Labor's Gotta Play Hardball to Win!

Showdown on West Coast Docks: The Battle
of Longview
(November 2011).
click on photo for article

Chicago Plant Occupation Electrifies Labor
(December 2008).
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May Day Strike Against the War Shuts
Down
U.S. West Coast Ports
(May 2008)
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June 2017
L.A. “Sanctuary Clinic”
Defends Immigrant Patients

Ana Grande, organizing director for the Clínica Oscar A.
Romero in Los Angeles. (CSEW
photo)
The following article is reprinted from the Class
Struggle Education Workers website, http://edworkersunite.blogspot.com/.
Bringing the power of labor into the fight to defeat the
anti-immigrant onslaught has been central to the Class
Struggle Education Workers’ work in the past period. This
is reflected in materials on the CSEW site, such as “NYC
Schools Must Be a Sanctuary for Immigrant and All Students
– Keep I.C.E. Cops Out of Our Schools,” “NYC Health Care
Workers Say: Mobilize the Power of Labor to Defend Muslims
and Immigrants,” and “The Crime of Medical Deportations.”
CSEW members have played a leading role in putting into
practice the call to establish committees to defend
immigrants in unions, schools and workplaces, while
helping build protests and mobilizations against attacks
and provocations aimed at immigrants, Muslims and basic
democratic rights.
So it was with great interest that CSEW activists learned
that a health clinic in Los Angeles had declared itself a
sanctuary from the recent wave of raids targeting
undocumented immigrants (“L.A. Health Clinic Protects
Immigrants Against Illness — and Deportation,” LA
Weekly, 15 March). Located in the largely Central
American Pico-Union neighborhood, the clinic is named
after Archbishop Oscar Romero of El Salvador, who was
assassinated in 1980 by right-wing death squads determined
to silence his denunciations of U.S.-backed army terror
during the Salvadoran civil war. The LA Weekly
reported:
“Administrators for the Clínica Monseñor Oscar
A. Romero declared the sanctuary policy ... after
caregivers reported an alarming rise in the number of
missed medical appointments since the Immigrant and
Customs Enforcement sweeps began in earnest in the area in
mid-February. Most of the patients who come to clinic for
care were born in El Salvador, Guatemala or Mexico, and an
estimated 40 percent of them are undocumented, according
to Ana Grande, the organizing director for the clinic.”
Grande was quoted as stating, “If agents come in
storming, our providers are prepared to act as human
shields.”
Inspired by this courageous stance, we sent her the
motion passed by NYC health care workers Local 768 (part
of AFSCME DC 37) on the fight to “defend undocumented
immigrants in need of health care from round-ups, jail and
deportation.” Phone discussions on the importance of
linking up these struggles from coast to coast led to a
mid-April visit to the Clínica Romero, where CSEW member
Sándor John interviewed Ana Grande. The edited and
abridged interview is published below.
* * *
Can you tell us a little about the clinic, its name,
and the patient population?
Clínica Monseñor Oscar Romero was founded in 1983 by a
group of Salvadoran refugees and their allies. It was
originally a concept from a committee of the El Rescate
legal services group, who were [concerned about] health
access for the new diaspora of Central Americans in Los
Angeles. There were some nurses in the community who said,
“Let’s start a clinic.” It started as a non-profit,
volunteer-run free clinic. The founders wanted to ensure
that there would be a community organizing department
within the clinic, so we’d be able to tackle what we now
know as the “social determinants of health” such as
housing, immigration, food scarcity, mental health issues,
you name it.
Over the last 34 years we have transitioned to having a
staff of 183, and we’re now a federally qualified agency
with 12,000 patients. 95% of our patients are monolingual
Spanish-speaking, and 2% speak a Mayan language called
Kanjobal spoken in Guatemala, and others speak dialects of
Náhuatl. There are now some African immigrants as well. We
believe that we owe it to our immigrant patients, and our
brothers and sisters in the community at large, to be
working in their defense, advocating for them.
So the clinic was founded at the height of the civil
war in El Salvador.
Yes. The clinic is named Monseñor Oscar Romero partly
because he lived and worked at a hospital in El Salvador,
El Hospitalito, which we provide resources for, but also
because we always wanted to be a voice for the voiceless.
Over 40% of our patients are undocumented, and those that
are legal residents or citizens come from mixed-status
families. I was a patient here when I was a kid; I used to
get my shots here. I came in two years ago as community
organizing director, and I get to work directly with the
culture I’m from. My father is the cousin of Rutilio
Grande, who was Monseñor Romero’s best friend and the
first religious martyr of the civil war. One of the
reasons why Monseñor Romero became the “voice of the
voiceless” was to highlight the human rights atrocities in
El Salvador.
In the mid-1980s, a large number of people from the
Salvadoran diaspora moved to this part of Los Angeles, as
well as Hondurans and Guatemalans. At that time, we had
what we called sanctuaries, which were churches that
became a network of solidarity and a community of support
for one another. I started being trained as an organizer
at that time, and now we’re taking up that concept with
what we’re living through right now.
The thing is, we’ve always been living through mass
deportations, even in the Obama era. Everyone was like,
“Oh, it’s not going to be horrible, because it’s Obama,
he’s not going to go into clinics or schools.” Well, yes
and no. But nobody did anything, other than the
“Dreamers,” who were really at the forefront of being
undocumented and unafraid. Now when Trump came into power,
there was now a major scare; it was going to up the ante,
and we knew that no place was going to be safe. So now we
see raids happening not only at workplaces, which they
always have, but we see them more in neighborhoods,
everywhere, during daylight time.
Because we’ve been very vocal about our undocumented
population, we felt it would behoove us to have policies
in place that not only protected the organization, but
those within it, and of course our patients. We talk about
being a part of the sanctuary network or the “safe space”
network now. We’re not providing sanctuary in the sense
that it used to have; we’re not housing people here. We’re
now part of a more extensive network...
Your point about deportations under Obama is a very
important one, which we’ve raised in articles like the
one about medical deportations. A lot of the
institutional and policy structures that Trump is
ramping up go back to that. The LA Weekly article said
that if I.C.E. came storming in, clinic personnel would
be human shields.
Yes, because they would be breaking the law, because this
is private property. We are hoping to continue with that
message, but obviously that is not the route we would like
to go...
At the City University of New York, the campus
presidents have made various declarations with an escape
hatch, where they say if I.C.E. comes with a legal
order, they will comply. We’ve been calling on people to
say, “No, we won’t comply,” and if they raid a campus or
go to the home or workplace of a student or campus
worker, and threaten them or their family with
deportation, we would shut down the campus and spread
that to the rest of the University. We’ve also talked
about comparisons to the fight against the Fugitive
Slave Act in the period before the U.S. Civil War.
Well, as Monseñor Romero would say, “No man is obliged to
abide by the law that is contrary to the laws of God.”
One of the things that the CSEW emphasizes is that we
think the labor movement – and more broadly the working
class, which has such a key immigrant component – has
the power to actually shut down these raids. [The
Clínica Romero’s staff is unionized in the SEIU.] I
wanted to end the interview by asking if you have any
message for health workers in the New York area, or the
students and faculty that are organizing around these
issues.
I think right now we are living in a time where the best
of us is being called forth. So how are we going to be
humane with the rest of humanity that is being tackled,
marginalized, oppressed? And it is up to us to really be
at that forefront, and to not give up. Giving up is not a
choice right now. It is really our responsibility to
change the course of history. We’re proud of the position
we’ve taken. Becoming a “safe clinic,” or a “sanctuary
clinic,” has allowed our patients to feel safer, and our
staff to become more united. When you are in solidarity,
that is what happens. ■
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