It Could Happen Here - How ICE Kidnapped A Farmworker Union Organizer

Episode Date: April 9, 2025

Mia talks with Coalition of Independent Unions organizer Mark Medina about ICE's kidnapping of Familias Unidas por la Justicia organizer Alfredo “Lelo” Juarez, Lelo's work, and the April 12th rally at Portland City Hall to free him.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Imagine you're scrolling through TikTok, you come across a video of a teenage girl, and then a photo of the person suspected of killing her. It was shocking. It was very shocking. Like that could have been my daughter. Like you never know. I'm Jen Swan. I'm the host of a new podcast called My Friend Daisy. It's the story of how and why a group of teenagers turn to social media to help track down their friend's killer. Listen to My Friend Daisy on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. In 2020, a group of young women found themselves in an AI-fueled nightmare.

Someone was posting photos. It was just me naked. Well, not me, but me with someone else's body parts. This is Levittown, a new podcast from iHeart Podcasts, Bloomberg and Kaleidoscope, about the rise of deep fake pornography and the battle to stop it. Listen to Levittown on Bloomberg's Big Take podcast. Find it on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts,

or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Jay Shetty. This episode, Lizzo opens up like never before about self-love, transformation and finding real peace in a world that constantly tries to define you. It's not me anymore. Whoever Lizzo is to the world is not really even me. And that disconnect is depressing. The Grammy goes to Lizzo.

Listen to On Purpose with Jay Shetty on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What's up? I'm Laura, host of the podcast Courtside with Laura Carrenti, a masterclass case study of the business of women's sports. I'll be chatting with leaders like tennis icon, Alana Kloss. I don't do what I do only for women. I do it for everyone.

And I want the whole market. And innovators like Jenny Nguyen. I would say 50% of the people that come visit the Sports Bra aren't sports fans. They come to be in community. They come to be part of this culture. Courtside with Laura Karenty is an iHeart women's sports production in partnership with Deep Blue Sports and Entertainment. Listen to Courtside with Laura Karenty on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to IKDAP Here, a podcast where here is the rapidly encroaching rise of fascism. My name is Mia Wong, and one of the major vectors of fascism that we have been covering on the show has been the increase in just effectively straight up blackbaggings by ICE

and Immigration Enforcement in general. We have spent a good amount of time covering a bunch of different angles of this, but there is another incredibly distressing angle that we have not covered as much yet, which is their targeting of labor organizers. And with me to talk about that is Mark Medina from Portland Jail for Justice and the Coalition of Independent Unions. And yeah, Mark, welcome to the show.

Hi, thanks for having me. Yeah, I'm glad to have you on. So one of the most pressing sort of blackbaggings that's happened fairly recently is ICE's kidnapping of Alfredo Juarez de Ferrino, otherwise known as Lalo. Can you tell us about sort of his work and the projects that he's been doing and Famila Sinilas por la Justicia? projects he's been doing and familiar as well as this year. Yes. So it's been a very disheartening and scary couple of weeks since this happened because this opens

up a new path for the state to go after organizers to go after workers and the most underprivileged in our society in a way that I suppose we all expected. But now that we see it now that we see it, now that we see it happening, now that we see it happening to people that we know in our community, it's becoming apparent.

There is no turning back from the idea that we have to be able to take this on headfirst. We as activists, as organizers, I have to look at this and then see it as an actual thing in our day to day that we have to combat and incorporate into our organizing. So maybe it might be a little helpful to start off with a little bit of a backstory on Flamingos Unidos by La Sisa. Yeah. So, the union has its origins going back to 2013.

The area in which they organized the Bellingham or the Washington, Wacom, Skagit areas has a very particular type of immigrant community there. Lelo himself is of Mixteclo background. There's a lot of indigenous Mexican populations in the region. It's also one that has long roots. A lot of these people go back generations, have been here for quite some time. This area also happens to be a very particularly with the non-Hispanic population, particularly

the white population, a very conservative, particularly conservative for the area. It's one of the very few areas in the Northwest that Donald Trump came to visit. It's an area that has had repeated attacks on the Indian community. And so it's in this context that workers are organizing in 2013 for this first independent union. And two, it's important to mention the independent part of it. A lot of the organizers from the start of this of the union came from a tradition of the United Farm Workers in California. They, some of them worked with Sessom Chavez in the in the heyday of the United Farm Workers. And in the years and decades since then, since the Delano Boycotts and other things, there's been a growing

rift of what the next steps should be. Yeah. And I think that a lot of farm workers, because they don't organize under the general labor law that we have for most workers, there is a sort of patchwork system for how farmworking organizing happens in the United States that's dependent upon different states and legislatures. And for the most part, with the exception of only two states, farmworkers don't have the same kind of protections that regular workers generally in the society have for union recognition, for collective bargaining. Only Washington and New York at the moment, I believe, have laws that allow for elections

for farm worker unions. And there's a very particular reason for that being the case. Farm workers were excluded from the Wagner Act for having general labor rights in the 1930s because precisely it was seen as immigrant labor. Yeah. And immigrants were not seen as immigrant labor. Yeah. And immigrants were not seen as meriting the same rights as white Americans in the same way that domestic workers were removed because that was seen at the time as black labor.

