1978 INS Raid, Sbicca of California, Inc. Shoe Company

The workers of the Sbicca of California, Inc. shoe company in the suburb of El Monte were surprised by INS officers with a factory raid on the morning of May 17, 1978. The INS officers planned the raid the same morning and headed east. Once a factory executive let them in, they sealed the exits and took 119 alleged Mexican nationals downtown under custody. All in a matter of hours, immigration officers successfully coerced many of the employees to sign voluntary departure forms and, after, loaded them on government busses to San Ysidro to be deported to Mexico. However, at the same time, a legal team convinced a federal judge to sign a temporary restraining order that would stop the workers’ deportation until they received appropriate legal counsel. A class action was filed on behalf of the detainees by the legal arm of the Labor and Immigration Action Center, a newly formed group comprised of labor unions, social justice committees, and law organizations, to determine INS authority in regards to detainment for violations of the 4th, 5th, and 6th amendments. The site witnessed two things during the raid, immigration agents’ tactics and, more importantly, the precedent for challenging the deportation machine and the collective efforts to do it. By demanding legal counsel for the detainees, they reconstructed the definition of deportability under U.S. law, raised attention to the civil rights violations by immigration agents, and demonstrated their organization’s capacity to impede the deportation process.

The Bracero program primarily monitored Mexican migration from 1942-1964 to provide U.S. employers a labor reserve of temporary and circular workers with limited rights. Once it was discontinued, the Hart-Cellar Act followed in 1965, introducing a numerical quota that would cap immigration from Latin America. It disproportionately affected Latin Americans, especially Mexicans who had a long history of migration, transforming integrated immigrants into illegal aliens and leaving them vulnerable throughout the 70s. The 1965 Act increased permanent settlements in urban environments near work opportunities. The undocumented population’s growth pushed the issue to the forefront of public and political debate, causing the media to pose it as a risk to prosperity and the state and federal governments to respond.   

  In the aftermath of the Hart-Cellar Act, the government employed tactics to detect, detain, and deport people in places like Los Angeles, with deeply integrated immigrant communities. However, the “process that illegalized the population also planted the first seeds of resistance and struggle of immigrants and their supportive allies” (Nicholls 2017, 38) in East Los Angeles. Activists organized in the wake of the government’s targeting of immigrants, notably the Center for Autonomous Social Action-General of Workers (CASA). As a mutual assistance and social welfare grassroots organization, it successfully advocated worker solidarity when recent illegal immigrants were considered takers. In disagreement about immigrant plights with the 60s UFW, Chicano Movement, and other organizations, which considered them a threat to established immigrant communities’ empowerment and economic security, organizer Bert Corona and Soledad Alatorre created CASA in the 70s. They were able to shift opinion on immigrant rights to one that reveals the similarity in struggles among documented and undocumented Latinos while brokering new ties between other activist groups to combat anti-immigrant measures. While they challenged the deportation machine many times, their most effective strategy was organizing and empowering the undocumented community and their allies. When the raid at the Sbicca factory happened, “neighborhood and workplace sweeps became a normal part of the undocumented immigrant’s urban landscape” (Nicholls 2017, 43). Still, the organized resistance and growing sentiment against oppression that had been building up created quick and enthusiastic participation to defend Sbicca workers. 

CASA pioneered defensive strategies like holding educational workshops and encouraging the exercise of the fifth amendment right. By employing techniques like silence or insisting upon their fundamental rights, immigrants asserted themselves as active subjects engaging in civil disobedience against the government arm terrorizing Latina/os. Increasing undocumented people’s awareness of la Migra’s limitations threw off the deportation system and how INS operated. As Sbicca workers were encouraged to reject voluntary departures, fight their cases, and refused to answer questions by invoking their rights under the Fifth Amendment when the deportation hearings began, it impeded INS agents from acting as judge, jury, and executioner. The case proved to deal with high stakes that could potentially stop the deportation machine if too many detainees began challenging their expulsions. While the Sbicca class action suit sought to define and defend undocumented people’s rights, CASA members and the Labor and Immigration Action Center organized educational campaigns, hotlines to inform of raids, and bail funds to rob INS of the power that keeping detainees in isolated centers gave them. These strategies showed rapid results beginning with the INS announcing in the fall of 1978 that it would halt “most factory raids because of pending lawsuits against the agency” (Goodman 2020, 161). Although the case highlighted the deportation process’s weaknesses, the INS adapted to prevent challenges like Sbicca by modifying section 287.3.  

