Raids at Work: Latinx Immigrant Labor Precarity and the Spectacle of ICE Worksite Enforcement Raids

Introduction

After a pledge on the part of the Trump Administration to “take the shackles off ¹ ” Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the agency made a nearly ten-fold increase in criminal and administrative worksite-related arrests in fiscal year 2018 (Aleaziz 2018; ICE 2018a). This marked a change from the Obama Administration which opted for “silent audits” of I-9 employment records and deemphasized worksite raids (Sampaio 2015, 141–142). Despite conducting the largest worksite raid in the nation’s history, resulting in the arrest of 680 workers in a single day, the Trump Administration prosecuted only 11 employers (but no companies) between April of 2018 and May of 2019 (Gallagher et al. 2019; TRAC 2019). If employers and business owners are rarely ever held accountable, why do worksite raids persist as a tool of immigration enforcement? To answer this question, I situate worksite raids within the broader context of Latinx racialization, labor exploitation, and immigration restrictionism.

First, I argue that contemporary iterations of worksite enforcement raids are marked by similar elements of public spectacle present in border militarization (Brown 2010; Chavez 2008; De Genova 2013; Golash-Boza 2015). I show how the government and media choreograph worksite raids in ways that (re)produce the illegality of Latinx im/migrants which racializes and thus normalizes such forms of ethno-racialized violence. Second, interviews with immigrants directly and indirectly affected by the 2018 worksite raids in Ohio show how they experience and understand such operations within the highly racialized and structurally precarious conditions of their workplaces. This study demonstrates the self-reinforcing dynamic that occurs when the government justifies workplace raids as interrupting patterns of labor exploitation while those raids actually work to instill fear in laborers and suppress whistle-blowing against mistreatment and poor working conditions.

This study begins by forwarding an understanding of ICE worksite raids as spectacles of immigration enforcement. I explain how processes of racialization and patterns of labor precarity are critical for understanding how and why the immigration enforcement system targets Latinx im/migrant workers. I then show how worksite enforcement raids serve as spectacles that can accomplish the dual goals satisfying nativist desires for public displays of migrant cruelty while simultaneously demobilizing resistance from im/migrant workers. Only by appreciating the political and economic utility of spectacular worksite raids can scholars understand the continued use of these operations in the face of their instrumental futility at achieving their purported goals of deterrence.

ICE Worksite Raids as Immigration Enforcement Spectacles

Worksite raids, as defined by Lopez et al. (2022), meet four criteria: “(1) ICE agents enter a commercial space; (2) in a single enforcement action; (3) on a single day; (4) in a single community” (p. 3). The two worksite raids that comprise the basis of this study—at Corso’s Flower and Garden Center, a nursery operation in Erie County, Ohio, and at Fresh Mark ² , a meat-processing company with locations in Northeast Ohio—satisfy this definition. The toll of these raids on the impacted communities (see Online Appendix for summary), including the separation of families via detention and deportation as well as acute economic distress suffered by many households, is in stark contrast to the elements of spectacle in both raids.

Worksite raids as a tool of immigration enforcement have long been used not for the instrumental goal of deterring additional unauthorized entries, but to maintain political-economic arrangements that serve employer and government interests. For example, Operation Wetback, which resulted in the mass deportation of 200,000 Mexicans in 1954, was less a plan to permanently expulse Mexican workers so much as a carefully coordinated effort between the INS and agribusiness to allow for deported undocumented workers to re-enter as temporary guest workers, or braceros, in a process termed “drying ³ .” According to historian Adam Goodman, the highly publicized spectacles of Operation Wetback raids “amounted to a yearlong INS self-promotion campaign that served as a way for the agency to boost its reputation, build morale among its officers, and solidify its place within the federal bureaucracy” (Goodman 2020, 71). More recently, the timing of the 2006 ICE raid of Swift & Co. meatpacking plants coincided with the Bush Administration’s effort to pressure legislators to pass a guest worker program ⁴ (Bacon 2007; Hsu 2008).