So it has its roots in racism. And yeah, and that's something that, you know, like you can tie that exclusion, like there's a straight line between that and Japanese internment, which also to a large extent is just is about land seizure and the sort of like fusion of racism, specifically racism in the farming sector with with the tax and labor rights and with this desire to just sort of seize literally the land and labor from non-white people. Yeah. Yeah.

So that's a long and bleak history. No, absolutely. And I'm sure your audience is well aware of a lot of these subject matter. It is a bleak history. And it wasn't until groups like the United Farm Workers in the 60s and the 70s, as they began to create the possibility for something new for the Hispanic community. It was United Farm Workers that built not just a lot of solidarity with other immigrant groups in the California area, but they also built a sense of pride and identity and belonging for a lot of communities. I grew up in Boyle Heights, East Los Angeles.

Cesar Chavez and the Night Farmworker murals are everywhere. You know, me and my friends would often joke that Cesar Chavez is like the patron saint of East Los Angeles, even though it's nowhere near Delano. And there's a reason for that. I think that a lot of us looked up to the United Farm Workers, we looked up to the farm worker union movement, and we saw in them our heroes, our modern day heroes. We saw them, we saw people who said, be proud to be brown, you know, there's a courage that comes from that history. The union movement that then sprung up in 2013 in the Bellingham, Northern Washington area

was coming out of that milieu. They understood that background, they understood that history, but they also understood that there was very little organizing in the region. There was a lot of fear in the region. It's very difficult to organize farm workers. To have access to a lot of these areas,

you have to cross just private property for quite some time before you reach the first farm worker. And it becomes very, very difficult to have organizing happen. And it's intentional that way. The rise in farm worker unions that happened in the 60s and 70s had a massive plummet by the time that we get into the 90s and 2000s. And so these workers had heard these stories, had heard about this legacy,

but had been essentially dealing with increasing frustration, racist behavior by bosses, lower and lower pay, and the use of certain types of immigrants to try to scab their jobs. It'd be the capitalist class using one type of worker against another type of worker, pinging them against each other. It's in this context in 2013 that this union starts to form. They go public at that time period. They call for recognition and they start taking

action directly. And they organize this years and years long boycott campaign to gain recognition, to get the employer to start bargaining. And after years and years of this and court battles and the employer trying to lay everyone off and hire certain types of newer immigrants coming in to replace all of them, pitting one worker against another, all these types of maneuvers, by 2017, these workers win a contract. And the philosophy of the union since then, has been not just to grow this union, but also for them to be able to stand on their own two

feet. Their idea is that they are very proud of their independent nature of that union. They're not part of, you know, the AFL-CIO, they're not part of the farm workers, they're not part of any other organization. You know, when I spoke to some of their leaders last year, one of the things that came to mind was they brought up a quote from Eugene Debs, the notion of like, if we were to lead you into the promised land, someone else would just lead you out. And the notion of their union is we have to be able to stand on our two feet. We can't rely on anyone else because if we if they promise us things today,

tomorrow they'll hold something over us. That's the notion that farm workers lead this movement and lead this union is an incredibly powerful statement of what working class people can do. The kinds of workers that everyone else kind of looks at, they could never do it. These, you know, these workers could never handle this kind of level of struggle and couldn't do this kind of organization have built one of the most powerful independent farm worker unions in the West Coast. Lelo, Alfredo Lelo Juarez, was a founding member of this union. He was a farm worker starting at the age of 12.

Since then, he devoted his entire life organizing to helping workers, to being the kind of person who commits himself to the work of making the world a better place and he found it. At 25, he is significantly younger than me. When I think of people who I look up to, who I think of, wow, when I grew up and want to be someone like that, I think of Lello. I have met Lello many a times over the years.

He's a very soft-spoken, very thoughtful type of person. Yeah, I think that the labor movement owes him a bit of a debt now. It is time that we as a whole stand up for him. SIMON Yeah, yeah. We are going to go to ads, regrettably, and then when we come back, we are going to start talking, I think, a bit more about the repression. Imagine you're scrolling through TikTok, you come across a video of a teenage girl, and then a photo of the person suspected of killing her.

And I was like, what? Like it was him? I was like, oh my god. It was shocking. It was very shocking. I'm Jen Swan. I'm a journalist in Los Angeles, and I've spent the past few years investigating the story behind the viral posts and the extraordinary events that followed. I started investing my time to get her justice. They put out something on social media so I'd get calls in the middle of the night all the time. It's like how do you think you're gonna get away with something like this? Like you killed somebody.

