In a World Cup-fueled union win, concessions workers at SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles have won the right to walk off the job, should ICE pose a threat to their safety. The stadium’s 2,000 cooks, bartenders, dishwashers, servers, and attendants had a major piece of leverage this summer: eight scheduled World Cup matches. Their victory came days after a 96 percent vote to authorize a strike.
Source
One year after the Trump administration deployed thousands of federal agents to Los Angeles to arrest and detain people, immigrant rights activists are cautiously optimistic about the success of their organizing efforts. Although arrests by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents in Southern California have dramatically dropped, organizers expect them to ramp up again in the future.
Source
As the World Cup nears, Los Angeles’s service workers — the people who staff hotels and keep the restaurants and bars going inside the city’s big stadium — have threatened to go on strike if the tournament becomes hunting grounds for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). They have good reason to be worried. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has indicated that it may not routinely…
Source
Journalist Steven Thrasher’s second book, The Overseer Class, begins with a quote by James Baldwin from a 1967 essay in The New York Times, where Baldwin writes, “we feared black cops even more than white cops, because the black cop had to work so much harder — on your head.” To see the continuing relevance of that quote, look to the horrific murder of Tyre Nichols in 2023 — a Black man…
Source
Former schoolteacher Theo Henderson had been unhoused for six years when he launched the “We the Unhoused” podcast in 2019 from a park in Los Angeles’s Chinatown. Henderson became unhoused in 2013 when he was evicted after losing his job and falling into medical debt due to spiraling costs related to his diabetes. When he began documenting his experiences and those of his unhoused neighbors…
Source
Activists in Los Angeles are demanding justice for Keith Porter Jr., an African American 43-year-old father of two, who was fatally shot by an off-duty ICE agent on New Year’s Eve. His family is demanding transparency in the investigation into his killing. “When he walked in, he brought joy,” says Porter’s cousin Jsané Tyler. “He always had a laugh, a joke, a smile.
Source