I contend that the two ICE worksite raids examined herein are consistent with patterns of immigration enforcement which other scholars have described as “spectacles” (Andreas [2000] 2009; Beltrán 2020; Brown 2010; Chavez 2008; De Genova 2013). Peter Andreas articulated the importance of optics for immigration enforcement by explaining how the federal government’s media strategy in the 1990s changed the public’s perception of an over-run México–U.S. border ⁵ . According to Andreas, the Clinton Administration understood that how the media and public “see the border is more critical than actual deterrence” and how efforts to push images of an overwhelmed southern border “out of the public’s mind … reinforces the new look of order” ([2000] 2009, 109). By contrast, the Trump Administration sought to use the images of ICE worksite raids to push the issue of immigration into the public’s mind. According to De Genova’s concept of “border spectacle,” scenes of migrant illegality from the nation’s interior heighten the sensorial aspects of threat because if the border is “effectively everywhere, so also is the spectacle of its enforcement and therefore its violation, rendering migrant ‘illegality’ ever more unsettlingly ubiquitous” (De Genova 2013, 1183).

The sensorial aspects of raids must also be understood for the threat they pose to im/migrant workers. In his comprehensive study of the immigrant rights protests of 2006, Zepeda-Millán (2017) contends that the protest wave’s abatement occurred partly because of a state suppression campaign that included highly publicized worksite raids. These raids were a part of a set of suppression tactics that “contributed to a less hospitable mobilizing environment in immigrant communities that, in effect, helped thwart their attempts at collective action” (149). Zepeda-Millán’s work demonstrated how English- and Spanish-language news stories about workplace raids “can function – intentionally and unintentionally – as a demobilizing force by fostering a sense of fear among current and potential participants in immigrant rights activism” (136). Raids were “spectacular” enough and sufficiently fear-inducing as to lead im/migrants to “question the effectiveness of mass marches and whether they were worth the backlash” (141).

The conceptual terrain of “spectacle” provides the analytical lens to interpret the three choreographic elements of worksite raids I outline below. The first element of spectacle I describe is ICE’s strategic use of the media to reach multiple audiences. Images of worksite raids at once project the aggressive reassertion of order craved by nativist constituencies while also transmitting fear to migrant workers. As highlighted by Rep. Kaptur, the congressional representative for the district where the Corso’s raid occurred, ICE did not inform local officials of the operation, but did notify an Associated Press photographer in advance. In her floor speech, Kaptur expressed outrage over ICE’s orchestration of media coverage. Kaptur stated that the Trump Administration “seems intent on staging a big show on immigration. But where is its interest on real solutions? Was this [Corso’s] raid really about security? Or is it more about intimidation?” (164 Cong. Rec. 2018). None of the published photos showed the chaos of the operation described in an excerpt from a letter sent to Kaptur from a woman present at the raid:

“I never expected anything like this to happen. When I saw them coming I ran. And I ran and ran and ran until I hid under a bed of flowers, and I buried myself under the dirt and cried in silence. All I could think about was my kids, I have three. A lot of us have some children who need us. My skin itched of the mud stuck to my body, drying ... I prayed to God for strength. I hid there for eight hours in fear of being taken, or that maybe ICE would still be around. I still feel like I am there suffocating.” (164 Cong. Rec. 2018)

Instead of capturing the full extent of the operation’s terror (running, disorder, fright, etc.,) that preceded the moments when workers were “under control” in a single-file line with their hands in zip-ties, the publicized images were limited to those consistent with the “visual grammar” of racialized Latin American low-wage workers as criminal threats (De Genova 2013, 1181). Following news of the raid at the meat-packing plant, a member of the city council expressed dismay at the labor practices by one of her city’s largest employers saying, “I didn’t realize we had so many illegals in our area” (Grazier 2018). Thus, ICE worksite raids are attention-grabbing because they provide a momentary, yet salient, display of the criminalization of racialized workers who are routinely invisiblized.

The second way the 2018 ICE raids at Corso’s and Fresh Mark amounted to spectacles lies in the Trump Administration’s simultaneous deprioritization of workplace safety enforcement. Doing so countered one of the instrumental goals commonly attributed to ICE worksite raids, namely, targeting employers engaging in repeated and severe instances of labor exploitation. In an ICE press release published a few months before the Ohio raids, then Acting Executive Associate Director of Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), Derek Benner, described how labor exploitation featured within the agency’s worksite enforcement strategy, stating, “ICE prioritizes violators who abuse and exploit their workers, aid in the smuggling or trafficking of their alien workforce into the United States, create false identity documents or facilitate document fraud, or create an entire business model using an unauthorized workforce” (ICE 2018b). Although the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) was established to address labor exploitation, ICE’s stated concern for immigrant workers’ well-being ran contrary to the Trump Administration’s record on workplace safety. In reality, the number of OSHA inspectors declined from 814 in 2017 to 764 a year later (a historic low in the agency’s history) while workplace fatality investigations were at a ten-year high (NELP 2018; NELP 2019).