It's the story of how and why a group of teenagers turn to social media to help track down their friend's killer. This is their story. This is my friend Daisy. Listen to My Friend Daisy on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Jay Shetty and if you've ever felt the weight of letting go, of people, past versions of yourself, or the expectations placed on you, this episode is for you. Lizzo opens up like never before about self-love, transformation, and finding real peace in a world that constantly tries to define you. It's not me anymore.

Whoever Lizzo is to the world is not really even me. And that disconnect is depressing. The Grammy goes to Lizzo. I think it's also hard when the things that you stand for are the same things that you're being scrutinized for. The weight that is no longer on me is not just fat or physical. I released so much to get to this point. And to be honest with you, I don't feel like I've expressed myself fully in the last two

years. Listen to On Purpose with Jay Shetty on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. In 2020, a group of young women in a tidy suburb of New York City found themselves in an AI-fuelled nightmare. Someone was posting photos. It was just me naked. Well, not me, but me with someone else's body parts on my body parts that looked exactly

like my own. I wanted to throw up. I wanted to scream. It happened in Levittown, New York. But reporting this series took us through the darkest corners of the internet and to the front lines of a global battle against deep fake pornography. This should be illegal, but what is this? This is a story about a technology that's moving faster than the law and about vigilantes trying to stem the tide. I'm Margie Murphy. And I'm Olivia Carville. This is Levertown,

a new podcast from iHeart Podcasts, Bloomberg, and Kaleidoscope. Listen to Levertown on Bloomberg's Big Take podcast. Find it on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. In 1978, Roger Caron's first book was published and he was unlike any first-time author Canada had ever seen. Roger Caron was 16 when first convicted. He spent 24 of those years in jail. 12 years in solitary. He went from an ex-con to a literary darling almost overnight.

He was instantly a celebrity. He was an adrenaline junkie, and he was the star of the show. Go-Boy is the gritty true story of how one man fought his way out of some of the darkest places imaginable. I had a knife go in my stomach, puncture my screen, break my ribs, I had my feps all in my hands. Only to find himself back where he started. Roger's saying this, I've never hurt anybody but myself. And I said, oh, you're so wrong. You're so wrong on that one, Rod.

From Campside Media and iHeart Podcasts, listen to GoBoy on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. We are back. So obviously, then this is a part of the story that you've been telling, the sort of capitalist class out in Bellingham and, you know, the sort of, I mean, this has been true of the broader capitalist class since this kind of organizing starting, like has been trying to break these unions this entire time. You know, that has been a major focus of everything that they've been doing. And you know, what we're seeing right now seems like a massive sort of escalation in

the degree of repression. So yeah, can we talk about the recent black bagging of Lilo and Yeah, and sort of what happens and where we go from there Yeah, the weaponization of the state to go after immigrants go after activists is I'm sure Your audience is well known is nothing new and it no knows party affiliation Yeah, the Democratic administrations have been doing this to immigrant communities and have been using it to silence political activists the Trump administration, however is now doing this on a level that is At least to a lot of us unheard of in the modern day Which is to go after specific union leaders and the labor movement to go after civil rights leaders

Yeah, you've seen this happen also when it comes to Palestinian rights activists around the country. The idea is pretty simple. It's to silence the loudest voices, to cut the leadership from the movement. On March 25th, Alfredo Lello Juarez was dropping off his girlfriend at a nearby farm for work and was accosted by ICE agents as he was exercising his

rights or what he thought his rights were at the time because of the regime. Who knows what your rights are? Yeah. They broke his window. They dragged him out of his car. You know, this was obviously a very traumatic incident, but also it was a real shock to the union, to C2C, the community group that works with the union and to the local Hispanic community in the area. Within hours of that, workers, organizers, community went to move to try to carry a response knowing that time was of the essence. Yeah. It was then taken to a localized facility.

He's now since been moved to a detention center in Tacoma, Washington. A large rally of hundreds took place calling for his immediate release. What we know now, seemingly, is that at the very last minute, apologies, I forget the exact day, but it was within a couple of days of the kidnapping. Lelo was pulled off. He has an automatic stay of deportation in place. At this point, no longer has any legal authority to remove Lelo. This came at the last minute.

He was in line for deportation and was removed at the very last minute. However, while this is good news, this is not good for someone's personal health and well-being. These are massively cramped facilities, underfunded facilities. There are horror stories around the country of the conditions in some of these places. Every day that Lelo is stuck behind these prison walls, is an injustice to our movement.

