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Jessica Kariisa [00:00:00] I’m Jessica Kariisa, in for Ericka Cruz Guevara, and welcome to The Bay, local news to keep you rooted.
Julio [00:00:07] Way over there. You have to look at a car that comes in, it’s suspicious, we’re all there.
Jessica Kariisa [00:00:17] This is Julio. He’s a day laborer in Oakland. On some mornings, he stands on a corner waiting for someone to offer him work. It could be in landscaping or construction, but he’s really not picky. He’ll do most work.
Julio [00:00:37] Whatever, whatever.
Jessica Kariisa [00:00:43] Julio’s already in a vulnerable position. He’s standing outside on a public corner, waiting to interact with strangers. But these days, it’s even more dangerous because many day laborers, including Julio, are undocumented.
Newsreel [00:01:00] This cell phone video shows another raid. This happened at a Home Depot in Westlake. Now agents pulled up in unmarked vans and you can see the panic and the fear in the streets among the street vendors.
Jessica Kariisa [00:01:12] An increase in ICE activity has also led to a lot more fear among day laborers like Julio. But volunteers are responding. They’re showing up to those same street corners to keep watch.
Christy [00:01:29] I believe in social justice, I believe right and wrong, and I can’t sit on my hands and say that’s wrong without doing something about it.
Jessica Kariisa [00:01:41] Today, why volunteers are adopting street corners for day laborers.
Farida Jhabvala Romero [00:01:56] So I went to this intersection in East Oakland in the morning.
Farida Jhabvala Romero [00:02:07] It’s really busy, you know. There’s a lot of parents walking their kids to a nearby school, people waiting for the bus. It was a U-Haul parking lot. There was a lot activity there, in addition to about 10 to 12 day laborers waiting for jobs.
Jessica Kariisa [00:02:23] And why did you want to go to to that corner?
Farida Jhabvala Romero [00:02:26] Yeah, so that’s where a training was gonna happen for volunteers of a program called Adopt a Day Laborer Corner.
Steve Robles [00:02:37] Right, the hardest thing is always being a step ahead of this department, right, of this agency.
Farida Jhabvala Romero [00:02:42] The idea is that people who want to support folks who might be at risk of detention by immigration authorities or stops by immigration authorities and who want to just, you know, support physically often vulnerable immigrants like delivers by being there.
Jessica Kariisa [00:03:02] And yeah, I’ve definitely seen corners where, you know, day laborers are waiting for work. I haven’t seen volunteers there waiting there with them. Can you tell me a little bit more about what the volunteers were doing when you were there?
Farida Jhabvala Romero [00:03:15] Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I didn’t know what exactly we were going to find, but I was very curious and the reason I worked on the story was I was curious about who was getting up early in the morning to do something like that.
Christy [00:03:28] I need to be out with the community I can’t and immigration has always been a real heartbreaker for me and it’s always been in my heart.
Farida Jhabvala Romero [00:03:37] I’m gonna only use their first names because both were afraid or concerned about negative impacts of their full names being out. So one of the volunteers I met, her name is Christy, and she’s 60 years old. She’s an interpreter. She lives in Alameda.
Christy [00:03:54] So I just decided, this seems like something I can do. I’m bilingual, I can look out, I have…
Farida Jhabvala Romero [00:04:00] And then the other volunteer is Wendy.
Wendy [00:04:03] Yeah, I’ve been here a few times. This will be my second week.
Farida Jhabvala Romero [00:04:10] And it was really interesting because Wendy works in public health, she actually lives nearby and she said she’d been you know spending time in the mornings there bringing her knitting and like chatting with with workers while she sat there. Both of them spoke Spanish you know they’re you know white American ladies who speak Spanish and so they felt like their jobs were either flexible enough in schedule or they could make time in a morning before their jobs to show up and do this.
Wendy [00:04:41] I’m not much of one for writing letters or emailing or calling, but this is something I can do.
Jessica Kariisa [00:04:49] Can you tell me a bit more about why they said they were out there?
Farida Jhabvala Romero [00:04:53] So I think both of these women were really activated by the recent bystander videos we’ve seen of federal agents detaining people in the Los Angeles area and nearby counties.
Christy [00:05:10] You know, watching what was going on in LA just broke my heart. It’s like, how can I, you know, be of service for a community?
Farida Jhabvala Romero [00:05:18] And then, especially, Christy talked about how she was really distressed by videos of immigration agents violently detaining people.
Christy [00:05:29] I believe in social justice. I believe in right and wrong and I can’t sit on my hands and say that’s wrong without doing something about it.
Jessica Kariisa [00:05:43] And this call that they heard to adopt a day laborer corner, where did it come from? Who’s behind it?
Farida Jhabvala Romero [00:05:50] Yeah, so there’s been an organization for a long time called the National Day Laborer Organizing Network. They’re based in Southern California, but they’re national. They have, I think, dozens of organizations like Street Level Health Project in Oakland that are part of this network. And so what they told me is that for years they’ve encouraged people to sort of make neighbors, employers, other folks to make a connection with these day laborers, you know, and like bring them coffee or not be afraid to chat with them outside of, you know, work projects. When the LA immigration operations started really heating up in the summer, they sort of formalized that initiative and made it into this Adopt a Corner program. They said they got like thousands of people, you know, attending their trainings, and so they’ve had a massive spike in interest, you now, to show up.
