Tag: Day laborers

JHISN Newsletter 05/24/2026

Posted on May 24, 2026 by - News, Newsletter

Dear friends,

Like the volatile Spring weather, the battle for NYC immigrants’ future runs hot and cold. We were glad last Monday when a federal judge ruled that ICE arrests at Manhattan immigration courts must be significantly curtailed. But that feeling of relief was soon tempered by learning that ICE detained a man at immigration court the very next day—and by awareness that ICE might respond to the ruling by increasing its presence on our streets. 

Today’s newsletter begins on a positive note by describing how NICE (New Immigrant Community Empowerment) has expanded its programs and physical presence in the neighborhood. Our second article dives into the little-known story of Omni Airlines, a billionaire-funded company noted for its particularly cruel ICE deportations. We share a revealing map that quickly shows the story of ICE activity in Corona, and conclude with information about an upcoming volunteer event—one where we hope you will join us.

Newsletter highlights:
  1. Going “beyond one-time assistance” for immigrants at NICE
  2. The airline you’ve never heard of that transports ICE deportees
  3. Mapping ICE activity in NYC

1. NICE: “From Surviving to Thriving”

Migration and displacement are overwhelming experiences. Community members must navigate complex U.S. systems—healthcare, employment, housing, and financial services—that are often unfamiliar and difficult to access. —NICE Fact Sheet

Since 1999, New Immigrant Community Empowerment (NICE) has been a crucial first point of contact in our neighborhood for thousands of recent Spanish-speaking immigrants seeking access to social services, legal advice, community, and basic survival assistance. NICE has long been known for its support for day laborers, its OSHA and ESL classes, and for political action in support of immigrant rights.

In recent years, NICE has expanded both its role and its facilities. Their current strategy gives priority to “holistic, culturally competent support that goes beyond one-time assistance.” A key feature of this strategy is the Pre-Apprenticeship Program for Life and Work (Pre-APLW). This apprenticeship program offers English-language, legal, and job-related training. But it also helps immigrants build other practical skills useful in navigating life in the US, including:

  • accessing health and mental health services
  • learning more about transportation systems
  • strengthening financial literacy
  • dealing with New York’s rental and real estate markets

Pre-APLW is organized around intensive workshops. These typically include 25 to 30 participants, who devote 30 to 40 hours a week for four weeks. NICE has contacts and partnerships with potential employers, allowing Pre-APLW Apprentices to obtain hands-on experience and job opportunities. Like all NICE programs, Pre-APLW aims to promote social and political leadership and build community among immigrants.

NICE has recently acquired and renovated additional spaces around Roosevelt and 72nd Street, becoming a small campus. This includes a community center, event and meeting areas, classrooms, and offices. The organization hopes to keep expanding to further meet the needs of their members and all recent immigrants. 

Funding for NICE’s work comes from a combination of government grants, philanthropic or corporate donors, and private contributions. Volunteers are encouraged to assist at the organization’s community events, such as their winter toy giveaway and their Thanksgiving distribution. NICE is currently campaigning to build community support by sponsoring runners in this year’s New York Marathon.

WHAT CAN WE DO?

2. Omni: ICE’s “Special” Airline

“To leave human beings warehoused on a tarmac for hours reveals a system that does not see them as people. This is not simply a logistical error; it is a feature of ICE’s inhumane mission.”—Jo Jordon of No ICE NH

Michael Dorrell, an immigrant from Australia, made billions as a financial investor in logistics companies like the Air Transport Services Group, ATSG, which owns Omni Airlines, a passenger airline that, through the broker Classic Air Charter, contracts with ICE to provide airline deportations. Omni is reportedly the sole provider of “special high-risk charter” (SHRC) deportation flights. Since other airlines refuse to provide that service, Omni charges ICE twice the standard rate for similar flight services, over $33,000 per hour. Comparing the ICE deportation machine to Amazon for people is more than a metaphor: between 2016 and 2024, Amazon acquired over 13 million shares in ATSG, and ATSG expanded the number of cargo planes leased to Amazon in an operating agreement that is good to 2029.

The Torture Abolition and Survivors Support Coalition demanded, in 2022, that Omni suspend cooperation with ICE due to the many human rights violations created by their deportation work. Omni did not stop. In fact, that year, the US government gave Omni $67 million in COVID bailout funds and awarded them a $78 million contract. The airline’s treatment of immigrants actually got worse: flights have become longer and crueler. In 2024, Omni had just six trips that took more than 24 hours to complete, using multi-destination hops. By the end of 2025, 31 flights took between 24 and 50 hours—some have taken 70 to 80 hours. Deportees are held in shackles for the entire duration–an ICE requirement–and deportees have sometimes gone 10 hours without food or water. 

ICE talked publicly last year about possibly purchasing its own fleet, but for now, it works with between 8 and 14 aircraft from about 10 contractors to oversee about 15,000 deportations every month. To reach Trump’s goal of 1 million annual deportations would require 83,300 removals every month, which would require more than 50 planes.