Yeah. Yeah. I think the thing it immediately reminds me of is the story of Thomas Paine, who was like slated to be executed in the French Revolution. And they didn't they didn't execute him because his door was open. So they didn't see the slash line on the cell that was supposed to execute him. And then like the next day, the reign of terror ended with the coup against the Jacobins. It reminds me a lot of that. But, you know, but on the other hand, here's the thing, we have gotten the stay of the deportation, but we have not brought down

the reign of terror yet. So. Yeah. And it would hold a little bit of time to wait four more years for that one. Yeah. Good Lord. Good lord. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So let's talk a bit about, so I mean, obviously, you know, what we're seeing here, and this is, you know, the connection that you made is we're seeing just on a sort of broad scale, the use of the state and of the sort of black bagging and of these deportations as a way to target organizers from Palestine to labor organizers. That's only going to expand as this goes on.

And I think something critical about, you know, one of the first things you were saying here about the fact that they're targeting sort of the loudest voices in the community. And I think a big part of this is that they know that their position isn't as strong as they're making it out to be, right? Like they have just detonated a nuke across the entire economy. They are systemically going through and individually fucking over every single group of people who are supposed to be their base. And I think part of what they're doing is they're trying to spread sort of raw terror and spread fear and, you know, and attack the critical infrastructure

of organizing because they want to make it look like resisting them is impossible. And that's just not true. They can be. Yeah, absolutely. I think that oftentimes, particularly fascistic power wants and needs to present itself as inevitable as overwhelming and impossible to defeat. Yeah. In part, because it's meant to hide the ultimate weakness of some of these powers. The actual power that these farm workers showed against the Sukuma farms when they went on strike and boycotted for years and years and years out in the fields, talking to workers

for years and years and years, it showed that no matter how powerful some of these companies are, some of these CEOs are, that the power CEOs are, that the power of workers overwhelms and the power of solidarity overwhelms. And they know that. Going after leadership, going after some of the most, some of the bravest people in our movement is a way of trying to hit the movement at the knees and trying to convince folks that struggle is impossible. But I think it is important to remember that what we're doing the struggle now, the response, this is how we show the population, the world, you know, our communities, that they are not inevitable. It is not insurmountable.

And so in by taking action, responding to the kinds of us just behaviors of the state, we show how feeble the state can be at times, even when it seems it's most treacherous and awful. Yeah, and I think a lot of times when we win fights, it can be very, very hard to actually see our victory because we don't see the world that could have been if we didn't fight. And that's the thing I think about with the first Trump administration. During the first Trump administration, they absolutely wanted to be doing this kind of shit. And they were able to do a lot of terrible stuff, but they weren't able to sort of go this far because of the kind of mass mobilizations that shut down a lot of the kinds of things

that they wanted to do. And I think that's a kind of victory that is hard to kind of like process because all we see is, you know, the suffering that did happen. And we can never see an image of like all of the people, you know, who got to continue living their lives because we stopped them. And that I think is another sort of powerful tool here. But also we do have an opportunity to make sure that we can beat them right here and right now in a way that's very, very publicly visible. And that's a question mark about that in my mind, because, you know, my entire adult life,

I've heard stories of the state repression against union organizers in the 20s and the 30s and the 40s. You hear the stories if you're an organizer about all the violent eras and how hard it was in the past. And we forget that a lot of that does continue on. It's just not where you would imagine it, where a lot of American workers imagine it. And so they don't see it in their shops and their factories and their unions.

But this right here is an attack on the labor movement. Had this been the head of the electricians union, the head of the SCIU, had this been an attack on what a lot of Americans would view as the mainstream labor movement, this would be headlines. The fact that it isn't shows and that it has been so much work to try to get attention

to a union leader being picked up and kidnapped by the state should be a blaring red light on the labor movement to take action immediately. I hope that what we're doing is the first steps of that because this is one of those moments. They went after the trade unionists and I was not a trade unionist. Well, they're going after the farm workers. I am not a farm worker.

It is incumbent upon us morally to stand up for one another at this point in time Yeah, and and I think there's been a real kind of Real cowardice and a real sort of appeasement of power and a real demonstration of where a lot of these unions politics are I mean we saw we saw the way that the teamsters like leadership just I mean just you know Openly want to speak at the RNC, right? We've been seeing the UAW which traditionally has had better Like immigration politics in the last few years than a lot of these other sort of mainstream unions But it's also been sort of going to bat for Trump's tariff like I've been calling the turf tariffs tariffs because of the wages of transphobia

but you know, they've been going to bat for like the turf tariffs, right and because of the wages of transphobia. But you know, they've been going to bat for like the turf tariffs, right? And that I think is part of why they've been sort of unable to like respond to this moment and why they've been unable to respond to the past fucking 50 years of moments. Which is that like, if you're if you're sort of like labor politics is rooted in this sort of like American nationalist, like American jobs for American workers stuff, right, and it's not actually based in the power of workers and the power of workers everywhere,