A third way ICE worksite raids constitute a spectacle is through their failure to deter further undocumented labor migration—an instrumental purpose commonly cited by ICE as a justification for these operations. In a press release touting the agency’s doubling of worksite enforcement investigations over the previous year, Benner stated that by “reducing illegal employment,” worksite raids “build another layer of border security” and address “collateral crimes, like identity theft, document and benefit fraud, and worker exploitation” (ICE 2018c). However, the 2018 Ohio worksite raids did not fundamentally restructure hiring practices as meatpacking and poultry plants throughout the region did little to alter their reliance on an exploitable undocumented workforce. In fact, much of this same undocumented workforce later navigated through a climate of fear created by the COVID-19 pandemic. After meat production was classified as an “essential” industry by the state and federal government, many im/migrant workers and community members died as they were forced to work in crowded conditions at plants where social distancing was impossible (Bernstein 2020; Cheng 2021; Thompson 2020).

Whether through the careful curation of media images, or the governmental and corporate actions that undermine the purported instrumental goals of these operations, worksite raids are heavily shaped by elements of spectacle. The focus on the spectacle features of worksite raids helps scholars understand why and how disparities in enforcement between workers and employers persist despite the government’s explicit concern about labor exploitation at targeted worksites. The importance of spectacle lies in the dynamics of racialized symbolic politics and im/migrant labor precarity.

Literature Review

Materials and Methods

In the fall of 2017, scholars from four small liberal arts colleges in Northeast Ohio partnered with the Immigrant Worker Project (IWP), a 501(c)(3) that offers legal aid to im/migrants and asylum seekers, to devise a community-based research project. In collaboration with the community organization, researchers created a survey instrument (see methodological Online Appendix for interview guide) that, among other topics, asked about workplace conditions and experiences with the immigration enforcement system ⁷ . Over the course of 7 weeks in the summer of 2018, the team collected 367 in-depth interviews (in Spanish, K’iche', and English) with Latin American im/migrant workers across Northeast Ohio. Interviews were collected through a snow-ball sampling method which scholars have previously used to survey populations of undocumented immigrants (Cornelius 1982). The project’s explicit partnership with IWP, a well-respected local community organization, helped establish a degree of trust with interviewees. The IWP identified community members for the first round of initial interviews, and those interviewees then provided connections to co-workers, family members, and neighbors to expand the sample.

Importantly, the raids at Corso’s and Fresh Mark occurred during the first few weeks of the data collection process; therefore, respondents were not directly asked questions related to the raids. Thus, interviewers were limited to statements about direct and indirect experiences with the raids that were volunteered by respondents. The analysis of open-ended question responses that follows is based on the interviews with 14 individuals who shared telling and/or representative characterizations of their workplace experiences. Basic demographic information from the 14 respondents in this study sub-sample can be found in the methodological appendix (see Table A1). Although respondents were not directly asked about their immigration status because our community-based organization serves the needs of undocumented workers and asylum seekers, the data we collected provide insights primarily about undocumented im/migrant worker experiences. The following two sections explore how the spectacle of ICE worksite raids affected im/migrant workers both directly and indirectly.

Racialization and Labor Precarity Before and After a Worksite ICE Raid: Direct Impacts

Izel ⁸ , a Guatemalan woman in her early 30s, explains how poor working conditions were inextricably linked to the racial identities of workers at Fresh Mark. At the time of our interview, a few weeks after the raid, Izel was reeling emotionally from her husband’s detention by immigration officials the previous winter. Moreover, the household was undergoing financial strains following Izel’s decision to quit her job at the meat-packing facility a few months before the raid. When asked why she left her job of nearly a decade, Izel shared she could no longer withstand the crushing fatigue resulting from the physical demands of her job:

I left the job due to fatigue. My foot hurts and I got sick—I felt a deep fatigue. My foot would heat up after standing for so long. They paid attention to me [the bosses] for about three weeks, but when the workers don’t arrive on Monday, they would put me to operate the machine. My shoulders used to hurt, but now that I’ve left the job, they no longer ache.