Thomas Cartwright offers a stark contrast with Dorrell.  He is a retired financial investor who, when working with Witness at the Border in 2019, learned about the dehumanizing deportation flights leaving small border airports. He used his skills to track deportation planes using flight-tracking apps. It was his work that revealed the details about the notorious CECOT flights last year. He trained others in his process and has transferred the bulk of the work to Human Rights First, which now publishes monthly reports. April’s report holds 32 pages of revealing details, including:

  • The number of flights for both internal transfers and removals.
  • The use of coast guard flights in the deportation machine.
  • The number of planes provided by each airline carrier.
  • The path of a 51-hour flight carrying deportees to 6 countries.
  • How many times each airport is used: Alexandria, in Louisiana, had the most usage at 2,439 flights.

The contrast of the work these two people have done reveals the difference in mindset between a person who is seeking to make money regardless of how people’s lives are horrifically impacted, and a person who is looking to help his community do well by other people instead of blaming and abusing them.

WHAT CAN WE DO?

3. Locally Mapping ICE 

There are data analysts, such as Danielle Harlow, who examine ICE records nationally to produce public data visualizations showing deportation flights and the locations from which people were taken.  NYC activists are also gathering data to tell the stories of local people kidnapped by ICE enforcers. Corona-based Queens Neighborhoods United (QNU) has been tracking neighborhood ICE raids and verifying the locations where they have kidnapped people. 

 

NYC Icebreaker has been tracking ICE actions throughout the city: their work has revealed that raids are most likely to take place between 7-8 am and 3-5 pm. Monday seems to be the most popular day of the week for ICE to stage their raids in Corona, Tuesday in Bushwick, and Thursday in Sunset Park.

Maps like these are helpful, but incomplete. At last weekend’s anti-casino town hall meeting, it was noted that hundreds of people per month are taken from NYC streets to endure the excruciating flights and inhumane detention centers. Neither maps nor figures can show the full extent or cruelty of the process. 

Like so much immigrant justice work, tracking and mapping ICE is the work of small, local, volunteer-led groups who need support from neighbors and progressive journalists to continue raising awareness and speaking out against the injustices of the deportation machinery.

WHAT CAN WE DO?
  • Join JHISN, Brave of Us, and others at the Community Volunteer Morning organized by Documented, the multilingual, immigrant-driven news outlet we have covered in this newsletter (and often use as a source):

    “Saturday, June 6, from 10:00 AM to 12:00 PM: Distribute newspapers and guides to community spaces (houses of worship, small businesses, community centers, and busy public areas). Engage with residents about their information needs and build community in real time, together— and over food and drink.” INFORMATION AND RSVP

 

In solidarity and with collective care,

Jackson Heights Immigrant Solidarity Network (JHISN)

Follow @JHSolidarity on Facebook and Twitter and share this newsletter with friends, families, neighbors, networks, and colleagues so they can subscribe and receive news from JHISN. 

 

 

JHISN Newsletter 01/14/2023

Posted on January 14, 2023 by - News, Newsletter

Dear friends,

As winter brings colder weather and our search for warmth, the realities of economic inequality and financial insecurity become all the more stark. Our newsletter looks at two local struggles to generate security and empowerment for immigrant workers often left out in the cold: day laborers, and those who are systematically excluded from the unemployment system. Our first article reports on the growing importance of Worker Centers in organizing immigrant day laborers, and the leading role of NICE (New Immigrant Community Empowerment), based here in Jackson Heights. Our second article announces a new movement launched by the Fund Excluded Workers Coalition to permanently expand unemployment compensation to cover many of the most vulnerable workers in New York state.  

Newsletter highlights:
  1. Day laborers and worker centers: NICE organizing
  2. Statewide campaign to secure unemployment insurance for all 

 

1. Jornaleros: Pushing Out of the Shadow Economy

On a recent afternoon in Woodside, more than fifty men wearing work clothes and backpacks have spread out along 69th Street, from Roosevelt Avenue to Broadway. Hanging out in small groups or alone, they scan the passing traffic intently, hoping that a van or car pulls over with an offer of work.

These workers are among an estimated 10,000 day laborers, gathered at about 70 sites around the city, who play an indispensable role in the NYC economy. Day laborers are hired for a variety of jobs, including domestic work. But the greatest demand for day labor comes from the city’s sprawling, $86 billion dollar a year construction industry. 69th Street has long been known as a stop—parada—where employers can find construction day laborers.

Immigrants make up 63% of the city’s construction workforce. Most are from Latin America. Their pay and conditions differ greatly depending on immigration status and union membership, with undocumented day laborers at the bottom of the construction labor hierarchy. Struggling just to get a one-day job, they tend to work for small, non-union contractors and landlords, some of whom are notorious for low pay, wage theft, and unsafe conditions. Now a new wave of migrants, many from Venezuela, is trying to establish a foothold in the industry, hustling jobs on city streets. Early morning crowds at 69th Street and other paradas have grown.

Day laborers—jornaleros and jornaleras in Spanish—have always engaged in an uphill struggle for dignity and fairness in the US. In recent decades, a nationwide network of “worker centers” has been at the heart of this struggle. In our own community, one of these worker centers is organized by New Immigrant Community Empowerment (NICE), whose offices on Roosevelt and 71st Street are buzzing with day laborer activity. NICE is part of a citywide day laborer coalition of worker centers fighting to “improve workplace conditions in unregulated industries, defend their civil rights, and to end wage theft.”

