Eustaquio Orozco Verdusco fotografiado en 2020.

Organizador de Trabajadores secuestrado por agentes federales en Minnesota

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Agentes federales de inmigración han secuestrado a Eustaquio Orozco Verdusco, un organizador de derechos de los trabajadores muy conocido en Minnesota por luchar contra el robo de salarios y la trata laboral. 

Su abogada y su hijo dicen que actualmente está detenido en el Centro Correccional del Condado de Cibola en Nuevo México, dirigido por CoreCivic, una de las mayores compañías privadas de prisiones en los Estados Unidos. Por primera vez, su familia va a la prensa mientras el apoyo de la comunidad para su liberación está aumentando. −Lo único que nos importa es tenerlo de vuelta con nosotros, en casa en Minnesota −me dijo su hijo, Gerardo Orozco Guzmán−. Eso es lo único que queremos. Nuestra entrevista se produjo tras el fallo de un juez en el Tribunal de Distrito de Minnesota el miércoles que negó y desestimó la petición de hábeas corpus de Orozco Verdusco, petición que pretendía impugnar su detención ilegal.

Minnesota
Eustaquio Orozco Verdusco pictured in 2020.

Worker Organizer Abducted By Federal Agents in Minnesota

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This article is a joint publication of Workday Magazine and In These Times. Federal immigration agents have abducted Eustaquio Orozco Verdusco, a workers’ rights organizer well known in Minnesota for fighting wage theft and labor trafficking. 

His attorney and son say he is currently held at the Cibola County Correctional Center in New Mexico, run by CoreCivic, one of the largest private prison companies in the United States. For the first time, his family is going to the press as community support for his release is swelling. “All we care about is having him back with us, at home in Minnesota,” his son, Gerardo Orozco Guzman, told me. “That’s all we want.”

Our interview followed a judge’s ruling in the District Court of Minnesota on Wednesday that denied and dismissed Orozco Verdusco’s habeas corpus petition challenging his unlawful detention.

Minnesota

The Minnesota Target Workers Who Walked Out Against ICE

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This article is a joint publication of Workday Magazine and The American Prospect. Rob doesn’t want anyone else to experience what his co-workers at the Target store in the Minneapolis suburb of Richfield went through. On January 8, federal immigration agents violently tackled and detained two Target workers during their shift. Rob was on the clock that day, and while he did not see the abductions, he did witness the aftermath. “We had a lot of people who were scared,” says Rob, who is using a pseudonym to protect him from retaliation.

Workers

The U.S. Workers Who Went on Strike for Gaza

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This article is a joint publication of Workday Magazine and In These Times. The most significant U.S. labor strike in the past two years in solidarity with Palestinians started with a simple premise. According to Nate Edenhofer, a graduate student at the University of California, Santa Cruz, ​“Everybody has some sort of vision of how they think the society we live in should be — most of them don’t think of it as being a genocide.” Edenhofer was part of organizing that strike, the only major strike so far from U.S. labor to defend the Gaza protest encampments and oppose the mass killing of Palestinians since Oct. 7, 2023. It included thousands of academic workers across the University of California system, echoing recent tactics of dockworkers — from Spain to Greece to France to Morocco—who have refused to handle military equipment and items they believe will be used against Palestinians. 

The strike rolled through one of the largest public university systems in the United States, with 19,780 workers voting to authorize the work action. The University of California campuses became sites of a pitched labor battle and a broader student struggle to stand with Palestinians. 

For nearly two years, Palestinian trade unionists have been urging workers — especially American workers, given the role of the United States in arming, funding and politically supporting Israel’s military actions — to take workplace action to stop the onslaught.

Minnesota

Alex Pretti’s Killer May Be Part of His Union

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This article is a joint publication of Workday Magazine and Jewish Currents. On January 24th, Border Patrol agents shot and killed Veterans Affairs ICU nurse and ICE observer Alex Pretti in Minneapolis—firing at least 10 shots within five seconds while Pretti was pinned to the ground. About six hours later, Pretti’s labor union, the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), released a statement about his murder. “We have received confirmation that a member of AFGE Local 3669, Alex J. Pretti, was the man killed during the incident,” it read. But while referring to Pretti’s killing as a “tragedy,” the statement fell short of condemning the federal immigration agents behind the shooting.

