ICE Agents Union says AFL-CIO President doesn’t speak for them

After AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka said that passing Pres. Obama’s mass amnesty plan was a “top priority” for his union, the ICE Agents Union, which is anAFL-CIO affiliate, issued a press release saying Trumpka doesn’t speak for them. In the statement, the ICE Agents Union said, “No President Trumka, there are still differences within the AFL-CIO, and you don’t speak for us.”

The ICE Agents Union says that Trumka and his top advisors have excluded the union from the development of immigration policy within the AFL-CIO and with lawmakers in Washington.

“It’s shocking,” said ICE Union President Chris Crane. “The last time I checked, all of the heavy hitters within immigration enforcement to include ICE, the U.S. Border Patrol and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services were all excleded by the AFL-CIO from policy planning and input – and we’re all AFL-CIO affiliates. With most of the nation’s immigration enforcement experts at his fingertips, to include immigration officers, agents and attorneys, Trumka has refused our union input on comprehensive immigration reform.”

The ICE Agents Union said in an earlier meeting with White House officials, Trumka and the AFL-CIO refused to stand up for concerns of the ICE Agents.

“We went directly to the Obama administration as well as the AFL-CIO with real matters of life and death for unionized American law enforcement officers and they shunned us,” Crane said. “We’re talking about 50,000 AFL-CIO affiliate members. We asked both the AFL-CIOand President Obama for help with corruption within our respective Federal law enforcement agencies, climbing officer suicide rates, assaults against officers, and perhaps most alarming, offenses against pregnant female employees. Following the White House meeting, the Obama Administration cut us off. Cecilia Munoz refuses to correspond with us, and President Tumka hasn’t so much as made one public comment fighting for the safety of AFL-CIO federal law enforcement officers. He just doesn’t speak on behalf of our union workers.”

According to the ICE Agents Union, fixing the internal issues within Immigration and Customs Enforcement is at the heart of fixing immigration enforcement in the United States.

“Respectfully, we see a lot of problems with the recently proposed reforms and we plan to exercise our rights as American’s to participate in the democratic process and voice those concerns publicly in the upcoming months; we hope to do so without groups like the AFL-CIO demonizing us for expressing a different opinion.”