then you're going to lose. It's not just sort of reactionary politics, so it is, it's also bad politics and we're seeing it right now. Yeah, and I think that the history of the labor movement has been an interesting one in my adult life because, you know, I'm as pro-labor as they come. However, the history of the labor movement

in the modern day has been a fascinating one. It is one that when it came to large strikes, within its native year, at the mid and late 2000s, I think at one point, it was just over a dozen strikes over 2000 workers. And you compare that to the height of the labor movement in the 40s and the 50s, when it was in the hundreds, and you had strike actions all the time. And that is what builds so much of what we call the middle class for some. And it was this really historic moment at the time. And we're in a historic moment now where I think the labor movement for so long from that point has been trying, workers from the rank and file have been trying to

kind of reshape the labor movement in the thoughts and the ideas of the new. But it comes with its own regressive new. But it comes with its own regressive setbacks and it comes with its own shortcomings of leadership. You know, the team's jurors making statements around immigration rights was a very unfortunate thing to be said in the modern day, in the modern context. I think that, you know, other unions seemingly looking to, you know, circle the wagons rather than take the risks that need that need to happen in this current time has really shown a lack of imagination from some of the mainstream unions. And the thing is, I hope for the best for them. I want them to succeed and I want them to get better because the world is a better place for having these large unions. However, if the independent movements, the independent unions like Familias Unidas, por la Justicia, like these other unions in the region, that can be the kind of canary in the coal mine, the kind of labs of experimentation that can be the first people out to do some

of the most radical and interesting and worker-centric type of movement building and messaging. I think there is a reason why it was the coalition of independent unions here in the Pacific Northwest that came up with the notion of having trans day of solidarity, this idea of patterning contracts together to have inclusive and protections for trans workers and having that be a thing that unions take up together. I think that it's incredibly notable that it's groups like Familia Unidas, Puebla Justicia, that carried out this long, years long boycott

and created a model by which other workers in the region can not just organize themselves, but organize themselves on a low cost member led democratic model. I think it's important to see that sometimes the large unions have to start looking at some of the radical pragmatism that comes from the necessities of these smaller independent campaigns. Yeah.

And I mean, before we go to ads, I think the last thing I want to say there is like, you know, the other option they have is to do the option of what the unions did during the rise of the Nazis, which is like during the rise of the Nazis, the unions fell in line, right? They fell in line because they were scared and they thought that they could fucking win benefits from it. And, you know, it saved some of them, like there were a few of those people, like just became Nazis, but the rest of them got fucking liquidated anyways. So those are your options, right? You either stand and fight now with the independent unions, or you become part of the regime and eventually get liquidated when,

you know, Trump in like fucking two and a half years signs executive order that says unions are illegal or whatever. Yeah. And what does that do at the end of the day? Even if it saves you, even if you're the head of some of these larger unions, and by working with the administration today the administration today by selling your soul by selling the movement out you give up the moral high ground of our movement of our working class democratic movement yeah you give it up for another generation then when workers when people like myself growing up looking at images of the united farm workers there are similar i'm i presume there

are similar people in united states growing up who look that way up to the United Auto Workers, who look that way up to the Teachers Union. What happens to those children, to those kids, those young people who want to be the next leadership, the next era of the labor movement, they will not look at us as having the moral high ground. We give that up. We give our role in history, our moral role in history to fight for the working class when we do things like this. Yeah. And what you become instead is just another extension of the state. You become

like one of like the national syndicates in like Francoist Spain. And what that does to you is people don't look at you in a generation as a labor movement. They look at you as just another arm of a fascist regime. And it doesn't have to be like that it really doesn't but yeah no it is not yeah I took no pleasure in saying this you know I take no pleasure in saying this but it's an unfortunate reality and hopefully the turnaround can come from anywhere it can come from from unexpected places and I hope that there is one and things like solidarity for Lelo I it'd be a small link in the chain that moves the pendulum right back into the direction of an ethical and moral superiority that comes

with fighting for working class folks. Yeah. We're going to take an ad break and when we come back, we're going to talk about what we can do for Lilo right now as you're listening to this. Imagine you're scrolling through TikTok, you come across a video of a teenage girl and then a photo of the person suspected of killing her. And I was like, what? Like it was him? I was like, oh my God. It was shocking. It was very shocking.

I'm Jen Swan. I'm a journalist in Los Angeles and I've spent the past few years investigating the story behind the viral posts and the extraordinary events that followed. I started investing my time to get her justice. They put out something on social media so I'd get calls in the middle of the night all the time. It's like how do you think you're going to get away with something like this? Like you killed somebody. It's the story of how and why a group of teenagers turn to social media to help track down their friend's killer. This is their story. This is my friend Daisy.