Izel’s numerous ailments resulted from years of performing the repetitive motions required to weigh heavy pieces of frozen meat. Izel shared how dealing with the pains throughout her body (shoulders, legs, and feet) was exacerbated by her fear and anxiety of deportation which often kept her awake at night. “It’s difficult to sleep during the nights—I’m scared that someone will knock on the door.” Izel desperately wished for the protections that legal status would afford her and her family, stating, “quiero trabajar por mi propio nombre” (“I wish to work under my own name”).

Apart from small cuts treated at the nurse’s office, Izel did not report suffering a serious injury from an accident at work. However, she did describe how injuries were a common occurrence on the floor of the meat-packing plant. One anecdote Izel shared provided a critical insight into how poor working conditions were directly linked to racialized status. Izel described a strategy she developed to convince her white boss that a machine needed repair saying,

At times they [the supervisors] would get angry, but I would put him [the American] to work it [the machine] when he would yell so he could try it. When they [the supervisors] saw that the work couldn’t be done, only then would they call in the mechanic … Other paisanos get injured and don’t say anything. They’re afraid and they don’t speak Spanish.

Izel’s explanation of her strategy for fixing machines that might otherwise result in injury to workers if left in disrepair shows how the racialized devaluation of Latinx workers’ expertise produced safety issues. Izel’s innovative strategy, which required her to enlist a white worker (“Americano”) who could endorse the problem she had identified, speaks to how the assertion of labor rights is contingent upon the interaction between race and identity.

At one point during the data collection process, interviews were conducted with a few workers directly impacted by the Fresh Mark ICE raid. About 3 weeks after the raid, interviewers were joined by an interpreter with connections in the community so that Indigenous language speakers could voice their labor concerns. Excerpts from four different interviews described a hyper-segregated workplace where hostile behavior directed toward Latinx workers created a climate where many workers, already uneasy conversing with English-speaking supervisors, felt uncomfortable coming forward to share safety concerns. Interviews with four individuals, Jazmín, Ximena, and Ricardo (Guatemalans from the department of El Quiché) and Alejandra from Oaxaca, México, each attest to the issues workers faced at the recently raided facility.

Jazmín, a Guatemalan woman in her mid-20s, was detained for a few hours after the raid, but was granted humanitarian release by ICE to care for her small children. For Jazmín, the raid represented the traumatic culmination of a months-long ordeal at a hostile plant. Jazmín explained how intimidation from white co-workers reproduced the social hierarchies clearly present in segregated shifts. Jazmín described how the anti-immigrant sentiment on the part of white workers was palpable—expressed through body language, facial expressions, and, in some instances, even physical altercations:

There are some Americans ⁹ who are good people, but others look at us like we’re different. Just with their gaze you can tell it is bad. For example, when I was working at Fresh Mark, during lunch in the cafeteria there were some American women who would push us out of their way or bump into us knocking our purses to the floor. When we would walk past them, they would bump into you if you didn’t move out of their way fast enough.

Jazmín interpreted the aggression on the part of her white co-workers as an indication of the plant’s racial divisions most clearly on display in the racial segregation of the plant’s three shifts. According to Jazmín and other Latinx immigrant workers at the plant, the plant’s first shift was largely composed of white ¹⁰ workers whose line speeds were roughly half the speed of the second and third shifts composed of Latinx immigrant workers. The mixture of higher turnover among U.S. workers in the first shift and the privileged racial, language, and citizenship status that empowered these workers to assert their labor rights helped explain their safer line speeds.

Some workers felt that the pace of the first shift’s line speed shortened the temper of supervisors who felt pressure to achieve processing quotas during the second and third shifts. Ximena, a Guatemalan woman in her mid-20s, described how this meant that supervisors often yelled at workers. When asked about treatment by bosses, the first thing Ximena mentioned was the yelling, saying, “Supervisors would yell at us when the lines aren’t running or if the workers want a break. They start to yell, no insults, but they would get upset. When they would get tired and couldn’t work anymore the supervisors would start to yell.” After being in the U.S. for less than a year, navigating language barriers with English and Spanish proved difficult for Ximena and many other Indigenous language speakers.

A few respondents working at various Fresh Mark facilities described how the degree to which the meat was frozen was always a cause for concern for workers since insufficiently frozen meat could not be cut properly. Wilson, a Honduran man in his mid-40s, recalled one altercation he had with a white worker at the plant because it represented the inter-racial tension of the workplace, saying:

At work, a white guy got upset with me because I didn’t pass him a piece of meat that was unfrozen for the machine to cut. Afterward, the white guy grabbed the piece of meat from me and almost threw it on top of me.

