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NEWS ROUNDUP

Deadly ICE raid | Tree Top wage theft | Rural hospitals

Monday, July 14, 2025

 

STRIKES

► From Truthout — Sanitation Workers Demand Higher Wages as Trash Pickup Strikes Spread Nationwide — The Teamsters said in an email on Friday that about 550 sanitation workers were on strike in multiple cities while 1,600 others refused to cross picket line extensions in solidarity with the strikers at local Republic Services sites in Massachusetts, Georgia, Illinois, Washington State, and California. For example, workers in the Bay Area launched a temporary trash pickup stoppage this week in solidarity with fellow workers striking over negotiations with Republic Services for better pay at a regional landfill near Stockton. “Republic Services has been threatening a war with American workers for years — and now, they’ve got one,” said Teamsters General President Sean M. O’Brien in a statement on Wednesday.

 

LOCAL

► From the Tri-City Herald — Tree Top juice company accused of not paying Eastern WA workers full wages –Tree Top is being accused in a federal lawsuit of failing to pay its workers at Washington plants the full wages they were owed. It has plants in Prosser, Selah and Wenatchee in Washington that produce fruit products, including apple and other juices and juice concentrates. It is a farmers’ cooperative with headquarters in Selah. The lawsuit is being proposed as a class action for the company’s Washington workers…The lead plaintiff in the case, Braine Johnson, a former Tree Top team lead in Selah, said he and other workers were required to remain on call and carried out requests from management during their unpaid meal breaks and rest breaks. They were not allowed to leave Tree Top during rest breaks, the lawsuit said.

► From KING 5 — ICE arrests up 65% in Washington: Communities respond with action, advocacy — Outside the barbed-wire fencing of the Northwest ICE Processing Center in Tacoma, protesters once again gathered — this time to demand the release of Alfredo Juarez, an undocumented farmworker and outspoken labor rights advocate from Skagit County…While protesters gathered outside the detention center, the Filipino advocacy group Tanggol Migrante celebrated Sunday at a Seattle park to honor Dixon and two other Filipino immigrants released from ICE custody. “It honestly feels surreal,” said Tracy Bartolome, a member of Tanggol Migrante. “Experiencing the fight together, making the phone calls to the consulate, writing letters to representatives, getting our coworkers and families to sign onto petitions. You can really feel the sense of community.”

► From KUOW — Portland family detained at Washington border facility for 2 weeks in apparent violation of immigration policy — A Portland-area mother and her four U.S.-born children have been detained by federal immigration officials for two weeks, an apparent violation of federal policy that limits how long people can be detained…“It is absurd that she has four U.S. citizen children with her, has an attorney and has no access to legal counsel,” Dexter said. “Her husband, who is detained, does have access to counsel. And yet we cannot connect the two of them to make sure that they understand the situation each other is in.”

 

NATIONAL

► From the Los Angeles Times — Details emerge about pot-farm immigration raid as worker dies — Trump administration officials defended the aggressive campaign to find and deport unauthorized immigrants even as a cannabis farmworker was taken off life support two days after he plunged from a roof amid the mayhem of a Ventura County raid. The death of Jaime Alanís Garcia, 57, announced Saturday by his family, comes amid a climate of increasing tension marked by weeks of militaristic raids, street protests and violent melees involving federal agents. Alanís’ family said he was fleeing immigration agents at the Glass House Farms cannabis operation in Camarillo on Thursday when he climbed atop a greenhouse and accidentally fell 30 feet, suffering catastrophic injury.

► From UFW:

► From the New York Times — FEMA Didn’t Answer Thousands of Calls From Flood Survivors, Documents Show — On July 5, as floodwaters were starting to recede, FEMA received 3,027 calls from disaster survivors and answered 3,018, or roughly 99.7 percent, the documents show. Contractors with four call center companies answered the vast majority of the calls. That evening, however, Ms. Noem did not renew the contracts with the four companies and hundreds of contractors were fired, according to the documents and the person briefed on the matter. The next day, July 6, FEMA received 2,363 calls and answered 846, or roughly 35.8 percent, according to the documents. And on Monday, July 7, the agency fielded 16,419 calls and answered 2,613, or around 15.9 percent, the documents show.

► From the New York Times — Judge Signals She Will Protect Abrego Garcia From Hasty Second Deportation — A frustrated federal judge signaled on Friday that she would issue an order protecting Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, the immigrant who was wrongfully deported to El Salvador, from being hastily expelled from the United States again after he was brought back last month to face criminal charges. The suggestion by Judge Paula Xinis, who is handling the original civil case emerging from the wrongful deportation, came during a hearing in Federal District Court in Maryland where she exploded at the Justice Department for having badly damaged the bonds of trust that are normally afforded by the courts to lawyers for the government.

