Lawful Filipino resident of U.S. kidnapped and imprisoned by ICE

Maximo Londino, a 42-year-old Filipino and permanent U.S. resident, was returning home from holidays in the Philippines with his wife and child when he was kidnapped by ICE at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport and then imprisoned at a detention center.

And that brought more than 100 International Association of Machinists members, union President Brian Bryant, and other unionists out in force for a mass rally on June 10 in front of ICE’s Northwest Detention Center in Tacoma, Wash., where Londonio has been jailed for almost a month.

The IAM member was born in the Philippines and came here as a child. He is not undocumented and holds a green card. He’s not a migrant or a single man trying to cross the U.S.-Mexico border, but a husband and a father of three. He was returning May 16 from visiting family in the Philippines when he was grabbed.

Londonio joins thousands of documented immigrant residents of the U.S. picked up in the Trump administration’s terror campaign against the people of the United States. Many have already been put on planes and deported with no legal assistance allowed. Tacoma’s Northwest Detention Center is widely viewed as a living hell. 

The sheer injustice of it all drove the crowd to a mass demonstration outside the center gates on June 10, where they heard from Londonio’s wife, Crystal, plus Bryant and other speakers demanding his release, according to both IAM and The Stand, the Washington State Labor Council’s news site.

“I want Maximo and his family to know that his union fully supports him,” said Bryant. “We will be here for whatever it takes for as long as it takes. We want Max free now!”

Belongs at home

“Maximo belongs at home with his family,” said Machinists Western Territory Vice President Bobby Martinez. “We are asking everyone to stand with our brother and help bring him home.” 

The fight to liberate Londonio is two-pronged, the union said in a statement. One is to free him. The other is “to speak out against politically motivated immigration enforcement” and to “continue fighting for the rights and dignity of all workers.”

Washington State Labor Council President April Sims painted a dire picture of conditions inside. Londonio and other captives arrive in unmarked white buses with blacked-out windows, so they can’t see where they’re going—and people can’t see them inside.

Sims told the crowd of more than 100 people that the council has for years backed a campaign by a Latino group, La Resistencia, to shut the for-profit jail down. 

A La Resistencia fact sheet reveals the center has some social services for people, like Londonio, who are “caged” there, but the quantity and quality of food is lacking. Inmates are three times less likely to obtain lawyers to argue their deportation cases. Of those who get lawyers, 80% win their cases.

“ICE has claimed the NWDC is a model facility, with good access to medical care and legal services. Still, people at the NWDC have died, people constantly go on hunger strike to protest their conditions, and GEO Group will not allow the Washington Department of Ecology to test water and soil samples for environmental health,” the fact sheet adds.

 “If this is a model facility, what must other detention facilities be like?” To top it all off, the center sits on an earthquake subduction zone and is “built on a Superfund site remediated to industrial levels. In other words, this is not a place where people are supposed to live.”

Though the fact sheet does not say so, the GEO Group, which runs the center for ICE and jails people there, is one of the U.S.’s two largest private prison firms, and its owners saw their stock price—and their profits—sharply rise when Trump took power and turned ICE loose. 

“For years, we have seen immigration policies weaponized to break worker solidarity and sow fear among workers who stand up for ourselves,” said Sims. 

“Now, the federal administration is leading a campaign of terror, targeting immigrant communities. They want us to believe immigrants are threats to our safety. But that is a lie. Immigrants are our loved ones, they are our coworkers, and they are our neighbors. Maximo Londonio is our brother.”

We hope you appreciated this article. At People’s World, we believe news and information should be free and accessible to all, but we need your help. Our journalism is free of corporate influence and paywalls because we are totally reader-supported. Only you, our readers and supporters, make this possible. If you enjoy reading People’s World and the stories we bring you, please support our work by donating or becoming a monthly sustainer today. Thank you!