Black, white rally with immigrant workers

They gathered in the evening darkness in the parking lot near Dunkin Donuts and the Freeport, L.I., train station on Nov. 6. Latin@ day laborers called out to their fellow workers hurrying home, “Don’t be afraid, compañeros, join us.” And they did.

About 50 Latin@ workers and their supporters then marched to the Village Hall for a rally to demand an end to the racial profiling and persecution of day laborers in this town of 45,000 residents.

“We are workers who are here making your gardens beautiful, fixing your houses. We are day laborers trying to make enough money to send home to our families so they can survive,” said Gustavo Flores, a leader of United Day Laborers of Long Island-Freeport. (UJLI-F). Flores said all Freeport residents—Black, white, and Latin@—deserve to be treated with dignity.

The last thing Freeport Mayor William Glacken wanted was a demonstration that showed how his administration has racially profiled and bullied Latin@s, who number almost half of Freeport’s population.

Working class Latin@s, many of them from Central America, who rent rooms and houses in the village have faced dawn raids by housing inspectors, arrests for trespassing in public malls, police harassment and raids by “La Migra”—the Immigration and Customs Enforcement division of the Department of Homeland Security. The mayor is behind all this. Not even the Department of Homeland Security would proceed without official support from local authorities.

A worker-run group, Freeport Community Worklink Center, composed of UJLI-F members and community residents, has been confronting Glacken. Time and again, they planned demonstrations, but the mayor convinced local foundations to cut off material support for the legal day laborer shape-up site—a trailer hidden from public view. The site was set up in 2002 after the racist harassment of day laborers by Freeport police was exposed and after the New York state attorney general served Freeport village with a suit for housing discrimination.

Last spring, Glacken convinced the foundations to fire the worker-run group that administered the trailer and turned the shape-up site over to Catholic Charities. Then the foundations and the mayor forbade the workers from setting their own rules or hiring their own coordinator. UJLI-F members found they could no longer get work at the trailer.

The mayor and the foundations went further. They combined to cut funding to the main organizer of Latin@ day laborers on Long Island, the Workplace Project of Hempstead.

The workers in Freeport know that Mayor Glacken forced Vornado Realty Trust, a corporation with $14 billion in U.S. real estate assets, to put up “no trespassing” signs in the Home Depot parking lot. Glacken’s police department has been arresting workers there.

Freeport residents have seen that when contractors invite day laborers into their vans near the Home Depot, Freeport police cars often stop these vehicles. They have seen Freeport police physically wrestle workers out of the trucks, preventing them from earning a day’s wages. But the contractors are never molested.

As Juan Hernández, a Salvadoran leader of UJLI-F, said, “They have been trying to clean Latin@s off the streets of Freeport. But we live here, and we need to work, and they need our work.”

At the rally in front of Village Hall, Hernández compared Glacken to President George W. Bush. “How come [Mayor Glacken and] President Bush hate Latin@s so much, when the countries of Central America support the U.S. illegal war on Iraq. And who is illegal? Him or us?”

Teresa Gutierrez of New York City’s May 1 Coalition said that the Freeport fight for justice represented the struggle of immigrant workers all over the country and was the cutting edge of the working-class movement in the U.S.

The group then stood in silence in the Village Court as Fred Brewington, a Black civil rights attorney for workers arrested for “trespassing” in the Home Depot parking lot, declared his clients “not guilty.” When the supporters, the arrested and the lawyer left, emptying the courtroom, the judge was dumfounded.

Brewington told the supporters afterwards that their presence had put the Village of Freeport on the defensive for the first time.