As U.S. relationships with undocumented immigrants grew tense through the 80s and 90s, immigrants and their allies built on prior strategies to mobilize in the face of new criminalization threats and deportation. Institutional fragmentation and estrangement enabled policy entrepreneurs and advocacy groups to play out conflicts in legislative struggles and the courts” (Tichenor, 355); however, changes in immigration policy enacted away from the public have allowed for political actors to create a complex system of deportability. Due to global events, the INS’s importance increased within the federal bureaucracy (Goodman 2020, 174) resulting in more power and funding. Changes to the deportation machine included the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) and NAFTA in 1994, which sparked restrictionist fears about employment availability in the U.S. Despite decreasing unemployment levels among Americans, it did little to qualm nationalist fears of foreign job-seekers and xenophobia. Demand for further restriction led to the 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA) which changed many aspects of the immigration issue. For one, “[making] it easier for authorities to apprehend, detain, and expel people; and roll back the rights of individuals facing deportation” (Goodman 2020, 179), as well as eliminating due process and judicial review for undocumented people and their cases. It worked alongside the 1993 campaign for the infamous Prop 187. and managed to encourage self deportations by invoking fear within the community. Still, after the September 11 attacks, the USA Patriot Act responded by limiting foreigners’ rights and allowing noncitizens’ indefinite detainment.

 Though notable mass organizations continued since the Sbicca case, there has been divisiveness within immigrant rights movements. For example, the attempts to organize against Prop 187 demonstrated a discontinuity of activism that resulted from divisions in strategy and execution preferences. Similarly, the mass mobilization for the 2006 rally in protest of the Sensenbrenner Bill proved what coalition and solidarity building could accomplish but also demonstrated the fragility of coalitions that differing views can disrupt. Although previous years set the stage to challenge the deportation process, the Sbicca case was a blueprint for organizing a successful challenge. In a time of social disapproval of illegal outsiders and INS fear campaigns, expulsion, and repression, immigrants, found means to resist and, along with allies, challenged the legal system and process of deportations, additionally setting a precedent for future immigrant rights advocates. The INS’s response serves as an example of the small transformations the legal system goes through to remain effectively protected and exclusionary and indicates that the debate and the politics around immigration will continue, but resistance will follow. 

Bowman, Bruce. “Sbicca Workers Winning - I.N.S. Reshuffling Deck.” National Lawyers Guild February 1979. 

Brodkin, Karen. “The Context of Labor and Immigrant Workers’ Rights Activism in Los Angeles.” Making Democracy Matter: Identity and Activism in Los Angeles. 17-42. Rutgers University Press, 2007.

Gabaccia, Donna R. "IMMIGRATION AND GLOBALIZATION, 1965 TO THE PRESENT." In Foreign Relations: American Immigration in Global Perspective, 176-221. PRINCETON; OXFORD: Princeton University Press, 2012. Accessed March 12, 2021. doi:10.2307/j.ctt7rk0q.8.

Goodman, Adam. The Deportation Machine: America's Long History of Expelling Immigrants. 134-196. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020. muse.jhu.edu/book/73241. 

“INS Raids Sbicca Shoes - Mass Defense and Action Center Organized: By members of the Sbicca Legal Defense Team.” Immigration Newsletter, Vol. 7, No. 3, National Lawyers Guild September-October 1978.

Nicholls, Walter J. and Uitermark, Justus. “Making Space for Immigrant Rights Activism in Los Angeles.” Cities and Social Movements: Immigrant Rights Activism in the US, France, and the Netherlands, 1970-2015, 39-52. Published 2017 by John Wiley and Sons, Ltd.

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Zepeda-Millán, Chris. “Promoting Protest Through Ethnic Media.” Chapter. In Latino Mass Mobilization: Immigration, Racialization, and Activism, 67–100. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. doi:10.1017/9781139924719.004.