On another occasion, Wilson described how a white co-worker aggressively ordered him to move out of his way. After purposefully misgendering him for the sake of public humiliation, the man yelled, “Move it, woman!” These sorts of aggressions were indicative of what Wilson perceived to be the underlying racism he experienced from whites throughout the state. He connected antagonism on the part of whites to the arrival of ICE at the plant saying,

People in Ohio are very racist. You can tell that they don’t like Hispanics to be here. Many of white people were happy when ICE showed up at the plant. The white people were told that they were going to raise their salary and that they would have to work fewer hours.

Personal experiences during the ICE raid at the meat-packing plant varied. Since ICE and other law enforcement agencies purposefully descended upon the plant during a shift change—likely to detain more workers—some interfaced with immigration officials while others like Ximena spoke to a labor contractor. Ximena said she was asked by her labor contractor to take a photo that could be run through the E-Verify system, but when she refused, she was fired and given her final check. Ximena’s cousin and brother were both detained in the raid which only further deepened her family’s economic distress. Two weeks after the raid, economic conditions in Ximena’s household remained dire. She described her anxiety and fear by saying:

I’m worried about not having an income, we [her and her baby] are no longer eating very well, I don’t sleep calmly … before the raid we would go out, but with fear. Now we go out less. When we go out now, we do so only when we have to, when it is absolutely necessary, but now we go out with far more fear.

The post-raid chilling effect described by Ximena was also echoed by Ricardo and Alejandra who were each detained in the raid and experienced separation from their children. The community exhibited signs of widespread chilling effects as many decided to stay indoors and avoided public spaces except for essential trips. Ricardo, a father of four children, only one of whom was with him in the U.S., explained how the 24 hours he spent separated from his young son was the most excruciating aspect of the experience. Despite his release from custody, Ricardo spoke of a lingering fear, saying:

I’m scared that I will be separated from my children. I spent 24 hours detained in Cleveland after the raid and during that time I was very concerned for the well-being of my boy. I’m very concerned that I will lose my boy.

For 2 years, Ricardo had endured the yelling from most of his white bosses at the plant as he spent the day hanging large chunks of frozen meat on hooks for processing. Now, without a job and concerned by rumors he heard of ICE going to homes, Ricardo felt like there was nowhere to hide, saying, “Before the raid I did go out more, now much less so. There are many rumors that migra is coming to people’s homes.”

Alejandra was also detained for several hours at an ICE detention facility until a video of dozens of children left without a guardian pressured the agency to grant humanitarian release to caregivers (mostly women). Alejandra explained what it felt like to experience the raid at her workplace, the range of emotions she felt over the course of the event, and her family’s daily efforts to manage their fear:

In the moment when it happens you are left in shock. You are left speechless—a person can’t defend themselves … I felt more fear for my kids—that was the worst. It was a relief to hear the news that I was going to be released in an hour … The fear has affected me greatly. I always have a constant fear. I think to myself: ‘what would happen to the children if they were to detain me again?’

Despite the fear she felt and the concern reverberating through her family, Alejandra resisted the larger narrative the raids portrayed of immigrants as undeserving:

In this country, everybody’s back is wet! Everyone’s family came from somewhere else. No one can judge anyone in this country because everyone’s an immigrant … Just because we’re undocumented doesn’t mean we don’t have rights! We don’t do anything bad, we’re simply working. We just come from work to the house, and then spend $300-$400 at a time at Walmart. They blame us for everything, but we’re not destroying anything. Americans, on the other hand? They’re not going to work in the fields from sunrise to sundown.

Alejandra’s assertion of rights in the face of the duplicity of the U.S. economic system that looks to immigrants to perform the essential jobs and services is indicative of the tendency of many immigrant workers to appeal to basic claims of human rights and dignity (Apostolidis 2010). In this sense, Alejandra’s comparatively deeper ties to the U.S. and her partner’s continued employment at the plant after the raid (the raid did not occur during his shift) likely afforded Alejandra a bit more freedom to articulate her anger at both the immediate conditions she and her coworkers faced in the raid’s wake and toward the structural conditions of undocumented immigrants in society.

