"Our Biggest Fear": A Garment Worker Organizer on the ICE Raid That Set Off Mass Protest

[Omaha Steve]

https://inthesetimes.com/article/ice-raids-garment-workers-los-angeles

“They’re picking up folks who were literally just going about making their daily bread and terrorizing them in their place of work,” says Marissa Nuncio, director of the Garment Worker Center in Los Angeles.
Thomas Birmingham June 11, 2025

On Friday, the Trump administration began its brutal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids in Los Angeles with a clear target: workers.

All told, over 40 immigrants were arrested, including Home Depot employees snatched from company parking lots and roughly two dozen garment workers detained at an Ambiance Apparel warehouse. By the day’s end, ICE had also detained David Huerta, the president of SEIU California, a union with a large immigrant membership, who had come to Ambiance Apparel to bear witness to the raid. (Huerta has since been released on bail and is being charged with a felony.) It was the raids in LA’s Fashion District that set off sustained, city-wide protests against ICE, which led to the Trump administration deploying National Guard troops to quell them.

To discuss how the abduction of garment workers can be seen as an effort to prevent immigrants from organizing, and how the labor movement can work to respond to ICE’s aggression, In These Times spoke with Marissa Nuncio, Director of the Garment Worker Center in the heart of the Fashion District, who explained that the protests have become a ​“lightning bolt moment where the realities of our government, the realities of exploitation and of repression are [being] revealed.”

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

FULL story at link above.