The longtime owner of a distillery and taproom in Virginia did something new last month: He emailed employees detailed instructions on what to do if immigration agents show up at the business.
Call the business owners immediately. Insist to the agents that they must speak to your employer. Ask them if they have a judicial warrant — signed by a judge. Remember, everyone has a right to remain silent in interactions with law enforcement. And, finally, while Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents have the right to enter public facilities, employees who hear about immigration agents nearby should “feel free to move the tasting room sign to CLOSED and lock the door. EVEN IF WE HAVE CUSTOMERS HERE.”
Speaking about the new policy, the distillery owner, who asked to remain anonymous to avoid retaliation, told HuffPost he was focused on making his employees and customers feel welcome.
“I sensed there was some fear and apprehension about this topic, and so I wanted to assuage that and basically be proactive and say, ‘Here’s how we’ll handle it if it happens,’” he said.
The company-wide email is part of a growing trend since President Donald Trump’s inauguration. While presidents Joe Biden and Barack Obama largely prioritized the arrest and deportation of undocumented people deemed public safety threats, under Trump, federal agents arrest any undocumented person they can get their hands on, regardless of their criminal record or employment status.
Often, that takes place at workplaces — including a Baltimore pizza shop, Philadelphia meat market, New Jersey kebab restaurant, Mississippi concrete contractor and countless others over the past two months.
In response, immigrant rights and legal groups have seen a surge in demand for so-called “know-your-rights” material, which explains how to interact with law enforcement including immigration agents. Demand is notably high from workers and business owners, they told HuffPost.
“We’ve seen an immense uptick” in demand for know-your-rights training, said Wennie Chin, senior director of community & civic engagement at the New York Immigration Coalition. The coalition includes groups that serve farm workers, domestic workers, taxi drivers, street vendors and a variety of other professions. One recent training was held for restaurant owners who wanted to prepare their own workplaces for potential law enforcement encounters, she said.
“Our team’s now doing at minimum three [trainings] a day, in person and virtual,” Chin added. “The volume has more than tripled. There’s not a day where our members are not doing know-your-rights work in the community.”
“The trainings are often hundreds of people in attendance,” said Jessie Hahn, senior counsel for labor and employment policy at the National Immigration Law Center. “A lot of those trainings have been specifically about worksite immigration enforcement and helping people understand their rights with regard to encounters with ICE at job sites.”
Know-Your-Rights Training Works, ‘Border Czar’ Says
There’s no greater evidence that know-your-rights training is helping to slow the Trump administration’s mass arrest and deportation program than what Trump officials themselves have said.
“Chicago — very well educated,” Trump’s “border czar,” Tom Homan, said a few days after Inauguration Day during a CNN interview. “They’ve been educated in how to defy ICE, how to hide from ICE, and I’ve seen many pamphlets from NGOs, ‘here’s how to escape ICE if [they are] arresting you, here’s what you need to do.’”
“They call it ‘know-your-rights,’ I call it ‘how to escape arrest,’” Homan said. Since then, he’s publicly agitated for a federal investigation of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), whose office has hosted its own know-your-rights trainings. She has openly mocked him in return.
“That is, for me, the biggest validation and assurance that the work we’re doing is making an impact,” Chin said, referring to Homan’s comment about Chicago.
Know-your-rights material can vary based on where it’s coming from, but the basics stay the same: In order to enter a private space, ICE needs a specific judicial warrant, signed by a judge, as opposed to “administrative” warrants that the Department of Homeland Security publishes themselves. Otherwise, in order to make an arrest, they need to establish probable cause of an immigration violation.
To avoid helping agents develop probable cause, people interacting with law enforcement should remain silent, ask to speak to a lawyer, not consent to any searches, and decline to sign anything, attorneys told HuffPost. People who feel comfortable, including onlookers, should film the encounter if they can, as it may be helpful later. Also, it’s generally a bad idea to run away from law enforcement, lie to them, resist or obstruct them, or give them false documents — all of which can escalate the situation and lead to an arrest themselves.
It can also be helpful to remind others around you of their rights, especially if you have coworkers or customers who are undocumented, or who could be subject to racial profiling, Chin told HuffPost.
“You always have the right to inform others of their rights” and “to ask a federal agent to identify themselves,” she said. “Most people want to listen to authority, but in that moment, it is important that employees give each other a gentle reminder of their human rights … Reminding people in that moment to remain silent is a great way to be an ally.”
Workers who know their rights are also less likely to be paralyzed by fear, which is one of the explicit goals of the Trump “mass deportation” agenda.
“Most people want to listen to authority, but in that moment, it is important that employees give each other a gentle reminder of their human rights … Reminding people in that moment to remain silent is a great way to be an ally.”
– Wennie Chin, senior director of community & civic engagement at the New York Immigration Coalition
A Larger Labor Issue
Several organizations — including the National Immigrant Law Center, the New York Immigration Coalition and Make the Road New York, an immigrant advocacy and community organizing group — have materials specifically addressing workers’ and employers’ rights if immigration agents show up at a workplace.
For workplaces preparing for ICE interactions, one key step is to mark private areas of the business — such as offices, kitchens, break rooms and other areas closed to the public — as literally “PRIVATE.” That way, workers can decline access to those areas to immigration agents who don’t present specific judicial warrants.