Many of the Latinx im/migrant workers who worked at the raided plant were resentful of their workplace because of (1) the abuse they received from white supervisors and co-workers, and (2) the many racially discriminatory features of the plant like the safer (and thus superior) treatment enjoyed by less experienced white workers. These hostile and dangerous workplaces persist because the threat of ICE raids pressures workers to acquiesce to such conditions lest they invite unwelcome scrutiny from employers. This form of “self-disciplining” behavior follows a similar dynamic found among Latino im/migrant dairy workers living in a context of heightened immigration enforcement (Harrison and Lloyd 2012). As indicated by many of the interviewees, undocumented workers engaged in avoidance behavior and changed their level of public exposure after worksite raids. Although these workers lived and worked under the threat of potential ICE raids, experiencing the raid first-hand (or even indirectly) underscored their labor precarity within the larger context of their “deportability” (De Genova 2002). As many of the interviewees’ attest, despite being accustomed to risking injury or enduring unsafe conditions, workers felt the need to adjust their workplace behaviors to accommodate the new context of heightened enforcement.

Racialization and Labor Precarity Before and After a Worksite ICE Raid: The Spillover Effects for Indirectly Impacted Workers

The post-raid chilling effects described by the workers at the meat-processing plant were also experienced by workers elsewhere as news of the raid spread to their respective communities. Alba, a woman from Chiapas, México, in her early 60s who had been in the U.S. for nearly two decades, and her daughter, Rosa, were interviewed about their experiences at vegetable packing plants in Huron County, Ohio. Though she had recently left her job to care for her infant, Rosa detailed the difficulty of working 12–13 hour shifts 5 days a week, even while pregnant.

Some bosses are good people, but others were mean. When I had appointments with the doctor, they don’t let you go, they would find “buts.” This was when I was pregnant at my last job. Sometimes when you’re sick you call to tell them you’re sick, but they don’t believe you. They make you go to work and if you don’t go, they’d punish you or fire you … I didn’t get injured at work. I did sometimes feel the risks at work on the line of potatoes because sometimes they would move us to other stations. We were working in one station where it was very hot (where the oven was that would release the wet potatoes) and then they would move us to a location that was very cold (the giant refrigerator), and they would send us there without a sweater. If you didn’t want to go, they’d punish or fire you. When you’d go to the office to complain, they wouldn’t believe you. Your life doesn’t matter to them, they only care about your production; they don’t pay attention to you. If you complained, the boss could fire you or lower your salary. He didn’t want complaints.

Rosa’s description of the daily injustices that Latina workers suffered were made worse by the harsh responses meted out by white bosses when workers requested basic safety protections. To Rosa, responses to labor demands by Latina workers stood in stark contrast to the company’s responses to white workers’ complaints. Alba confirmed this, relaying how bosses had ignored her pain after she slipped and fell on wet onion peels: “Sometimes I tell them, but I think they only care if you’re bleeding.”

Lastly, Alba described how the labor exploitation she and co-workers faced was explicitly connected to the threat of ICE raids. She shared that her decision to stay home from work on a day she feared ICE would appear in town, a step she presumed was in the interest of her employer, became the grounds for her firing:

The Americans have told me that we are invading the country. My supervisor is mean … He told my daughter that they fired us because we’re immigrants. They give better salaries to the American workers … Lately, I think that they look at me in a bad way. They fired me from my job because I missed one day. The day I missed, I missed because they had told us, a rumor in the town, that migra was going to be in town. The truth is, some people think they’re better. The supervisor told me to my face that he was firing me because I am an immigrant.

The irony of being fired for taking a step to protect her employer was not lost on Alba. Alba and her daughter Rosa understood how the mere threat of ICE raids reinforced the illegality of Latinx immigrant workers in the eyes of her employers. Rosa and Alba’s experiences with a sense of “deportability” illustrate that interior immigration enforcement functions in a “productive” rather than “retributive” manner (Valdez 2016). Immigration enforcement, like ICE worksite raids, produces illegality because even when undocumented immigrants take steps to avoid deportation, exploitative labor conditions reserved for undocumented workers serve as a punishment.

Verónica, from the Mexican state of Morelos in her mid-30s, described how Latinx workers were regularly burdened with the most strenuous tasks at her worksite creating plastic seals for semi-trucks. Verónica attributed this unequal division of labor at her worksite almost exclusively to the undocumented status of Latinx workers.

