Now that this year’s FIFA World Cup is behind us (Congratulations, Argentina!), all eyes are on Mexico, United States and Canada who will co-host the mega-event in 2026. And after the infamous treatment of migrant workers in Qatar, we must ensure that next time human rights will be protected.
Today, as we celebrate International Migrant’s Day, CDM’s Campaigns Director, Evy Peña published an op-ed in Reforma, a leading newspaper in Mexico, to call on FIFA, host cities and nations, to make human rights a priority and to implement sound human rights plans that take into account the voices of civil society and low-wage workers who work in World Cup related industries.
We have a unique opportunity to work together in raising global labor standards across sectors and across nations. But we have our work cut out for us. If we hope to succeed, the work can’t start four years from now. It has to start today.
Will you join us in ensuring migrant worker rights are protected in the 2026 World Cup?
Today, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) announced an immigration relief policy for migrant and immigrant workers who face abuse and defend their workplace rights.
This policy will empower workers to speak out and take action against exploitative employers by providing them temporary immigration protections and permission to work in the US when raising their voice against unsafe and unfair working conditions.
This is a victory worth celebrating! Migrant and immigrant workers have long demanded these protections and CDM has supported those demands since its foundation in 2005. We applaud the agency for taking a step forward in strengthening protections for migrant and immigrant workers.
This policy is one key step towards empowering workers to hold abusive employers accountable. Our government can do so much more to ensure migrant workers can leave abusive employers and take action to improve their working conditions.
At CDM, we will continue to advocate for those changes, but today we celebrate with migrant and immigrant workers, allied organizations, and with you, who have supported us and encouraged us throughout the last 17 years. You are a huge part of this success.
On Tuesday, Mexico and the United States signed a historic agreement (MOU) on protections for migrant workers. Thanks to our relentless advocacy, the agreement includes unprecedented provisions to strengthen workers’ rights across the region!
For the past 17 years, CDM has led cross-border campaigns to advance migrant justice and gender equity in labor migration. You may remember Adareli Ponce and Maritza Perez, two migrant worker women who submitted the first petition against the U.S. government under the USMCA in March 2021. Together with a coalition of allies from across the region, we argued that the U.S. government failed to live up to its obligations under the trade agreement by facilitating systemic sex discrimination in temporary work programs. Since filing our petition, we’ve spent 664 days mobilizing allies and workers, meeting with dozens of government officials from Mexico and the US and submitting supplementary evidence.
Now, our efforts are paying off. For the first time ever, migrant women’s demands are answered in the agreement between the US and Mexico. The memorandum directly reflects many of our recommendations. Some key provisions include:
Prohibiting discrimination in recruitment
Making gender-related data publicly available
Increasing access to justice for migrant workers and ensuring they receive their compensation.
Providing pre-departure rights education to migrant workers
This is a tremendous step forward in our fight to end discrimination against migrant women. We’re so honored to celebrate this win alongside our allies, Maritza, Adareli and all the courageous women who have shared their stories.
What’s next? Solidifying worker protections in the implementation of the agreement. Our team will continue to advocate to expand access to legal services, providing workers with the possibility to use these groundbreaking policies to exercise their rights!
I am honored to share that CDM was just awarded the Presidential Award for Extraordinary Efforts to Combat Trafficking in Persons.
The award ceremony happened a few moments ago during the annual meeting of the President’s Interagency Task Force to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons (PITF). The ceremony included Senior White House officials and principals from 20 participating PITF agencies, including Merrick Garland, Alejando Mayorkas and Xavier Becerra. I was honored to attend the White House ceremony with CDM Board President Cori Alonso-Yoder to receive the award from Secretary of State Antony Blinken on behalf of CDM.
The award, signed by President Biden, states that CDM was selected “for its outstanding record of assisting thousands of migrant workers to defend their rights and its years of tireless advocacy and organizing to advance a more just and humane migration process free of forced labor and other forms of exploitation.” This great honor is a testament to the commitment, heart, and creativity of our staff, Board of Directors, alumni and volunteers; the strength of the Migrant Defense Committee members and the constant encouragement of our incredible supporters. This recognition belongs to us all.
Each and every one of us has a part to play in combating human exploitation and abuse. And CDM is determined to keep doing its part by empowering migrant workers and supporting them in their fight for justice by holding human traffickers accountable.
