thing or three about the immigration system and what’s happening on the ground with the carwasherxs. Himself a DACA recipient, he was working with CLEAN when Obama was in the White House and had signed the Dream Act. He has criticisms of the Obama Administration’s approach to immigration. But, unlike now, “there were leverage points we could push on” as a part of their campaigns, one of them a effort to untangle local law enforcement from immigration operations.
Almador notes measures that have been put into place over the years have offered some protections to vulnerable carwash workers. The car washowners represent a wide political spectrum, Amador says; and many support their employees by posting signs warning that the facilities are private property—for workers and customers only.
(They’re talking to you, ICE.)
There are of course dangers for carwash workers other than DHS raids: exposure to chemicals and other safety issues; scanty or no rest breaks; no accessible water on site. CLEAN has led many “know-your-rights” trainings; the workers now know what employers can and cannot do and if they are compliant with labor laws.
Now, of course, the “know your rights” conversations have increasingly turned to the vulnerability carwash workers face with the escalation of immigration raids.
“There is a growing, strong infrastructure of volunteer-led rapid response networks,” Amador says.
CLEAN and other grassroots organizations have structured a response built on the work and organizing they have done for years.
“There is a growing, strong infrastructure of volunteer-led rapid response networks,” Amador says. Their urgent emphasis is on alerting people to ICE incursions ahead of time if possible, supporting detainees and alerting their families.
Rapid response structure participants also collect raid stories for future legal actions–cases can only be successful, Amador says, with an accurate depiction of what’s happening on the ground.
Amador notes a difference at CLEAN–previously organizers working with CLEAN were proud to tell people if they were undocumented. “Now there’s a sense of fear or shame for speaking out as undocumented organizers themselves. They’re much more cautious.” The organizers are much more cautious about like being out you in the patrolling or the monitoring of different job sites.
“I think that is one of the big difference.”
To find out how you can support CLEAN efforts and that of other community defense groups visit: https://www.immdef.org/community-defense
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Copyright 2025 by Bobbi Murray. Image of David Huerta used under fair use proviso of the copyright law. All other images copyrighted by Barrio Dog Productions, Inc.