Jessica Kariisa [00:06:53] So say I decide to adopt a coroner. Is the goal for me if I see an ICE raid happening or if I see ICE coming to stop that from happening or to stop someone from being detained, what exactly is the goal?
Farida Jhabvala Romero [00:07:08] No, that is not the goal. The main goal is just to first monitor what’s happening. What we’ve seen with immigration enforcement is often they don’t have identification that says immigration or ICE.
Steve Robles [00:07:26] When it comes to adopt a corner, your position is more as a watch out. We want you to be very aware of your surroundings and very vigilant.
Farida Jhabvala Romero [00:07:36] Steve Robles is with Street Level Health Project, which is an organization, I think their office is in the Fruitvale. Steve was talking to the volunteers about what they were expected to do.
Steve Robles [00:07:50] One thing that we’ve noticed is if a truck is large enough to have people standing up in the back, that’s a big red flag because what they’re doing is these raids happen in maybe five minutes.
Farida Jhabvala Romero [00:08:03] He told them that ICE arrests, especially in public places, can happen very quickly. And their job as volunteers is to, as soon as they spot, you know, this kind of activity happening or something they suspect, this, you know immigration enforcement showing up, to call a number that alerts a wider network of immigrant advocates and lawyers, and at the same time to try to document what’s happening with their cell phones. After arrests happen, people need to figure out who was arrested, you know, and then try to alert the relatives. So there’s that kind of gathering of information that will help later on. It’s getting maybe legal help to people who need it, alerting relatives or friends about what’s happened and that kind stuff.
Jessica Kariisa [00:08:59] So really like serving as a witness and then helping to activate a chain of events that might allow someone to get more resources and more help.
Jessica Kariisa [00:09:16] For the day laborers themselves, seeing these volunteers, how does that make them feel? Do they feel safer?
Farida Jhabvala Romero [00:09:34] At first people are like who are these folks you know why are you just standing there and then the day laborers felt like well I mean it’s another pair of eyes right that is here.
Julio [00:09:45] It’s good that they live here because it’s more protected.
Farida Jhabvala Romero [00:09:49] It feels like there’s more people besides the workers.
Julio [00:09:53] There’s more people, yeah.
Farida Jhabvala Romero [00:09:54] Julio is a day laborer, originally from Honduras, because of his immigration status, we’re not using his full name. He’s been in the States for a long time, and mostly works construction, landscaping jobs, but he says he comes to this particular corner in Oakland, you know, when he’s done with those jobs and is in between jobs, to try to supplement his income.
Farida Jhabvala Romero [00:10:22] You have to be careful because you don’t know what’s going to happen. You have a suspicious car coming. We’re all there.
Farida Jhabvala Romero [00:10:32] He was very vigilant while we were talking. A lot of these, I think the immigration enforcement in Southern California has really made these folks who were already concerned about ICE agents showing up be even more worried about that. And because of the nature of their job, I mean, you have like vehicles coming up to them and then a potential employer asking who wants to work, explaining about the terms for the project. But when new people approach, they’re trying to figure out if it’s safe to even come close to that vehicle.
Jessica Kariisa [00:11:09] Yeah, I mean, it sounds incredibly stressful. And I imagine Julio has so many other things going on, you know, trying to get work and, you know trying to also stay in the country. I wonder what is his most pressing need as a day laborer? And like, are initiatives like Adopt a Corner helping him?
Farida Jhabvala Romero [00:11:30] We’ll see you know what the impact is but for day laborers I mean they’re out there because they need the work. They need to make money they need to pay rent they need to they often send money back to their home countries to their families Julio said he was like sending money to his daughter he’s you know in college in Honduras so I think their most pressing needs remain the same which is you know like make a living. Even though we’ve heard that the number of day laborers definitely went down in these very public spaces, you know, many still need to like make money so they have to come out. And here in Northern California, we have not seen that level of immigration enforcement that we’ve seen in LA. But there’s definitely a sense that people are watching and they’re trying to prepare. And so I think the volunteers I spoke with felt like this was something that they could start doing now to build those relationships, figure out what corner they’re going to be in, and then if needed, they’ll be there. So I think a lot of this is a lot preparation in the Bay Area.
Jessica Kariisa [00:12:44] Yeah, yeah. Sort of picking up on that, you know, on the other side of it, you know, people watching all these things happening, seeing all these viral videos. There have been different responses to it. We’ve seen huge protests in the Bay Area all across California. I’m wondering how you see a program like this, you know, fitting into, like, the broader efforts around, like responding to what’s happening around immigration.
Farida Jhabvala Romero [00:13:10] I think there’s a lot of organizing and trying to reach out to different people that are interested in getting involved. And so I think that there’s been a little more urgency. With this program, in particular, what the volunteers told me is they needed another avenue to feel like they could do something that they believe will help the broader community.
Wendy [00:13:40] It helps to be actually doing a thing and even if it’s only a little bit useful, you know, because me being here, is that going to prevent people getting picked up by ICE if ICE shows up? Probably not, but we can mitigate some of the harm.
Farida Jhabvala Romero [00:13:53] For Wendy, that was a way to show solidarity. She also lives in the neighborhood, and so these folks are part of her community in a way. She sees them all the time as she’s going to work. And so for her, it was like going a step beyond and spend time at the corner, observing and just monitoring for things.
