Democratic Gov. Abigail Spanberger made headlines this week with her order that state law enforcement agencies end controversial agreements with US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
The agreements, known as 287(g) agreements, effectively mean that state police could be recruited into Trump’s violent crackdown on immigrants and protestors.
These agreements have been one tool the Trump administration has used to more aggressively target immigrants. And that crackdown is having real economic impacts on both workers and their communities.
For example, KFF, the health policy researcher, says that Trump’s restrictions on foreign workers will likely “exacerbate existing health care worker shortages, including in the rural physician workforce.”
Meanwhile on Trump’s watch, ICE’s budget has exploded from less than $6 billion in 2015 to $78 billion in the current fiscal year.
Surely there are better uses of that money at a time when nearly half of US adults say it’s difficult to afford health care and the child poverty rate in the US rose to 13% in 2024.
In Virginia, local officials in Hanover County said they didn’t want a new ICE warehouse to open there because supervisors don’t want to deal with the negative economic impact they expected it would cause.
And there’s the impact on ordinary working people.
I was in Richmond recently where I asked Felicia Boney, chair of the Richmond chapter of Service Employees International Union Virginia 512, about the intersection between the labor movement and immigrants’ rights.
For Boney, the answer was simple: the immigrants under attack are the same workers that power so much of the economy.
”It’s just absolutely ludicrous because they’re one and the same,” Boney said. “It’s the people that do the labor.”
