Labor Defends Jailed Immigrants: Forklift Driver, Hospital Worker
Machinists union members rallied May 23 outside the Northwest Detention Center in Tacoma, Washington, protesting the jailing of fellow union member and legal resident Maximo Londonio, who was arrested coming home from vacation. Another rally is planned on Thursday, May 29 for detained hospital lab technician and SEIU member Lewelyn Dixon. Photo: Washington State Labor Council
UPDATE: On May 29, SEIU Local 925 announced that Lewelyn Dixon was being released after being held by ICE for three months. An immigration judge ruled that Dixon could not be deported. "Because of our communities coming together and exercising people power, Auntie Lynn is being released from detention," the union said in a Facebook post.
The Seattle-area labor movement is rallying in defense of immigrant members seized by the Trump regime.
Forklift driver Maximo Londonio and his family were on their way home from vacation in the Philippines—where he and his wife had celebrated their 20th wedding anniversary—when he was pulled aside at the airport, held there for days, then taken to a for-profit jail.
Londonio has a green card; he moved here from the Philippines when he was just a kid. His wife is a U.S. citizen; they have three daughters. And he’s a Machinist.
“Quite a lot of people in the shop are upset,” said Local Lodge 695 President Richard Howard. “They want us to get him out of there. Max is pretty well liked, especially in his department, shipping. He’s a family man just like the rest of us.”
The shop is Crown Cork and Seal, a manufacturer of aluminum beverage cans, near Olympia. Howard became friends with Londonio when they used to work the night shift together. They kept up a running banter about football—one is a 49ers fan, the other backs the Seahawks.
The Machinists teamed up with Tanggol Migrante, a grassroots network defending Filipino migrants, to hold a May 23 protest outside the Northwest Detention Center in Tacoma. They demanded the release of three green card holders, two of them union members.
JOB PROTECTION NEEDED
The other detained union member is “Aunty Lynn” Lewelyn Dixon, a lab tech at Seattle’s University of Washington Medical Center, who has lived in the U.S. for more than 50 years.
Dixon has been held by ICE since February, when she too was stopped at the airport on her way back from visiting family in the Philippines. Her union, SEIU Local 925, and Tanggol Migrante have called another rally at the jail this Thursday, May 29, when her case comes up for a hearing.
The Case for Shutting an Immigration Jail
Immigration jails are fairly new. La Resistencia points out on its website that 35 years ago, “ICE did not exist and immigration authorities rarely detained people while processing their deportation cases.”
Now tens of thousands of people are detained at any given time (51,000 as of mid-May) and a for-profit industry has grown to take advantage of those federal dollars.
La Resistencia argues that creating capacity has led to more detention. The group compared Washington to two other states where similar numbers of immigrants lived: Massachusetts and Georgia. But Massachusetts had half as much space in its immigration jails as Washington did—and sure enough, ICE made only half as many arrests there. Georgia, on the other hand, had twice as much immigration jail space as Washington—and 3.5 times as many ICE arrests.
Bottom line, the group argues: “As long as the Northwest Detention Center exists, GEO Group will seek to expand it, ICE will seek to fill it, and both asylum-seekers arriving at the border and Washington state residents will be in danger of being caged there.”
Dixon was on the verge of her 10th anniversary at the UW Medical Center and about to vest in the pension. Local 925 and other campus unions are pushing the university to protect her job and benefits, allow other workers to donate their leave, and extend these rights to any detained employee. The unions have gathered thousands of petition signatures, rallied on campus, and marched on the president’s office. The university has responded evasively.
So far Crown Cork and Seal hasn’t given the Machinists any trouble about holding Londonio’s job for him, Howard said: “The managers would like to see him [let] out too. They have a vested interest in having him back in the shop and back to his family.” The union has been passing the hat at local and labor council meetings for Londonio’s family, suddenly without its breadwinner, and for his legal defense.