Minnesota

How One Minnesota Union Is Helping Members Survive the Federal Siege

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This article is a publication of Workday Magazine and In These Times. MINNEAPOLIS, MINN.—When Feben Ghilagaber delivers food to fellow union members hiding from the thousands of federal immigration agents swarming Minnesota, the lights to their homes are often off when she gets there. 

“People are scared for their lives,” she tells me as we drive to UNITE HERE Local 17 office in Minneapolis, a labor union representing more than 6,000 workers in hotels, stadiums and convention centers in the Twin Cities metro area. It also represents many of the workers at the Minneapolis–Saint Paul International Airport and Ghilagaber, an airport food service worker and steward for the union, says the people she delivers food to “are sitting in the dark.”

“ICE,” she says, “is attacking everybody.”

The majority of Local 17’s members are immigrants and/or people of color, which puts them at risk of being detained for merely being in public where border patrol and ICE are present. And they’re present everywhere. 

Under its so-called Operation Metro Surge, the Trump administration has deployed thousands of federal agents to Minnesota, where they have raided homes, schools and daycares, detaining school-aged children and violently attacking many of those resisting their presence. An ICE agent shot and killed poet and mother, Renee Good, on January 7 and she has become a rallying cry for the efforts to push ICE out of the area.

Midwest

How Trump’s Immigration Crackdown Chills Organizing and Erodes Conditions for All Workers

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This article is a joint publication of Workday Magazine and The Nation. In late 2025, federal immigration authorities detained a non-union janitor who had recently—and publicly—accused contractors for Minnesota’s Ramsey County of mass wage theft. “Despite a bunch of intimidation and threats to his job by his non-union employer, who was trying to pay less, he came forward at a press conference launching these allegations,” Greg Nammacher, the president of SEIU Local 26, told me. 

The courage of this worker, who has been released but is now in deportation proceedings, played a vital role moving the case forward, according to the union, and it supported a similar wage theft case against Hennepin County contractors, which was also announced at the press conference where he spoke. The effort delivered for workers. The case against Hennepin County contractors resulted in the disbursal of nearly $400,000 in back pay to more than 70 subcontracted workers in December 2025, and the case against Ramsey County contractors is ongoing and has already led to some internal policy changes. 

When someone who fought so successfully for workers—both immigrants and non-immigrants—is detained, “it sends a chill through all the workers in the non-union companies that are trying to stand up and get their rights enforced,” Nammacher said.

Minnesota

“We Are Facing a Tsunami of Hate”: Amid ICE Crackdown, Unions and Community Groups Call for Minnesota Shutdown in 10 Days

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This article is a joint publication of Workday Magazine and In These Times. Unions and community groups gathered in front of the Hennepin County Government Center in downtown Minneapolis, Minnesota this morning to announce a day of “no work, no school, no shopping” on January 23 to oppose the ferocious assault on the state by federal immigration authorities. “We are facing a tsunami of hate from our own federal government,” Abdikarim Khasim, a Minnesota rideshare driver, told the crowd. “We’re going to shut it down on the 23rd. We’re going to overcome this.” 

JaNaé Bates Imari, representative of the church Camphor Memorial UMC., told the crowd that the joint action will be “a day when every single Minnesotan who loves this state—who loves the idea of truth and freedom—will refuse to work, shop and go to school.

Workers

“There Is a War Against Us”: Worker Leader, Released from ICE Custody, Speaks Out

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This article is a joint publication of Workday Magazine and In These Times. Willian Giménez González is a day laborer in Chicago known for organizing for workers’ rights. He was part of a group that filed a federal lawsuit over the alleged beating and harassment of day laborers at a Home Depot. 

On September 12, federal agents detained him outside of his barbershop, beginning a 47-day ordeal in which he was held in the Broadview ICE detention center in Illinois and then moved to the North Lake detention center in Michigan. The abduction came in the early days of ​“Operation Midway Blitz” as the Trump administration dramatically ramped up the presence of heavily armed, masked federal agents throughout the Chicago area. Giménez González’s community responded with outrage and concern, rallying at the Broadview facility the day after he was detained.