STATEMENT ON FEDERAL IMMIGRATION RAIDS NEAR MOUNT NITTANY MEDICAL CENTER

Thursday evening, Seven Mountains AFL-CIO became aware that Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) engaged in a workplace raid near Mount Nittany Medical Center targeting approximately 25 allegedly undocumented construction workers on their way to a job site on Mount Nittany Medical Center property. 

The following may be attributed to Chapter President Connor Lewis:

“Every worker, regardless of documentation status, has the right to be safe on the job, and on their way to and from work.

Abducting workers on their way to build an expansion for community medical facilities is obscene. Those workers will find themselves incarcerated in inhumane conditions without the benefit of due process. Meanwhile, the contractors that exploited them, and who have been investigated numerous times for worker abuses, will count their profits and move on to the next job.

If we had real justice, the C-Suite suits running the business would be in jail awaiting trial, and those workers would be at work.

This is not a complicated issue. This is a clear choice about which side you’re on. 

We know which side we’re on. The local AFL-CIO is firm in its resolve to stand on the side of workers. Masked federal agents abducting workers from a job site to throw them in a modern day gulag are thugs and cowards, period.

The detainees must be given their full rights and due process under the law, and we demand that all local and federal officials for Centre County work to ensure that their rights are upheld and that federal agents are held accountable for any abuse of their authority.

We fully endorse the planned protest outside of the ICE detention facility in Clearfield County, and urge community members and union members to support it as well. For-profit concentration camps paid for by taxpayer dollars have no place in a free society.

The time for equivocation is over, and we’ll remember the choices that leaders make in this critical moment.”