LEGAL IMMIGRANTS
Green card holders are lawful permanent residents. They’re eligible to pursue citizenship, but not obliged to. Until the current crackdown they had no reason to expect they could be abruptly taken captive.
Now travel suddenly looks like dangerous for immigrants, no matter what their status.
Evan Church, a customer service agent at the airport, is a member of Machinists Local Lodge 2202. “As you might imagine, people who work in the airline industry, there are a lot of first-generation, second-generation, recently immigrated families,” he said, “because the flight benefits provide the opportunity to visit relatives.
“So it really hits home for a lot of people. There is a lot of fear in the work group, working in an environment around DHS and the organizations that are trying to snatch people returning from vacation like Max was.”
Church said just three or four of the most active members of Local 2202 came out to previous rallies at the immigration jail, but 10 to 15 carpooled down to the rally for Londonio: “This definitely has touched a nerve being one of our own brothers.”
Contrary to Trump’s claim that he would deport only dangerous criminals, ICE is dredging up decades-old cases to justify seizing ordinary people who long ago paid for their mistakes and moved on with their lives.
Twenty-four years ago, Dixon was convicted of taking $6,500 from a bank where she worked; she paid it all back. Londonio served seven months in jail on a nonviolent charge when he was 19.
“Because of something that happened 20 years ago, that he paid his dues for, now all of a sudden he can’t go home to his family?” Howard said. “That’s b.s., pardon my French.”
GROWING SOLIDARITY
The local labor movement has held several rallies outside the Tacoma immigrant jail recently. Two hundred people came out in March to a labor council-sponsored protest to support Dixon and farmworker Alfredo “Lelo” Juarez Zeferino, a leader in the militant union Familias Unidas por la Justicia.
Mylo Lang, an apprentice machinist at Boeing, is excited about the growing solidarity between labor and immigrant rights groups. He helped organize a May Day march in Tacoma that drew 1,000 people—they rallied downtown, heard updates on grocery workers’ and teachers’ contract fights, then marched to the detention center.
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When he realized that the latest detainee, Londonio, was a fellow Machinist, “a union brother,” Lang said, “I wanted to do whatever I could to spread his story and help out his family.”
He welcomes the opportunity to open conversations with his co-workers about how “you’re not poor and struggling to afford rent because an immigrant is taking your job, but because a billionaire is taking your labor.” He said it would be a mistake to write off Machinists as Trump supporters who will never “realize their place in a wider working class.
“Having these conversations is how changes happen,” Lang said. “They’re not going to be immediately received perfectly, but it’s starting the conversation and having these issues present themselves that really allows people to think more, and open their eyes and understand the struggle that they’re a part of.”
SHUT IT DOWN
The Washington State Labor Council is a longtime endorser of the campaign, led by local grassroots group La Resistencia, to shut down the Northwest Detention Center (see box). It’s the state’s only private prison, run by the for-profit GEO Group, and a significant node in the deportation system because of the nearby county-owned airport, known as Boeing Field, that does deportation flights.
A research team at the UW in 2019 started mapping the ICE Air system nationally, exposing abuses of detainees and how the county was collaborating with ICE.
The deportation system, Church said, is “a supply chain that starts at the airport,” where he works, “goes through the detention center, and ends at Boeing Field.” Indeed, the UW researchers’ map of the ICE Air network looks a lot like maps of other logistics networks.
After the research report came out, during the first Trump administration, then-King County Executive Dow Constantine issued an executive order halting deportation flights from this airport.
A legal battle ensued—the Biden administration continued Trump’s push for the deportation flights—and since a court decision last December, the flights have resumed.
“These protests are frustrating for all of us because they’re obviously not enough,” Church said. “The people that need to be freed are on the other side of that wall and we can’t do anything to tear down that wall, we can only stand on the other side and chant.”
But he said the demonstrations also give him “a lot of hope” as a chance to meet more and more people who together can build a movement capable of shutting it down.
