SUMMER 2026
ISSUE 07

In the heightened attacks of the last year and a half, the Trump administration and private corporations (including Amazon, which runs the cloud computing services that ICE and DHS rely on) have collaborated to facilitate the surveillance and targeting of immigrant workers and activists. Immigrant workers have been detained en masse, and labor organizers face threats of deportation. But resistance, too, has proliferated, most notably exemplified in the organizing across workplace and community in Minneapolis this winter, where grassroots mobilization forced the retreat of Operation Metro Surge. These political struggles – both the fear and the hope that they inspire – manifest on the shop floor, in Amazon warehouses and beyond.

*

“Oh no,” said E.T., my manager, his pale eyes turned skyward. The reds of his safety vest seemed to grin. “It’s started.”

Above us, there was a quick fluttering motion. A light body propelled itself between two concrete beams that held up the ceiling.“

All warehouses have birds,” E.T. explained to me, breaking down the basic facts of life. “There’s only two ways to deal with birds: You trap it in a net, or you shoot it.” He shook his head despairingly. “They’re impossible to catch.”

His eyes returned to earth, as if from a distant place, and he cocked his head, looking beyond me to the group of red-vests who loitered in the distance, standing around rollie desks and laptops, watching us. I didn’t miss his signal: I’d been wasting time. The eyes pressed hot on my back. I pulled on my gloves, thanked him for his illuminations, and used the weight of my body to carry on with my metal pick cart, piled high with 30-some Amazon packages. The bird above me in the cement rafters had found a friend, and just like us, they flew about, chattering, looking for a way out.

*

I worked in an Amazon warehouse for two years, shifting boxes in a twilight zone. Most of what I did at work, though, was talk. As one of my friends once said, the only interesting thing in the warehouse was people – the boxes had nothing to say, try as they might to drain us of life.

Half of my coworkers were New Yorkers, like me, and half were immigrants – refugees from other countries, mostly Haiti but also African countries, the Caribbean, Russia, and Ukraine. All had temporary legal status, if not a green card. Big companies like Amazon require legal work permits. When Trump’s attacks began in January 2025, many of my coworkers were suddenly at imminent risk of losing that status and of losing their jobs, which were an abusive lifeline for us all. Although Amazon workers are made to feel disposable and at the whim of an immigration document or one last write-up, we are the ones that churn Amazon’s profits. Its empire couldn’t exist without us.

Most people work the night shift, a brutal ten hours that hurls you into a state of perpetual jetlag and allows for two days of potential overtime, if you want it, which many of my immigrant coworkers do. So many sunrises I spent sitting on a bench with my coworkers, smoking and talking shit.

*

I started working at Amazon in the fall of 2023, when the warehouse was first opened. In the beginning, the machines were friendly and new. We clicked through hours of virtual training and quizzes on the 16 leadership principles of “Earth’s Best Employer.” “Everyday Is Day One,” read a mural on the wall.

After work every day, I wrote down every detail that I could remember. “Feels like the building is animate / the conveyor belt is a silver river / the walls breathe and look down on us,” I wrote on our second day.

At first, we were a small, close band of young workers that would commune together at the Uno table, which grew in players and complexity of rules over the first weeks. “Uno, Uno out,” the least likely of our lot would say, and the table would erupt. Alliances formed, tensions grew, and we laid the bricks of deep friendships. When management tried to join our Uno games, we bristled and sometimes ended the game – Uno was for us alone.

One day I looked up to see E.T. posting a Kierkegaard quote on the wall of the breakroom. “Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom,” it read. Above the quote hung a Kit-Cat Klock, its eyes and its tail swinging side to side with the passing seconds.

The number of workers increased, and the trouble started when we had been fully trained and the volume of boxes running through us each day ramped up. We were pushed, subtly and then more explicitly, to move faster. On hot days, sweating through our shirts, we were berated for stopping to drink water. The repetitive stress that would eventually injure most of us began to strain our muscles and wear on our nerves. The Uno table morphed into a group chat.

I took notes about how the managers would harass us but also about the conversations I would have with my coworkers. Like everyone else, I had gotten the job to pay my rent, but I also wanted to form a union, to see from the inside what it would take to organize in the heart of capitalism. In the beginning, this was my secret, but over time I told the coworkers who I trusted. When they found out, no one was very surprised. At that point, we had been discussing for months, “What would it take to change the conditions that send us home each day weary to the bone? What would it look like if we controlled this warehouse ourselves?” (“We are the power” – a quote from one of my coworkers in a rain-tattered notebook.)

There were many things that I learned in the process: how to stand up for myself and my friends, that trust is a flighty thing, to believe people when they tell you about themselves. That fear, whether it is fear of being fired, or sexism, transphobia, or immigration status, makes people quiet.

Slowly the site began to hire more Haitian workers. I remember the first time I met Reubens. “I’ll call you Luan,” he said as I helped him move his cart of boxes down the ramp. When I asked why, he smiled and said it was the name of his little cousin.

One night during the holidays, two months after beginning work, we switched on the speaker during our break, and the room filled with kompa music. Pairs of workers danced around the warehouse floor, or swayed by themselves, arms open. My new friend Cher and I clung to the side, too shy to dance.

