Xue Hui Zhang left a courtroom for lunch after giving a deposition against his former employer, who owes him $200,000 in back wages. Zhang and his attorney Adam Dong had barely made it to the diner entrance when as many as half a dozen Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents stopped them. “Mr. Zhang, can you come with us?” one reportedly asked. Zhang, an undocumented immigrant, was taken into custody.
“Zhang's attorneys said the case is extremely unusual,” WNYC reports. “While ICE has arrested people coming and going from courts, it has a memorandum of understanding with the U.S. Department of Labor not to detain workers in the process of suing an employer over workplace violations.” But that memo dates back to 2011, and our nation’s agencies are now operated by Trump loyalists who take the law into account based on how it affects the boss and his priorities.
In this case, the priority is to sweep up as many immigrants as possible, government memos be damned. An attorney for Ichiban, Zhang’s former employer, claimed that "I have no first hand knowledge of the facts of Mr. Zhang’s arrest. My clients have assured me that they did not call ICE." Fine, but this would also be much easier to believe if there weren’t already a history of ICE targeting workers who dared to fight unscrupulous employers.
Last year in Mississippi, Koch Foods settled with Latina processing plant workers for nearly $4 million after they alleged supervisors sexually harassed them, assaulted them, and forced them to work in overall “hostile” conditions. Earlier this month, that Koch plant was one of several raided by ICE, sweeping up nearly 700 workers and separating families. Koch Foods, documents state, had a history of “knowingly hiring and employing illegal aliens.”
Zhang, his attorneys say, is currently jailed at a detention center in Buffalo, New York. "The underlying rationale or reason for the two agencies having this [memorandum of understanding] is to ensure that undocumented employees can pursue their labor law rights without the fear of interference from ICE," said attorney John Troy. “He said he'll seek to free Zhang from detention based on this argument,” WNYC added.