Listen to My Friend Daisy on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Jay Shetty. And if you've ever felt the weight of letting go of people, past versions of yourself, or the expectations placed on you, this episode is for you. Lizzo opens up like never before about self-love, transformation, and finding real peace in a world that constantly tries to define you. It's not me anymore. Whoever Lizzo is to the world is not really even me. And that disconnect is depressing. The Grammy goes to...

Lizzo! I think it's also hard when the things that you stand for are the same things that you're being scrutinized for. The weight that is no longer on me is not just fat or physical. I released so much to get to this point. And to be honest with you, I don't feel like I've expressed myself fully in the last two years.

Listen to On Purpose with Jay Shetty on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. In 2020, a group of young women in a tidy suburb of New York City found themselves in an AI-fuelled nightmare. Someone was posting photos. It was just me naked. Well, not me, but me with someone else's body parts on my body parts that looked exactly like my own. I wanted to throw up. I wanted to scream.

It happened in Levittown, New York. But reporting the series took us through the darkest corners of the internet and to the front lines of a global battle against deepfake pornography. This should be illegal, but what is this? This is a story about a technology that's moving faster than the law, and about vigilantes trying to stem the tide. I'm Margie Murphy. And I'm Olivia Carville.

This is Levertown, a new podcast from iHeart Podcasts, Bloomberg and Kaleidoscope. Listen to Levertown on Bloomberg's Big Take podcast. Find it on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. In 1978, Roger Caron's first book was published, and he was unlike any first time author Canada had ever seen. Roger Caron was 16 when first convicted. Had spent 24 of those years in jail.

12 years in solitary. He went from an ex-con to a literary darling almost overnight. He was instantly a celebrity. He was an adrenaline junkie, and he was the star of the show. Go-Boy is the gritty true story of how one man fought his way out of some of the darkest places imaginable. I had a knife go in my stomach, puncture my skin, break my ribs, I had my guts all in my hands. Only to find himself back where he started.

Rodger's saying this, I've never hurt anybody but myself. And I said, oh, you're so wrong. You're so wrong on that one, Rod. From Campside Media and iHeart Podcasts, listen to GO BOY on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. We are back. So let's talk about both the operation, I mean, just immediately the plans to sort of put pressure to Friar Lilo and also then I guess we'll get into sort of more broadly the kinds of fighting that we need to be doing in order to resist this.

Sure, sounds good. So like I mentioned earlier, in the immediate aftermath of Lelo's kidnapping by ICE, workers in the region began organizing and unions came together in support of Lelo and helped rally in front of the detention center in Tacoma. Now what we're trying to do is trying to spread the word further. There are other communities, particularly here on the west coast, that can stand solidarity, that should stand in solidarity. And when we heard this needs to go down activists within the CIU asked themselves We can't stand idly by while a leader in our movement is kidnapped by the state We need to take action And so we did and the point was to move as quickly as possible to try to build a larger voice

For Lello while he is in detention. So there is a good number of activists here in the Portland area We can be of service to the to the farm workers union. You know, we have a strong core of independent unions here in the Pacific Northwest, particularly in the Portland area. We can do what other unions are hesitant to do, which is take action immediately. It stands firmly with our brothers and sisters, our? up in northern Washington. So what's happening is the call from the union is workers individually for people individually to call into the attorney general in Washington state and call to the release of Lelo,

also calling the new governor up in Washington state to call for the release, bring wider attention, making known that this person is someone who is important to the community, cannot be spirited away to another country where they are not from, where that is not their home, and taken away from their family, the community, and from the good work that they do. And the other thing that we're trying to do is we're trying to get local officials to also use their voice to maximize the pressure, use their voice to maximize the pressure to give more attention to this issue. So that's the call so far.

This rally that we're having in front of City Hall on Saturday, April 12th at 2 p.m. is the beginning of what we hope is a larger campaign that will not end until Lelo is free and until these raids stop attacking the labor movement in the Pacific Northwest. You know, just because we in Portland, you know, are not farm workers, because we don't work with farm workers, because a lot of the workers who who who work here, and maybe never

met a farm worker, it does not mean that we should not stand shoulder to shoulder and arm and arm and support the farm workers union up in northern Washington to the hilt. And this begins this fight of building that kind of level of solidarity and being it begins by showing up for them, doing what they can't do right now. They don't have the resources to go state by state and city by city to bring attention and awareness to one of their leaders being attacked. But we can do it. And if we can do it, we should do it. It's an immoral imperative that a little be free. Yeah. And so I mean, statistically, there are a lot of you in Portland listening to this show, but statistically, most of you are not in Portland. Are there other things