*

In early June, I met Reubens in midtown Manhattan. He wasn’t at the Dunkin’ where we had planned to meet, and I found him down the block, a blue hoodie pulled over his ears. Our nerves filled the air between us; I found myself peering around street corners as we walked. When we arrived at the Asylum Application Help Center, we both breathed easier. It was a gray, stoic building, with a couple people sitting on the steps.

Inside, Reubens fumbled for his ID. The security desk was crowded with welcome signs in dozens of languages, and Reubens saw one he could read. (“Look, they do speak Creole here,” he said.) The walls were coated with signs: “ATTENTION!” was printed in every language, “The Asylum Application Help Center (AAHC) will permanently close on Monday June 30, 2025.”

The AAHC was launched in 2023 to assist newly arrived immigrants with the complicated asylum process, but it closed last summer; Mayor Eric Adams cited failures in the city budget. A more likely story: Adams was indicted on federal corruption charges in September 2024, but when Trump came into office, the charges were dropped in return for Adams’s bending to Trump’s political agenda, which targets immigrants like Reubens.

I had accompanied Reubens to his appointment for support. Though the room was packed, I didn’t see many other Haitians. There were Latino families, many with little kids, and some moms with babies wrapped to their chests. There were some young men who I guessed were West African, each accompanied by an older white person who sat with them, either on their phones or talking in low tones.

The waiting room slowly emptied out. “I have stress, bro,” Reubens told me. To pass the time, we talked about work, our families, and the situation in Haiti. We talked about the anti-ICE protests that consumed Los Angeles during the summer: the immigrant youth that poured onto Highway 101 wrapped in their national flags, shouting down US imperialism from the coast of California to bomb-torn Gaza. “We need that here,” said Reubens.

“Reubens,” they finally called, and here we parted ways. He motioned to dap me up, but I dodged his hand and gave him an awkward hug. He promised to call me afterwards, and I watched his back disappear as he followed the interpreter down the hallway.

*

Cher, who was by this time one of my best friends at work, showed me her forearms. They were crisscrossed with cuts, red scratches from her elbows to her wrists. In some places, the conveyor belt had even drawn blood. Its edge was sharp, and when Cher leaned against it to do a job called “straighten” – essentially, positioning the boxes on the belt into a single-file line – she often had to reach to catch a box she had missed or one that had rushed down the belt too fast. The belt was unforgiving, and the boxes hissed at her as they passed. “Oops! I delivered again. Anything you need, I’m your box,” they taunted with a smiling arrow.

Cher showed me where in her app she had submitted a complaint weeks ago. It wasn’t just her. The conveyor belt had ensnared Evens, another worker, and cracked the screen of his phone through his pants pocket.

I told Cher that we should confront the managers about the sharp edge of the belt. At first, she refused, shy and unwilling to ask the managers for anything, insisting that they wouldn’t understand her properly. For Cher, who is also Haitian, language is a barrier; her English is good but requires patience. Convincing her took time, weeks of talking to other coworkers together and comparing notes about what we’d experienced on shift. She recounted, again and again, what had happened to her, that she’d reported it through the official avenue but been ignored. She talked to other women workers; one had miscarriage scarring that the sharp belt would aggravate. Eventually we assembled a small crew of workers to bombard the managers.

Before the end of the day, management had found strips of foam to attach to the belt to protect those who “straighten.” Now Cher is no longer so afraid to talk to the managers. “You’re not listening to me,” she’ll say to our manager when he gives her trouble or brushes her off.

Cher is older than me, in her early 30s. She is composed, brilliant, funny, religious, beautiful, and kind. Like Reubens, Cher applied for asylum, fleeing the gang violence that has ravaged Haiti in the wake of governmental collapse and decades of foreign intervention. Attacks by France and the United States over the past century have severely destabilized the sovereignty and undermined the economy of the country.

“Why does the US hate Haiti?” one of the Haitian cleaners of the warehouse asked me at 3:00am. We talked about the specter of the Haitian Revolution of 1791, the first successful slave revolt, which resounded around the world and struck fear into the hearts of ruling classes everywhere.

The spirit of that historic revolution runs strong through my coworkers. When one manager barked at Gerardo, implying that he had a habit of standing about and not working after he stopped to breathe on a particularly hot and busy day, the hairs rose on his neck. “We will never be slaves again,” Gerardo told me. That day, the Haitian workers refused the overtime hours they work daily and left work in proud unison, reducing the manager on duty to an anxious puddle. Every red-vest had to work that day to finish our workload. Even HR was moving boxes, a gleeful sight for tired eyes.

*

In the breakroom, Cher and Flora talked about God. It was 5:45am, our lunch break. They were eating meat and rice brought from home; I was eating two pepperoni hot pockets wrapped in a paper towel.

Cher explained that you can be religious without having a relationship with God. “Religion has tried to tie us to God, but it has failed,” she said. “I was raised in a Christian family, but I had no relationship to God. It was only recently that I met God.” Flora laughed heartily at her.