Although worker centers were once seen as unwanted competitors by the construction unions, in recent years it’s become clear that worker centers are organizing workers who the unions themselves can’t reach, and that they are helping lift up standards in the whole construction industry. Relations between worker centers and unions vary around the country. But today there is often cooperation, which sometimes includes the funding of worker centers by unions, and has even involved a few joint unionization efforts. In New York, Local 79 of the Laborers Union and other unions work closely with local worker centers on the #FundExcludedWorkers campaign, including the recent mobilization to expand unemployment insurance.

NICE and the other worker centers often protest and lobby for legislation needed by day laborers, such as Carlos’ Law, a major NY State workplace safety bill signed by Governor Hochul in December. Workers victimized by wage theft or who face unsafe conditions can count on NICE to use its collective strength to intervene—sometimes side by side with unionized workers. NICE runs a continuous series of Occupational Safety and Health classes, which are legally required for work on most construction sites. The waiting list for these classes has grown long, as the recently arrived wave of asylum seekers searches for work. NICE also teaches construction skills such as framing, plumbing, and painting, as well as “soft skills” like English and technology. Women are encouraged to investigate careers in construction. All of the classes and workshops are free.

NICE’s effort to build solidarity among jornaleros is exemplified by their day laborer hiring hall. Employers looking for dependable day labor contact the Center. (“Hire NICE Workers,” the Center’s website says.) Workers who are registered with NICE get dispatched without favoritism, with an agreed wage, and with a formal work order. This system protects workers from unscrupulous bosses and job agencies. The Center’s workers make decisions democratically about minimum pay and other aspects of dispatch. The Worker Center doesn’t have the number of jobs or the physical capacity that would allow them to dispatch the whole local day laborer workforce today. Most jornaleros are still looking for work on 69th Street at least part of the time. But the hiring hall model is known in labor history to be a potential kernel of powerful worker organizations. For instance, in the 1930s, the demand for a hiring hall was central to eliminating the competitive “shape-up” of day laborers that ruled the longshore industry at that time. Winning the demand for a fair hiring hall helped create longshore unions in the US, mobilizing a mostly-immigrant day labor workforce that had been considered unorganizable.

To amplify its day labor activism, NICE developed a cell phone app in 2016 that helps workers track their hours and pay, rates employers, and shares warnings and alerts. Omar Trinidad, a construction worker, was the lead organizer for the app, which was named, appropriately, Jornalero/a. The app has spread to day laborer stops and among delivery workers in the city and beyond.

WHAT CAN WE DO?
  • Sign the petition, by NYC’s Day Laborer Coalition, calling on the city council to fund the Day Laborer Workforce Initiative. 
  • Hire a NICE worker if you need construction, day labor, domestic work, or a dog walker.

 

2. #ExcludedNoMore Launches Campaign for Unemployment Compensation

Immigrant justice groups and the Fund for Excluded Workers (FEW) Coalition won a historic struggle here in New York in 2021: $2.1 billion in state funding for immigrant workers systematically excluded from federal pandemic relief programs such as unemployment insurance and stimulus payments. The NY Department of Labor (DOL) distributed the money to 130,000 eligible applicants, with most recipients receiving the maximum funding amount of $15,600. Last month, the NYDOL made final payments of another $30 million to an additional 1,900 New Yorkers.

But immigration activists and community organizers didn’t stop after this unprecedented victory. The pandemic revealed brutal inequities in government support for workers in precarious times:

“[T[here are hundreds of thousands of workers across New York who have no way to access financial support when a crisis hits, be it a pandemic or an economic recession. That’s because our unemployment insurance system shuts out many of our state’s most vulnerable workers, especially Black, Brown, and immigrant workers in precarious low-wage industries …. We need a permanent solution that will remedy the need for an Excluded Workers Fund in the future.” –Nisha Tabassum, FEW Coalition Manager

This week, #ExcludedNoMore launches a statewide Unemployment Bridge Program campaign to secure economic justice for all workers excluded from unemployment compensation due to their immigration status, or the kind of job they hold—including coverage for up to 750,000 domestic workers, day laborers, freelancers, and street vendors. “We need to do the structural work of matching our state’s unemployment system to the realities of the labor force,” said Queens-based State Senator Jessica Ramos, “The Unemployment Bridge Project is an update that aims to create a 21st-century safety net to match our 21st-century workforce.”

On January 11, the new campaign officially launched in NYC with a march and press conference near the Brooklyn Bridge. Rolling launch actions will take place this week in Westchester, Long Island, Upstate, and Albany. The struggle is just beginning!

 WHAT CAN WE DO?
  • Follow the Unemployment Bridge campaign on Fund Excluded Workers Coalition’s  Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, where future actions and rallies will be announced.

 

In solidarity and with collective care,

Jackson Heights Immigrant Solidarity Network (JHISN)

Follow @JHSolidarity on Facebook and Twitter and share this newsletter with friends, families, neighbors, networks, and colleagues so they can subscribe and receive news from JHISN.