The message of the amicus brief filed with the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in late June was simple: Officers tasked with enforcing the Trump administration’s restrictive new asylum policy believe it violates federal law and fundamental American principles.
“We wanted the court to hear our story,” said Michael Knowles, the president of Local 1924 of the American Federation of Government Employees, the union that filed the brief on behalf of asylum officers in the Washington, D.C., area. “This is folks doing the work, saying, ‘This is wrong.’”
The impact of that message may reach far beyond the court.
It is part of a little-noticed shift, in recent weeks, in the public response to the Trump administration’s border crackdown. Institutions and groups that are not normally partisan or political have begun to state publicly that the administration’s policies violate their core values, and to back up those statements with action.
A few days before Mr. Knowles’s union filed its brief, for instance, employees at the Boston headquarters of Wayfair, an online furniture retailer, walked off the job in protest of their company’s decision to sell furniture to a detention center for migrant children.
Research on ICE Business Enablers
Alleged . . .Trump and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) continue to dehumanize and abuse primarily Black and brown immigrants. Family separation has taken the form of concentration camps, separating children from their families as they come into the U.S., and coordinated raids target mostly immigrant neighborhoods and establishments across the country.
As detentions centers fill up, we have reason to believe
that the following nine U.S. hotel chains will aid Trump’s racist anti-immigrant agenda by collaborating with ICE to hold detained immigrants:
- Best Western Hotels and Resorts
- Choice Hotels (EconoLodge, Comfort Inn, Quality Inn, Sleep Inn)
- Drury Hotels
- G6 Hospitality (Motel 6)
- Hilton (Hampton Inn, Embassy Suites)
- InterContinental Hotels Group (Holiday Inn)
- Marriott (Courtyard, Fairfield)
- Red Roof
- Wyndham Hotels (Days Inn, Ramada, Super 8, Howard Johnson, La Quinta).
What’s more? Seven of the above hotels (all but Marriott and G6 Hospitality) have previously contracted with ICE. And, G6 was slammed with lawsuits for sharing client information with ICE. We, as consumers, must put pressure on these hotel chains to not collaborate with ICE, which continues to separate thousands of immigrant families.
