Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) allegedly conducted a raid at Amazon’s JFK8 warehouse in Staten Island, New York, last weekend, according to a former local union official.
Derrick Palmer, one of the founding members of Amazon Labor Union which covers workers at the facility, wrote on his personal account on social media platform Threads:
Attention all amazon workers at JFK8 Staten Island ‼️ ICE came to JFK8 at around 6AM this morning to arrest migrant workers. Although I’m not sure if anyone was arrested I strongly advise you all to inform every worker you know because I’m sure they will come back until they do. Please spread awareness by sharing my post as well 🙏🏾 thank you
Palmer remains a manager at the facility but is no longer in a leadership role within the ALU, having resigned in 2023.
The World Socialist Web Site has not been able to confirm the raid as of this writing. However, it comes in the context of a rapid escalation of President Donald Trump’s attacks on immigrants. According to a Los Angeles Times report last week, the White House is planning a massive raid in Los Angeles before the end of the month. The administration has also begun shipping migrants to the Guantanamo Bay prison camp, which it is converting into a massive concentration camp holding 30,000 people.
The attacks on immigrants are also taking place alongside increased repression in the workplace. On January 31, police invaded Ford’s Michigan Assembly Plant (MAP), where several workers were summarily fired. Ford Motor Company and the United Auto Workers say that a permanent police presence in the plants will become “the new normal.”
If the raid at JFK8 took place, it is also significant because ALU is part of the Teamsters, which it merged with last summer. The Teamsters bureaucracy, led by General President Sean O’Brien, are major supporters of the Trump administration and his xenophobic “America First” nationalism. O’Brien, who is emerging as a right-wing ideologue in his own right, slandered immigrants late last year as “criminals,” declaring “I have a problem when people come into this country with the agenda to commit crimes and do things that are not popular in America.”
Bureaucrats in other unions, such as the United Auto Workers, have declared their support for Trump’s “America First” trade war policies, while falsely trying to distinguish this from his anti-immigrant racism.
As workplace raids continue to increase, spearheading Trump’s plans to establish a dictatorship in the United States, O’Brien and other bureaucrats are being exposed as enemies not only of immigrant workers, including tens of thousands of Teamsters members, but of the working class as a whole.
A WSWS reporting team visited the JFK8 warehouse on Wednesday to speak with workers about the raid and the police-state nature of Trump’s war on immigrants. They engaged with workers arriving and departing from the public bus stop, many of whom spoke Spanish. Our reporters distributed a leaflet in Spanish titled “Mobilize the Working Class to Stop Dictatorship and Mass Deportations.”
None of the workers knew about the raid at JFK8. Although they expressed concerns about ICE raids in general, most were reluctant to share their thoughts further, fearing for their jobs. Several provided the WSWS with their contact information so that they could continue discussions later.
Everyone agreed that workers who come to the United States in search of work, a place to live, and a place to raise their families are not criminals.
During a short conversation with another worker at the bus stop, our reporter informed him about the recent raid on the Ocean Seafood Depot warehouse in Newark, New Jersey, not far from Staten Island. The raid led to several arrests and detentions. “So they’re really doing it now—they’re really doing it!” the worker exclaimed. He committed to reading the leaflet to become better informed.
An off-duty security guard waiting at the bus stop shared with our reporters his insights into the oppressive atmosphere experienced by workers at the warehouse, saying, “To be honest, I don’t know anything about anything, because inside there,” he said indicating the warehouse, “everything is like ‘allegedly.’”
The emergency fencing surrounding the warehouse heightens the sense of oppression, making the facility resemble a minimum security prison. Amazon installed this fencing in December 2024 in anticipation of a three-day strike organized by ALU-IBT due to the company’s refusal to negotiate a labor contract.
The warehouse is Amazon’s only unionized facility in the United States. Since the union’s formation in 2022, Amazon has stalled negotiations. The strike included pickets manned by community supporters and union officials, but no Amazon workers were present. It failed to push the multi-billion-dollar company, owned by Jeff Bezos—one of the richest oligarchs who attended fascist Donald Trump’s second inauguration—any closer to the bargaining table.
There can be no doubt that Bezos and Amazon management are emboldened by the Trump administration’s rapid attacks on the rights of workers, and any raid at an Amazon facility would have been done with the permission of the company. Amazon is also using Trump’s evisceration of the National Labor Relations Board to overturn a vote by workers to form a union at Whole Foods, the grocery chain which is owned by Amazon.
The WSWS interviewed workers during the strike, asking why only local “Amazon supporters” and union officials were on the picket lines, with no JFK8 workers present. One worker remarked, “I think there are a couple of reasons, and one of them is fear [of walking out] because there’s no trust in the ALU.”
When the WSWS mentioned the ALU’s affiliation with the Teamsters and their president, Sean O’Brien, who spoke at last summer’s Republican National Convention and openly supports Trump’s anti-immigration policies, she replied, “Well, that’s another reason. A lot of people don’t trust the Teamsters because of their support for Trump.”
Another JFK8 worker who spoke to the WSWS about the ALU leadership, elected in July, not informing workers of the ICE raid, said, “They’re worse than the previous leadership, even less informative!”
It is significant that JFK8 workers are learning about an ICE raid at their workplace from WSWS reporters instead of from the ALU IBT, which is supposed to represent them.
To defend the rights of immigrants and of the whole working class, workers must form rank-and-file workplace and neighborhood committees. As noted in the leaflet distributed by WSWS to JFK8 workers on Wednesday:
The International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC) will provide advice and support to such committees and will be actively involved in fighting to build committees and link them across school, workplace and national boundaries in a powerful network of correspondence and collaboration. The IWA-RFC will strive to introduce into the struggles ahead a political program aimed at connecting the defense of immigrants to the fight to defend the basic democratic rights of all.