The blood rushed to Cher’s face. “No,” she said angrily, “I know that I met him because I felt it. Now he is with me. I was very depressed, and he came to me as a friend. It was a spiritual meeting. I did not know God before. But when I approached Him, He came to meet me.”

“You are wrong, wrong,” said Flora, leaning forward against the plastic table. “I have a relationship with God. God is my father, God is my family, God is my sister, God is my friend. God is not somewhere up in the sky.” She laughed.

Cher looked at her with quiet indignation, sitting up straight in her chair. “God is not your friend,” she said.

Flora looked at me now. “Do you hear this? She said that God is not my friend. God is my friend! But it’s not what you think. If God provides, where is my passport? Is it God who can give me that?”

*

Many of my coworkers came to the United States as refugees, some with Temporary Protected Status (TPS) and some through Biden’s Processes for Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans (CHNV) parole program, which granted humanitarian parole to migrants from those countries. On May 30, 2025, the Supreme Court upheld the cancellation of the CHNV parole program, and the Department of Homeland Security issued notices to recipients of the program commanding them to self-deport or face deportation by ICE. My coworkers showed me this email in their inboxes.

The cancellation of the CHNV program alone affected more than half a million immigrants across the country. Now, TPS is also under threat as part of the Trump administration’s anti-immigrant offensive. Biden and the Democrats are equally complicit: Biden announced before the end of his term that CHNV recipients would not be allowed to renew their work permits. It’s clear to us exactly what both political parties are doing. By attacking immigrants, they pit workers against each other and undermine our ability to organize. But we were not fooled.

Twelve coworkers and I sat around a long table at a Haitian restaurant in deep Flatbush with a lawyer. She was giving us a Know Your Rights training, solemnly explaining what to do in case of an ICE raid and passing out red cards in English, French, and Haitian Creole. My coworker Mireille’s eyes pricked with tears. I held her hand, and she put her other hand over mine, as if I was the one that needed reassuring. “I know you’re worried, but I’m not scared,” she said. “I’m not afraid of Trump. I will stay here. This is my home now. I want to fight.”

Later, she pulled me out of my chair, and we rocked around the restaurant room late into the afternoon dancing kompa.

*

Near the end of my time working in the warehouse, I met a worker named Lorenzo, an older Black man with an erudite air. I could see, even when observing him from a distance, a certain conviction in his pose. I watched him speak at length to two young new hires, who stood listening among overflowing rows of boxes – transfixed or terrified by what he was telling them, it was hard to tell.

I gathered my resolve to talk to him and waited for the right moment. In the end, it was he who talked to me first. He caught me texting in an aisle. “You young people,” he said. “Do you know all the ways they are watching you?” Oh brother, here we go, I said in my head.

He began to talk to me, forgoing all small talk, about the difference between belief and knowing and the evil powers that had put us here, in this warehouse. The gray walls listened cynically, but his speech had created an escape and transported us to a rich and vivid landscape that existed beyond maxims.

When I asked him where he was from, a sharp sparkle entered his eye. “I have no country,” he said. “Do you?”

“No, I don’t either,” I said, startled.

*

In my memories I drift back to last summer. On the day of our coworker soccer game, it was pouring rain. We met at the field next to the warehouse lugging suitcases of uniforms, Prestige Haitian beer, and a giant speaker and generator and quickly had to take shelter under the trees. We clustered around their trunks as the rain came down harder and harder, the men’s backs arching as they stripped off their wet T-shirts and donned their jerseys, soon to be soaked as well.

“LU – #1” read the back of my jersey, a birthday gift from Evens. The rain flooded onto the sidewalk and flowed into itself, creating inlets and then a river between us and the field. Some ran for the warehouse to wait out the weather inside, but most of us waited, standing around, water running down our heads and through to our undergarments. Beside the thought of the game, the rain seemed marginal, and some men tied their cleats and did high knees in the mud. The rain was silver in the sun, unreal and cinematic in its density, glistening on Josue’s cheeks as he readied himself for his role as goalie. We lounged together and waited for the downpour to pass.

Once it did, the clouds parted, and a shocking hot sun graced the field. The players joined the field, and the two teams took shape: one with the uniform of Real Madrid, the other AC Milan. I fought my way through sexism onto the field on Milan’s team, arguing with men I couldn’t understand as they shouted in Creole.

The field was between two opposing buildings: On one side, our warehouse, new, gray, and geometric. Where we spend our lives. On the other, an abandoned grain terminal, vestige from a time before us, a ghost of a different industry. Its tall, darkened silos were surrounded by colorful graffiti and the clouds of the sunset to be. And on the other side, behind our warehouse, the clouds were those muted types, like the spines of fish elongating into the distance.

In between was us. Evens, watching the game, furrowed his brow, more serious than I had ever seen him. Stretched across the field were the players, my coworkers, the blues and reds of their uniforms smearing into the sky. I took out my camera to take a photograph of Gerardo coming across the field. He strode towards me, overtaking the warehouse in the background and becoming giant in its wake. Flecks of rain spotted my lens, and I took the photo, though maybe too late. Gerardo ran, he missed, he shot, he scored, he slipped, tumbling head over heels in wet grass and in triumph, just like any great soccer player might on a rainy day.