They [employers] discriminate a lot against us. They differentiate us because we’re Hispanic, they give preference to people from here. They give the more difficult work to Hispanic people and treat us badly. They know that we don’t have the means to defend ourselves, and we, as Hispanics, have become accustomed to that because we know that we’re here in a way that is illegal. We have rights as human beings, but we know that we’re not here in the correct manner. You can tell that because we’re Hispanic, they [the bosses] pressure us more in the work. I don’t know how to defend myself because I don’t speak English. But even if I spoke English, I wouldn’t defend myself because I don’t have papers.”

Verónica’s lived experience was one characterized by the near absolute determinism of her undocumented status, to the point that she believed hypothetical fluency in English would provide insufficient protection for her to demand better workplace conditions. For Verónica, the salience of her fixed undocumented status heightened her sense of deportability during this period. However, interviews conducted with a few Latinx im/migrants with work authorization described how the heightened climate of enforcement following the worksite raids led to experiences with an alternative form of illegality. The following interviews from Domingo, Luis, Javier, Fabian, and Gabriel describe what Flores and Schachter (2018) refer to as “social illegality,” whereby illegality can operate beyond an individual’s documentation as people “rely on shared stereotypes” to “assign ‘illegality’ to certain bodies” (839).

For Domingo, a nursery worker in his mid-30s from Guatemala’s Zacapa department, the combination of a tight labor market combined with the now very real threat of immigration enforcement disincentivized reporting safety issues at work. He said:

Getting a job is really hard if your English isn’t perfect because people are racist and don’t want to give you a job … There’s always fear about reporting [safety issues]. Once they told me to go and sign some papers that said that if we fall it was our fault and there was no discussion about it—I think the company wished to wash their hands of us.

After suffering a fall that damaged his vertebra, Domingo found efforts on the part of companies to conceal safety issues to be especially troubling. Domingo had not filed a complaint against his previous employer after his fall out of fear that he would not be hired the following season. Despite having recently attained legal permanent resident (LPR) status, Domingo described how a sense of fear reemerged when he thought ICE officers parked at a local McDonald’s were staring at him. After telling his boss about his experience at McDonald’s, Domingo’s boss responded with laughter which only made him feel more worried that he could somehow lose his residency. Domingo’s inability to feel any sense of security even after attaining LPR status was due in part to his multiple encounters with police. Domingo reported being stopped regularly by local police which he saw as racial profiling. After the raid, Domingo believed police would “do an injustice and rip up my residency or something.” Thus, Domingo’s experience shows how even workers of less precarious immigration statuses working in other industries felt increased vulnerability after the raids.

Interviews conducted with individuals who possessed U.S. citizenship or temporary guest-worker visas (like H2a or H2b visas) also suggested how the heightened enforcement climate after the raids created negative spillover effects even for documented workers. For example, Luis, a nursery worker in his late 30s from the Mexican state of Guanajuato, described how the exploitative practices of his employer meant that compliant guest workers were rewarded. Under conditions with no pay hierarchies (a flat wage regardless of years of experience), consistency of work attained year to year was the premium. Therefore, guest workers who return annually on 9-month contracts quickly learn that compliance is the pathway to job security. Luis described how veteran workers actively cared for one another’s personal safety, saying, “We take care of one another. If one of us gets hurt, it could be the case that next year you don’t return.” Avoiding injury was a key objective for Luis as he had twice injured his lower back from performing heavy lifting tasks around the nursery. When asked specifically if he and his co-workers felt comfortable expressing their concerns about workplace safety issues, Luis said, “Do I feel very safe reporting? Well, the truth is that, no. It could be the case they no longer call you.”

Lastly, three additional workers with work authorization also corroborated the experiences of precarity shared by Domingo and Luis. Javier, Fabian, and Gabriel lived and worked at a tomato farm alongside 40 other men living in crowded conditions. These workers described some of the harshest labor conditions we encountered during the data collection process ¹¹ . Javier, a Mexican guest worker in his mid-30s, described multiple abuses by farm bosses emboldened by the heightened immigration enforcement climate: “We work 6 days a week, but sometimes we have to work the seventh day too… At the beginning when we first started, they said that Sundays were optional. And it was optional for like the first one or two Sundays, but then they started forcing us to work Sundays, too. So we have no days off. If we refuse, we get a warning, and after three warnings, you get fired.”

