Seattle May Day rally unites labor and migrant groups, and present with past

Hundreds of people, and dozens of union, immigrant, and labor groups turned out for Friday's May Day rallies across Washington state — commemorating the labor fight in the U.S. that gave birth to the 8-hour workday, among other labor wins.

Friday also marked the 20th year anniversary of one of the largest single-day labor and immigrant rights mobilizations in American history.

Rigo Valdez was in attendance in 2006 at the Great American Boycott, a one-day boycott of U.S. business and schools by immigrants also known as the Day Without an Immigrant. Valdez was 33 years old, living in Los Angeles, and flanked by hundreds of thousands of workers and immigrants.

At the time Congress was considering a bill that would criminalize unauthorized immigrants as felons. Twenty years later, Valdez now works as an organizer for MLK Labor in Seattle, and helped organize Friday’s May Day march in Seattle.

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As he stepped out to march Friday from Seattle’s Capitol Hill, that bill criminalizing unauthorized immigrants is long dead, but he said the spirit of the bill still lives in President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown and mass deportations.

“Twenty years after a day without immigrants, we see the same kind of attack, and even a more direct and more aggressive attack against communities of immigrants, and workers,” Valdez told KUOW. “This authoritarian regime has gone way too far.”

Last year around 2,300 people were arrested by ICE in Washington state, according to records obtained by the University of Washington’s Center for Human Rights. Many of those arrests have been challenged as unlawful.

Arrests were often made while people were on their way to work. In addition to undocumented workers, immigrants pursuing legal status in the U.S. — from green card holders pursuing citizenship to asylum seekers — have also faced arrest and deportation.

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“The government has tried to break us, but they have only made us stronger,” Maximo Londonio told a crowd of union, labor, and immigrant groups before the march Friday afternoon in Cal Anderson Park. He was standing side-by-side with IAM, an aviation machinist union. Londonio is a green card holder who was detained for nearly two months last year at the ICE detention center in Tacoma.

“Migrants’ work is hard work,” Londonio said. “We take the toughest job. We face harsh conditions, and too often we are treated like our lives matter less than our labor.”

Londonio recounted a night when he was detained and taken to the Northwest ICE Processing Center in Tacoma. It was cold and he tried to sleep on a metal bunk.

“All I felt was fear,” he said. “Fear of not knowing what, when I would see my family again.”

Londonio credited the work of his wife and community activists for helping to get him released from detention.

“No worker should ever face a system like that alone,” he said.

Ana Bello was marching with Casa Latina, a day-laborer organization connecting workers with jobs. She says there’s plenty of work to go around for everyone, and the more people work, the more demand for services and labor it creates.

“Our work is important, and it’s thanks to the work of ours, other work is possible,” she said in Spanish.

Bello works in housekeeping. Before joining Casa Latina, she said she was underpaid and overworked. But with labor groups she’s been able to protect herself from wage theft and extreme hours, she said. Bello said she was struck by what she calls the inhuman treatment of immigrants, something that she said impacts not just the targets of immigration policy but every worker.

Nationwide, U.S. citizens have been detained and interrogated by ICE, and some have even been kicked out of the country, along with parents who don’t have legal status.

“ The reality for us is that we are seeing this kind of authoritarianism targeted against workers that are immigrants, regardless of their status,” rally organizer Valdez told KUOW. “This is a dangerous time that we're living in.”

President Trump campaigned on promises of a nationwide crackdown against undocumented immigrants with criminal records and mass deportations, but that strategy has grown less popular since he began arresting thousands of people in 2025. The majority of immigrants being detained for deportation have no criminal convictions.

“So, stand with the migrant workers,” Londino told rallygoers. “Stand with the families. Stand with the organizing because when we unite, we are powerful.”

Around 60 protesters were also in Tukwila Friday morning to protest a potential ICE expansion in the city.

They were there holding signs on the sides of the road with slogans like, “Due process is not optional” and, “Stop the ICE Gestapo” urging morning commuters driving by to join them.

Chris McEwen was there collecting signatures for a letter she was sending to property groups urging them to not lease to DHS or ICE. For her, labor and immigration go hand in hand, especially unauthorized immigrants. We all owe a debt to them, she said.

“They contribute to Social Security with their payroll, Social Security taxes. And they do not recoup that investment they give to us,” McEwen said. “When I'm old enough to receive Social Security, undocumented laborers will be part of the people who have paid into that system for my benefit.”

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Demonstrators in Tukwila said they came to protests at the DHS building because they don’t like how the federal government is treating immigrants whether they have legal status or not.

Marches were also held in Tacoma, Yakima, Spokane, all with the common message of protesting federal immigration policy. Protesters also spoke out against billionaires and U.S. involvement in foreign wars.