► From Meat + Poultry — OSHA fines Tyson Foods subsidiary after boiler room explosion — On Dec. 26, 2024, the agency determined that two workers at the Camilla plant “were seriously burned when a hose filled with oil ruptured, igniting the oil mist and causing a fire and explosion in the boiler room.”…RWDSU President Stuart Appelbaum provided a statement following the DOL’s announcement, in which he criticized the “meager fine” issued against the processor. “What we’ve learned today is that Tyson Foods was in fact at fault for our members’ near life ending injuries,” he said. “While a worker’s life can never be monetarily valued, it certainly cannot be valued at a few thousand dollars. OSHA’s decision to issue only modest fines in the wake of the devastating boiler explosion at Tyson’s Camilla, Ga., poultry plant is the true embodiment of a broken system that lacks the teeth and incentives to protect workers.”

► From the AP — Nursing homes struggle with Trump’s immigration crackdown — Facilities for older adults and disabled people are reporting the sporadic loss of employees who have had their legal status revoked by Trump. But they fear even more dramatic impacts are ahead as pipelines of potential workers slow to a trickle with an overall downturn in legal immigration…Nearly one in five civilian workers in the U.S. is foreign born, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, but as in construction, agriculture and manufacturing, immigrants are overrepresented in caregiving roles. More than a quarter of an estimated 4 million nursing assistants, home health aides, personal care aides and other so-called direct care workers are foreign born, according to PHI, a nonprofit focused on the caregiving workforce.

► From the Teamsters:

 

POLITICS & POLICY

► From the Hill — Hospitals across nation brace for Medicaid cuts under ‘big, beautiful’ law — While most of the cuts won’t happen immediately, rural facilities in particular say they likely will have to make difficult financial decisions about which services they can afford to keep and which may need to be cut…The new law cuts about $1 trillion from Medicaid, primarily through stringent work requirements as well as reductions to how states can fund their Medicaid programs through provider taxes and state directed payments…“State directed payments are a critical source of support for hospitals, particularly in rural areas, and provider taxes help reduce the gap between Medicaid and other payers, ensuring that physicians can take Medicaid patients and hospitals can be adequately staffed. Cutting these lifelines is not sustainable, and it will harm patients.”

► From the Washington Post — State Department fires more than 1,300 employees in downsizing plan — The diplomats hit hardest hailed from the offices that Secretary of State Marco Rubio eliminated in his sweeping reorganization of the department, the most far-reaching in decades, including the Office of Global Women’s Issues and the department’s diversity and inclusion programs. But cuts also affected employees working on highly volatile issues, including Syria, a brittle Middle Eastern country emerging from decades of authoritarian rule, and senior officials in charge of chemical weapons issues and multilateral nuclear diplomacy.

► From the New York Times — VIDEO: How the V.A. and DOGE Misreported Big Savings — Over the past six months, The New York Times has documented how the Department of Government Efficiency’s “Wall of Receipts,” the only public accounting of its work, has been plagued by errors. To understand why, David A. Fahrenthold looked closely at claims submitted by the Department of Veterans Affairs, which has had one of the highest totals of canceled contracts on the wall, and also some of its bigger mistakes.

► From the New York Times — ICE Set to Vastly Expand Its Reach With New Funds — After weeks of pressuring members of Congress into supporting his signature domestic policy legislation, Mr. Trump has secured an extraordinary injection of funding for his immigration agenda — $170 billion, the vast majority of which will go to the Department of Homeland Security over four years. The annual budget of Immigration and Customs Enforcement alone will spike from about $8 billion to roughly $28 billion, making it the highest funded law enforcement agency in the federal government.

► From Reuters — US judge grants Trump admin request to scrap Biden-era medical debt rule — A federal judge in Texas on Friday granted a request from the Trump administration and industry groups to scrap regulations adopted during the final days of Joe Biden’s presidency that would have removed consumers’ medical debts from their credit reports, court papers showed. U.S. District Judge Sean Jordan, whom Trump appointed in 2019, agreed with current leadership of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and financial industry trade groups that the rule, adopted in January, exceeded the CFPB’s legal authorities and should be vacated.

 

INTERNATIONAL

► From the Guardian — Musk’s giant Tesla factory casts shadow on lives in a quiet corner of Germany — As sales have declined, the factory has suffered. Shifts manufacturing the Y-Model have been reduced from three to two a day. The trade union IG Metall – which recruited several hundred workers despite opposition from Tesla – has urged the company to consider putting workers on “kurzzeit”, the short-time work allowance much of the embattled car industry has introduced to enable it to retain workers during a downturn…Musk’s apparent Nazi salute was in general met with shock and horror in Germany but did not play large in Grünheide, until campaign groups projected an image of it on to the facade of the Tesla factory, provocatively placing the Nazi-associated word “heil” in front of the Tesla logo. The shock caused by the incident was palpable on the factory floor, workers told the tabloid Berliner Kurier. “At Tesla Germany they had pretended they had nothing to do with (Musk) and were keeping quiet,” it wrote. Now they could no longer ignore their association.

 

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