that people in the rest of the country and I guess the rest of the world, I know, I know there's some of you statistically don't live in the US. Yeah. Are there other things that people in other places can do to put pressure specifically for Lilo, but also just to do in their own communities to, you know, I mean, put pressure to for Lalo, but also just to do in their own communities to, you know, I mean, put pressure to stop these raids? Yes, absolutely. So this is very similar, I think, to the CIU, the Coalition of Independent Unions, is Coalition of Independent Unions here in the Pacific Northwest. It was trying to do and is trying to do with Trans-Dial Solidarity. The idea is we're trying to make

this work here in the Pacific Northwest. And if it's useful, if it's good, if people are paying attention to it, then we can export this to other cities and other areas to bring more attention to these causes. And so with that, when patterning, patterning contracts together, particularly on this one issue of transgender health care and trans-inclusive language and contracts and codifying that between unions and having that a demand of labor movement that they not walk away from this We want to also do the same thing with this fight for freedom for the farmworkers union and their leaders And workers everywhere and the attacks will come soon Soon enough, I suppose I would imagine from this this regime in Washington

Yeah If this works we want workers in other cities to start assisting the farm worker union taking up the call of action and fighting for not just let up, but whoever comes afterwards because there will be little in the future, unfortunately, as it may be. So if this works here, workers here, as they hear more updates, we would hope and we would love if workers elsewhere, if organizing groups elsewhere would want to take up this fight and bring attention to the cause. Matthew 16 hell yeah, yeah. And I think there is a lot of, you know, potential and sort

of mobilizations, there's a lot of potential in getting people to understand that this stuff is happening. And there's a lot of potential in cross union organizing. And also, and I will say this too, because like, you know, obviously, statistically, like, there are a large number of people listening to this who are like union staffers, but also like most of you are not. That also doesn't mean that whatever kind of organizing that you're doing doesn't overlap with this and doesn't have capacity that they can bring to bear to stop the entire deportation regime that we're facing right now.

And that's something that you have to do both on the level of solidarity on a moral level and also on a strategic level because again, he's going to go for you too. So yeah, yeah. You know, without making it too personal, like I know level personally, I have met a little many times over the years. He's a fantastic person. The reason why a lot of us as organizers, why we do this kind of work to begin with, is because we believe as as bizarrely as it may be, that we could be a link in the chain that makes the world a better place that that we can leave the world a better in what we're doing because when we look at people who have been attacked by corporations and attacked by the state, we feel a moral compulsion to help. And what I would say to folks who are outside of Portland,

who are hearing this story, who hear the calls to call the attorney general in Washington state and demand that they'll be released to follow up with the union, Familias Unidas por la Oficia, further direction on how they can assist and potentially holding their own rallies in support and solidarity

and bringing attention to the issue. I would hope that they do this. Imagine if Lelo were your brother. Imagine if Lelo were your cousin, your father, your friend. Act as if they were them because it requires that level of empathy to have the kind of solidarity that we need in order to fight this fascist regime and everything that it does. It is easy to say I will wait for

someone else to do the work I will, someone else will come along and and it'll get resolved that way. No, if you don't do the work, it just will not get done. And so we have to go in every day as part of civic engagement and assisting the working class as part of our daily routines and using the kind of the kind of sense of moral necessity and of immediate action it requires that you would do for someone that was close to you. Because this person is you just by another name, this person is your family, even if you've never met them. We are all in this together as working class people. And if we start coming up with boundaries and reasons

for why we shouldn't stand up for one another, those reasons then become excuses for everyone else. So I would hope that when people hear this, they look and see the struggle of this person and they can imagine what would happen to them in the future and they say, I would want someone there for me in my corner in my time of need. So I will be there for them and theirs Yeah, it reminds me a lot of this line from uh, pecky seger who who wrote a wrote an anti-fascist song called song of choice and one of the verses that's always stuck with me

is Today the soldiers took away one, tomorrow they may take away two, one April they took away Greece, but surely they will never take you. And, you know, I mean, that's, that's the thing that people in the thirties woke up to, right? Is, you know, if you're in this country, and this is the thing that you're waking up to now is that, yeah, the soldiers are taking people away and every day they're taking away

more and more people. And one day you wake up and they've taken entire countries. And the only way that you can stop this is by making sure that the action that you're taking is not just waking up and going back to sleep, right? You have to take a stand, you have to fight because no one is coming. The only person who is coming for these people, the only person who is coming for the people coming next to them and inevitably the only people who was coming to save you when they come for you is going to be you. And you know, there are enough of us to stop them, right?

There always have been. That's always been a thing about fascism is that it relies on us not fighting them. It relies on us on our passivity it relies on us not caring enough about the people that they take first you know to sit back and do nothing and think that we can wait and you can't you have you have to start right now and you have to stop them before they advance any further and you have to roll back what they've already done and this is our opportunity to do that yeah absolutely absolutely I think this is that opportunity to do that. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. I think this is the thing capsulates the sentiment perfectly well. Yeah.