When you’re on someone else’s private property, such as in a workplace, the property owner makes the determination of how they’re going to interact with DHS or law enforcement when they show up, said Nathalia Varela, a supervising attorney for the Workplace Justice Project at Make the Road New York.
Varela argued that establishing a policy for interacting with immigration agents is a matter of workers’ rights.
“There is a larger labor issue here,” Varela said. “We’re coming [to work] for the majority of our lives. It’s at least 40 hours a week, and if you’re my clients, it’s anywhere up to 70 or 80.”
Varela and others stressed they weren’t giving legal advice to readers. But she proposed a hypothetical conversation with a boss: “All of us are scared. And we want to ask you to promulgate a policy and adhere to it, that if law enforcement comes here, you’re not going to let them enter the space unless they have a valid warrant. Are you willing to designate some of these spaces as ‘private’?”
Private areas like kitchens and offices “are places of distinction where an employer can step in and say, ‘Do you have a warrant? No? Then I’m not going to authorize you to come back into the kitchen,’” she told HuffPost. And if a legitimate judicial warrant lists the name of someone the business owner knows isn’t present at the location, they can say so.
“It’s important for people to understand — and get clarity from their employer about — the difference between an administrative and judicial warrant, and then, which areas of the worksite are public and which private,” Hahn said. Employers, she added, should make it clear to employees that people have the right to deny access to nonpublic areas of their worksite if ICE does not have a judicial warrant.
“That is their right,” she said. “And we’ve seen how many people have been successfully asserting those rights and pushing back against abuses.”
Immigration agents have a track record of using pressure and deceit to get what they want, including by using plainclothes officers who don’t properly identify themselves.
Trump has also deputized federal agents from across the government to increase immigration arrests, so uniformed officers making immigration arrests won’t necessarily have “ICE” or “immigration” on their uniforms, Hahn said.
Immigration agents “also have a well-documented history of trying to coerce people into granting them access with only an administrative warrant,” she added. “They issue those themselves. And they do not give them the legal authority to overcome the private property rights the owner, or their agents, have.”
Finally, immigration agents sometimes visit businesses for so-called “I-9 audits,” which are focused on reviewing a given business’s employment paperwork. Once at a job site, law enforcement officers sometimes attempt to make arrests by grilling workers about their legal status and trying to develop probable cause. As always, workers have a right to remain silent. What’s more, “employers have the ability to say to DHS, ‘We will bring all the documentation to your office, so you don’t have to return to our worksite,’” Hahn said. “They can negotiate for more time when workers are trying to get documents together.”
Universities Likely To See More Arrests
Among other major changes, Trump has vastly expanded the ability of immigration agents to make arrests at so-called “sensitive locations,” including health clinics and schools and universities.
The issue grew more urgent earlier this month, when federal agents arrested a permanent U.S. resident, Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil, from his Columbia University housing and quickly shuttled him to a detention facility in Louisiana. Khalil did not commit a crime, but the Trump administration says his nonviolent activism is grounds for deportation, and that “this is the first arrest of many to come.” A Brown University professor was subsequently deported despite a judge’s order.
Even before Khalil’s arrest, faculty, staff and students across the country were scrambling to plan for a new era of immigration enforcement on campus.
“There’s a lot of fear and anxiety,” one Ohio State University professor told HuffPost. “As a faculty member, my first concern was what to do if they came for my students in a classroom.”
“As a faculty member, my first concern was what to do if they came for my students in a classroom.”
– An Ohio State University professor
OSU provided some relief last month when the university stated plainly that “ICE officers must have a judicial warrant to enter non-public areas of the university.” Still, the professor said, the mood in Columbus has been tense since last year, when police arrested dozens of pro-Palestine protesters on campus in what he described as an overreaction. Since Trump’s inauguration, OSU President Ted Carter has also preemptively shut down diversity offices at the school.
So when faculty were told to call OSU’s campus police department if ICE showed up at their classrooms, “there were a lot of eye rolls,” the professor said. “It’s really unclear to us what, if anything, the admin would do if we had a similar situation to what happened at Columbia.”
The shock of Khalil’s arrest — the combination of Trump’s aggressive deportation agenda and his targeting of Palestinian anti-war activists and their allies — is adding to ongoing stress on the country’s universities.
In Ohio, Khalid Turaani, the executive director of the state’s chapter of the Council on American–Islamic Relations, warned international students to avoid protest altogether.
“If you are a student on an F-1 visa, on a student visa, do not participate in any activism in the United States,” Turaani said last week. “It is not a safe place, nor [is it] a time for you to participate. Just do your … studies and do not participate.”
At Columbia, journalism school dean Jelani Cobb said something similar in an off-the-record meeting with students after Khalil’s arrest.
“Nobody can protect you,” Cobb said, according to The New York Times. “These are dangerous times.”
In a post on social media, Cobb objected to the Times’ characterization of his remarks, noting he’d also said, “I would do everything in my power to defend our journalists and their right to report.”
But given the Trump administration’s aggressive use of decade-old laws to try to deport Khalil and others based on their political views, the point stands.
“These are, in fact, dangerous times,” Cobb said.
