Two weeks ago local, state, and federal police, including Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) simultaneously raided massage parlors in Longmeadow, West Springfield, Hadley, Springfield and Chicopee More than 30 agents took part in the two Hadley raids, in which two people were arrested. In total, the police arrested nine people. Six were arrested on immigration charges and three on prostitution charges.
How do the police justify these expensive, high profile raids? An anonymous tip that a Chicopee massage parlor employee had offered sex for cash. Undercover cops investigated this tip multiple times but were never able to verify it. According to the cops, they had been investigating the massage parlors in Springfield for some time, but could not come up with enough evidence to arrest anyone there on the prostitution charges.
In these raids only three of the arrests had to do with prostitution. The majority of the arrests were for immigration violations. If these raids were targeted to break up a prostitution ring, then why are the majority of the charges related to immigration? It’s clear that when the vice squad couldn’t find enough evidence to put people away on prostitution charges, they turned to ICE to do their dirty work.
Now what about the six women who are now in ICE custody? At the East Longmeadow parlor that was raided, three of the employees that were undocumented were also living in the parlor. This means that they were almost certainly not paid a living wage and may even have been held against their will. They, like the 12 million other undocumented immigrants in this country, would have had almost no way of asserting their rights as workers. How many hours did they work a day? How many days a week? What happened to them if they were injured or assaulted by a customer? Their boss could have told them to do anything, and they would have no choice but to obey. If they spoke up, they could have easily been handed over to ICE to face imprisonment and deportation. Now that they have been arrested—not on prostitution charges but on immigration charges—they will be held without bail until a federal immigration judge reviews their cases. This means that people whose only crime was working will be sent to federal prison until they are deported.
While incarcerated by ICE, they will have no contact with their families or anyone else until they reappear in their home countries. This detention period could be as short as a few weeks or as long as a year. The ICE tactics of holding people without trial, contact with the outside world, or bail, is disturbingly similar to the practice of “disappearing” dissidents used by military dictatorships around the world. In the United States, this is the fate of millions who have come seeking jobs to support themselves and their families.
Most undocumented workers in this country are refugees of trade policies which devastate economies abroad. It is inhumane, hypocritical and unjust to then deport these people, tearing apart lives and families. We must organize against repressive immigration policy that makes it unsafe for immigrants to live and work in our communities. We must fight for dignity alongside undocumented workers—if ICE is coming for them, you can be sure the cops will be there too. So we must also organize ourselves against the police, who will always be willing to brutalize working people, immigrants or otherwise, in order to maintain economic inequality.