Do you have anything else that you want to add before we head out and we will put links to a whole bunch of things in the description to this? Yeah. Yeah. I suppose. To those that would want to know more about not just the struggle of the farm workers union, but also the general like experiments in independent unionism here in the Pacific Northwest. I'd highly encourage the folks take a deep dive and see that to come in and sort of rescue you from from the mystery and drudgery of Non-union workplaces you can do it too. You can create you have it in your head in your own mind and your own hands Yeah, the ability to organize the ability to fight with your co-workers

you have the kinds of clever problem-solving skills that every worker has in order to combat the boss and create a better world than the one that currently exists. And also that when it comes to issues like standing up for this struggle now and struggles in the future, I would say you have it now, the creative capacity to, in whatever city you're in, to make connections, to build inroads with the labor movement, to build inroads with working class people, and to try to create those bonds that happen. We here are trying to build closer bonds with city workers and farm workers out in the country. It's an important struggle because one is going to be more and more important in the

future. You don't have to wait for anyone else to tell you how to do that. You yourselves can show solidarity and work together to build those kinds of bonds now so that in the future you can create working class movements that whether that takes the form of collective bargaining or something else. Organizing for the common good is useful no matter in what legal capacity it happens. Yeah. And I mean, you know, one last point I want to add about that in terms of looking at like you not needing help to do things like, you know, I know a lot of the people who, you know, like are the organizers who were hired by places like the UAW, like AFL-CIO

unions, right? They're good people. Like they're good people. They're good organizers. They don't know anything that you can't learn. Like, a lot of these people are just literally college students, right? Who are recruited, like, from college campuses and are thrown with no training into organizing these things, right? And, you know, and again, these are people who are just, like, stepping out of classrooms into, like, into these organizing scenarios with very minimal training and they've been able to do it.

And if those people can do it, so can you. Like I know you, I know these organizers and the only difference between them and you is that they spent some time learning some things and then they apply the same tools, like they apply in some ways worse versions of the same tools that the independent union organizers use, and they're all tools that you can learn. Yeah, and if any of the people listening want to learn some of those tools,

Yeah. or you need help with education and training, or just want to make connections and interrows with workers elsewhere, contact the Coalition of Independent Unions and seeing how we can build these bonds together, because I think that we will problem solve how to defeat this regime one way or another. But I think that we particularly in the independent union space provide a unique possibility for

how this can happen. Because since we are not tied to larger established contracts, we're not tied to, you know, jurisdictional disputes, we're not tied to a lot of the legacies of some of the larger unions, God bless them, we can create and fashion a labor movement that doesn't have to live by those rules. If you imagine the idea of what it would look like to refound the CIO in the 1930s, if you could imagine the worst aspects of the labor movement and exercising them and what is the best aspects of the labor movement that you would want to see, we can create that together today.

And today it takes the form of standing up in solidarity with LELO and Farm Workers Union of Northern Washington, not because we get anything from it, not because it's easy, but precisely because it is difficult and precisely because it is a moral compulsion on us to take action today for it. We don't have to wait for anyone to tell us what to do as part part of an independent labor movement, we get to decide our future and our faiths and we get to decide our struggles. Yeah. And if and when we beat them here, we can beat them today, we can beat them tomorrow, we can beat them the next day. And one day, you know, we will, we will have won one victory

too many for them to hold on to power. And that's the only way forward. Absolutely. Fascism wants you to believe in a nihilistic perspective of the world. They want you to believe in the mission is hopeless to fight back. They want you to believe just doom scroll forever and don't take any action and focus on yourselves and navel gaze indefinitely. The way that you find out the kind of person that you are and the way that you build the kind of future that you want for yourselves or your families, for your communities, for the people that you don't even know and never will meet, but you want a good life for them. The way that you build the kind of future that you want for yourselves or your families, for your communities, for the people that you don't even know and never will meet, but you want a good life for them.

The way that you do that is you take action. Now you start organizing, you do what you can, you build what you can. That's how we do this. Like we said earlier, they want you to believe that the fight is already over. The history has already been written. They only say that because they know it's not true. And we, and me and other people who talk like this, who are as optimistic and as hopeful and as fight ready, we don't believe this out of nowhere.

We believe this because we truly do see that the better world is possible if we fight. Yeah. And I think, I think that's a spectacular place to end. Mark, thank you so much for coming on the show. Yeah. Thank you. And everyone else who's listening to this, go out and fight. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media,

visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can now find sources for It Could Happen Here listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening. Imagine you're scrolling through TikTok. You come across a video of a teenage girl and then a photo of the person suspected of killing her. It was shocking. It was very shocking. Like that could have been my daughter. Like you never know. I'm Jen Swan. I'm the host of a new podcast called My Friend Daisy. It's the story of

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