Dear Tufts unions,
As we know, President Donald Trump’s administration’s horrific attacks on immigrants and its repression of the antiwar movement have only escalated in the wake of the arrest of Mahmoud Khalil at Columbia University. After being abducted near her home by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers on Tuesday, Tufts graduate student and member of Service Employees International Union Local 509 Rümeysa Öztürk has been locked in a Louisiana ICE detention facility and is threatened with deportation.
The day after Öztürk’s kidnapping, over 2,000 protesters rallied in Somerville; it is imperative to keep this momentum going. Without an organized national fightback, led by the labor movement, we have no hope of freeing our fellow students and workers nor of ending the horrific abductions and deportations. That’s why Workers Strike Back is calling on all Tufts campus unions to join the student walkout this coming Tuesday. It’s urgent that students, workers and union members shut down the campus on Tuesday as a decisive step towards building the movement to fight Trump’s attacks.
Workers Strike Back supports the Tufts dining hall workers and members of UNITE HERE Local 26 — a group who on Friday called for the immediate release of Öztürk and called out the real motive of this arrest: “to spread fear among immigrant workers.” We absolutely agree with this assessment. To quote the old labor adage, “an injury to one is an injury to all.” We also agree with SEIU President April Verrett in that prominent “universities are rapidly becoming graveyards for free speech rights, with students and faculty living in fear.” This is why we are calling on all Tufts unions — including SEIU Local 509, SEIU Local 32BJ, UNITE HERE Local 26 and OPEIU Local 153 — to join the student-led walkout on Tuesday at noon.
There is an urgent need to unite the labor and antiwar movements. The collaboration of student activists and labor organizations played a critical role in winning the historic victories of the Vietnam anti-war movement. Now, with visa holders and legal residents being wrongfully detained for speaking out against Israel’s U.S.-backed genocide of over 50,000 Palestinians per Gaza Health Ministry, to others estimating as nearly 200,000, this kind of mass action is needed again. It is woefully insufficient for unions and organizations to release infographics and host trainings educating members on their “rights” at a time when Trump’s billionaire-backed administration is systematically trampling on those rights. In addition to the attacks on immigrant workers, Trump has also signed an executive order ending the right to collective bargaining for many federal workers.
Workers Strike Back was formed in 2023 on the legacy of founding member Kshama Sawant’s fighting strategy on the Seattle City Council. It was her office’s movement-building strategy, organizing alongside working people and union members that: helped win the first $15 an hour minimum wage in a major city in the country which has now risen to $20.76 an hour, historic victories in renters’ rights and an annual tax on Amazon and other big businesses which raised $360 million last year alone to fund affordable housing. We will be walking out in solidarity with Tufts students on Tuesday. It is critical to build the strongest possible support for this shutdown as a major catalyst for the mass protests, strikes and civil disobedience that will be necessary to halt these deportations of student activists and immigrant workers.
In solidarity,
Sam White, Workers Strike Back and former UNITE HERE NEJB member
Willow Reader, Workers Strike Back and former SEIU Local 509 member
Joan Wright, Workers Strike Back and OPIEU Local 153 Member
solidarity@workersstrikeback.org
Correction: The article was updated to better reflect the estimated death toll in Gaza. This correction was made on March 31.
