Teamsters Local 804 Passes a Resolution to Defend Haitian and Syrian Immigrants in the Face of Trump’s Attacks on TPS - Left Voice
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With the cancellation of Temporary Protected Status, 300,000 more immigrant workers are at risk of deportation. In response, NYC Teamsters local 804 overwhelmingly passed the “Resolution to Stop Deportation of Haitian and Syrian Workers.” The rest of the labor movement should follow this example, and go further, to defend immigrant workers and communities.

In June, the Supreme Court upheld the Trump administration and Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) cancellation of Temporary Protected Status (TPS). This ruling is only the most recent of the devastating attacks in the Trump offensive against immigrant workers and communities, and its impacts are already beginning to sow instability and insecurity in communities and workplaces across the United States.

The labor movement has a key role to play in fighting back against this egregious attack, alongside every attack against our immigrant friends, neighbors and coworkers. This week, rank-and-file members of Teamsters Local 804, which represents UPS and Amazon workers in Queens, voted in a “Resolution to Stop Deportation of Haitian and Syrian Workers.” This resolution is monumental, especially for Amazon workers, which in NYC include large numbers of Haitian workers.

TPS was created by Congress in 1990 to provide immigrants with a legal pathway to a visa and work authorization if they could not return to their countries of origin because of natural disaster, armed conflict, or war. 300,000 people had TPS prior to its cancellation in June, and some of these recipients have been in the United States for decades on this status. For many, the threat of deportation is not just a matter of leaving one’s family, job, and community, but a matter of life and death. As of last week, TPS officially ended for Haitian and Syrian recipients, stripping immigrants of their right to work and their legal status.

Haitians first received TPS after the catastrophic earthquake of 2010, and today, the U.S. State Department warns against travel to Haiti due to safety risks, and the risk of “crime, kidnapping, terrorism, unrest, and limited health care.” The State Department even advises U.S. citizens in Haiti to “prepare a will.” Yet, the state has no problem deporting hundreds of thousands of Haitians back to warzone-like conditions. And this tracks for a president who has targeted Haitian immigrants in revolting displays of racism over the last two years.

The situation in Syria is also precarious: the humanitarian crisis has persisted beyond the collapse of the Assad regime in 2024, and Syrians face widespread food insecurity, internal displacement, and collapsing infrastructure. These catastrophic conditions have led migrants from Haiti and Syria to seek refuge in the United States, where oftentimes they have built a new sense of belonging and have become beloved members of their communities.

Multibillion and trillion dollar companies such as UPS and Amazon have no regard for their immigrant employees, who they use and discard in their quest for profit, and in fact have deep allegiances with ICE, DHS, and Trump. It’s up to workers themselves to reject the racist and chauvinist politics of the bourgeois state and union leaderships. Democratic discussion and resolutions are a good place to start. The potential for workers to go further in fighting for immigrant rights was demonstrated in Minneapolis where communities and workers organized a profound resistance to Trump’s offensive on immigrants.

Below, we reproduce the Teamsters Local 804 resolution.

Resolution to Stop Deportation of Haitian and Syrian Workers

Whereas, on June 25 the Supreme Court ruled that the Department of Homeland Security may arbitrarily terminate Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for Haitians and Syrians; and

Whereas, the Department of Homeland Security set the deadline to end TPS for Haitians and Syrians for July 24, subsequently extended to July 27, ordering employers to fire them and making them targets in the ongoing campaign of “mass deportations”; and

Whereas, many Haitian workers in particular have lived and worked in the U.S. for decades, and to deport Haitians or Syrians would place them in grave danger; and

Whereas, Haitian workers are a vital part of New York City’s labor movement, and central to the health care system in New York, where their removal would endanger many hospitals and senior care facilities; and

Whereas, attacks on TPS are part of a war on immigrants that grievously undermines the fight to organize the unorganized especially at Amazon where our local is engaged in a unionization campaign, and where, in 2025, Haitian workers whose Humanitarian Parole status had been revoked were laid off en masse; and

Whereas, attacks on immigrant rights are an attack on the rights of the working class as a whole and must be opposed in line with the labor motto that “an injury to one is an injury to all”;

Therefore, be it resolved, that Teamsters Local 804 calls to stop the deportations of Haitians and Syrians, and opposes any firing or layoff of our immigrant fellow workers by UPS or Amazon due to termination of TPS or other change in immigration status.

The post Teamsters Local 804 Passes a Resolution to Defend Haitian and Syrian Immigrants in the Face of Trump’s Attacks on TPS appeared first on Left Voice.

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