Fabian (early 30s) and Gabriel (early 40s), Puerto Rican workers who sought work in the U.S. following Hurricane Maria, worked alongside Javier and other Mexican workers. Fabian and Gabriel described how their U.S. citizenship did little to differentiate their labor experiences from others. Fabian described the verbal abuses endured by Puerto Rican and Mexican guest workers alike, saying, “There is one supervisor in specific that is horrible to both Puerto Ricans and Mexicans. Devin, he is very racist and has threatened Mexicans with deportation if they don’t wanna work Sundays.” Gabriel then described the strict rules that governed the worksite saying, “There are very strict rules. We cannot have a TV, no smoking, no women, no visitors, etc. If workers violate this, they can get a warning or get fired.” The experiences described by this set of documented workers are consistent with Flores and Schachter’s (2018) concept of “social illegality” whereby documented Latinx workers in low-wage jobs are perceived as suspicious and thus subject to the fear and disciplining practices designed for the undocumented. The insights provided by Domingo, Luis, Javier, Fabian, and Gabriel were important to include in this analysis because they show that while feelings of “deportability” for the undocumented rise in the context of the highly publicized workplace raids, so too do experiences with “social illegality” among documented workers (De Genova 2002; Flores and Schachter 2018).

Conclusion

This analysis has shown how ICE worksite enforcement raids emerge from and reinforce patterns of Latinx im/migrant racialization and labor precarity. Drawing upon the testimonies collected in the IWP Survey, this study offers three contributions. First, an examination of raids at work reveals that ICE worksite raids serve as spectacles of migrant cruelty choreographed to deliver maximum political symbolism rather than to address patterns of labor exploitation. According to Lopez (2022), nativist politicians find ICE worksite raids to be a politically useful way to “flex one’s anti-immigrant muscle while ensuring the existence of an exploitable worker class” (34). In this way, ICE worksite raids help to “produce” the illegality of im/migrant workers which immigration enforcement agencies and the media use to justify further operations, thus creating a self-sustaining cycle of raids as an entrenched practice. In conjunction with the systematic mistreatment of im/migrant workers, the climate of fear created by punitive interior immigration enforcement tactics like worksite raids actively “shapes” the meaning of race (Valdez 2016).

A second contribution has been to document how raids work as spectacle primarily because the legal and economic consequences of these operations fail to deliver the deterrent effect promised by the government. Government officials past and present have long identified two primary instrumental purposes for worksite enforcement raids: 1) their purported ability to deter further undocumented labor migration by removing an economic pull factor and 2) their targeting of employers who engage in repeated and severe instances of labor exploitation. On both counts, however, evidence has been presented that these instrumental goals are belied by both government and industry actions. The former rarely ever brings forward criminal prosecutions against employers, while the latter continues to rely on undocumented workers who are subject to increasingly exploitative and dangerous workplace conditions they are functionally prohibited from challenging.

A third contribution of this work has been to show how ICE worksite raids have far-reaching consequences. For both undocumented and documented im/migrant workers who experienced worksite raids either directly or indirectly, these operations deepened their fear of employer retribution for resistance to unsafe working conditions or racialized harassment. For those whose worksites were raided, these operations were understood as another signal of their racialized labor precarity. Workers seeking to assert their labor rights or protect their livelihoods described how the raids limited their ability to engage in such resistance following a heightened sense of “deportability” because of their undocumented status and because of the “social illegality” experienced even by those with authorization. In other words, by increasing the pliability of the undocumented workforce, a spillover effect is that raids erode safe working conditions for documented workers as well.

In conclusion, ICE worksite raids have implications for our collective understanding of other forms of legal violence. The fear, trauma, and suffering (both physical and psychological) caused by such operations exist within a system of “legal violence” which is constructed, sanctioned, and maintained by immigration laws and labor regulations (Menjívar and Abrego 2012). As such, ICE worksite raids can be understood as consistent with the U.S.’s legacy of ethno-racialized violence including gratuitous forms of anti-Black violence deployed to maintain systems of slavery, segregation, and political repression in the past (Weaver 2007) and to sustain profit-based systems of mass incarceration in the present (Alexander 2010). If the coherence of white nativist ideologies in the U.S. are dependent upon and secured through a steady flow of news and images documenting violence against “illegalized” immigrants, then operations like ICE worksite raids become a necessary component of this political project. Today, restrictionists use the spectacle of ICE worksite raids in service of protecting and expanding a vast immigration enforcement apparatus extending from the militarized México–U.S. border to the floors of Midwestern meat-packing plants.

Supplemental Material