This award, along with several recent wins for migrant workers, has truly energized all of us at CDM! With your help, we are building a world where migrant worker rights are respected and laws and policies reflect their voices and experiences.
On Workers Memorial Day 2020, as the pandemic was rapidly spreading, we announced our Protein Processing Worker Project (PPP), a collective effort to ensure that workers with limited knowledge of English had access to accurate information about COVID-19, their rights, and how to protect themselves from communicable diseases.
Today, we are proud to share with you our second year impact report which details our partnership-based model and the incredible results we achieved alongside our 13 partner organizations.
Both in-person and online, we helped workers defend their rights, protect their health and access vaccines, testing, and vital information about their right to a healthy and safe workplace. In the project’s second year alone we reached 271,800+ workers and community members across North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Delaware, Maryland and Virginia.
Leveraging the knowledge and resources of our partner organizations and expertise of processing workers, our efforts supported more than 500 community events and activities, delivered information and resources to 110,500+ workers and their communities in person, and reached 161,000+ more through digital and online multimedia resources and programs in Spanish, English, Haitian Creole, Mixtec and other indigenous languages.
You can read more about the project’s incredible impact in our Year Two Impact Report here.
Fighting for all workers’ right to a healthy and safe workplace has been a priority for CDM since its foundation in 2005. The PPP project has allowed us to further this effort through a targeted campaign for protein processing industry workers and their communities. Now, as the Biden administration prepares to end the COVID-19 emergency declarations next month, it is more important than ever to continue to prioritize frontline workers’ health and strengthen occupational health and safety for migrant workers through the next phase of the pandemic and beyond.
One of the most important lessons we learned from the COVID pandemic is that workers’ health IS public health. As such, we must keep working together to ensure that workers not only know their rights, but also feel protected when exercising those rights to health and safety, without a fear of retaliation. Will you join us in defending whistleblowers and workers standing up for their rights and seeking fair working conditions?
Yesterday, following a week of activities, we officially celebrated Labor Day and CDM’s 18th anniversary. Today, our vision remains the same as it did when we opened the doors to our first office in Zacatecas back in 2005: a world where borders aren’t barriers to justice and the rights of migrant workers are respected and laws and policies reflect their voices and experiences.
To launch the week of activities, Daria Hernandez, a leader in our Migrant Defense Committee, and CDM staff joined the U.S. Department of Labor, the Mexican government and other governments for the kick-off of Labor Rights Week. As a keynote speaker, Daria spoke passionately, advocating for the rights of her fellow migrant workers, challenging discrimination and retaliation, and championing better access to healthcare. She inspired us with her courage, clarity and call to action.
Daria’s journey hasn’t been a solitary one. She has drawn strength from the collective efforts of the Migrant Defense Committee, made possible by the unwavering support of people like you—migrant worker leaders, our supporters, allies, former staff and volunteers, and donors. You’ve stood by us, believed in our mission, and made a real impact in the lives of migrant workers.
As we celebrate this 18th anniversary, our commitment remains steadfast: We will continue building power with migrant workers, fighting for justice in the courts and advocating for fair labor migration policies. And now, I invite you to heed Daria’s courageous call: “Every one of you has the power in your hands to do something to improve the lives of workers like me, and we’re counting on you to act.”
Finally! After months of planning, we held our first mass pro se deferred action legal clinic for farmworkers in North Carolina this past Sunday.
Ever since the Deferred Action for Labor Disputes process was announced in January of this year we knew this could be a game-changer for workers unable to speak out against abuse for fear of losing their job, their income and their immigration status. Over the past few months, we have been working alongside allied organizations and law school clinics to develop and pilot a model clinic, legal infrastructure, and resources that would allow us to provide the support workers need to access this immigration relief.
And I’m happy to report that it was a very successful event thanks to our wonderful and committed partners: Duke University Immigrant Rights’ Clinic, It’s Our Future (El Futuro Es Nuestro), NC FIELD, NC Justice Center, Mexican Consulate, St Ann’s Catholic Church, among others. We’re inspired by the courage of the farmworkers who braved the wrath of their employers, who had prohibited their attendance, in order to assert their rights, organize and seek justice.
Digital and in-person outreach was key to the clinic’s success: we were able to reach out to over 800 workers in person and over 5000 online. Thanks to these efforts, more than 80 farmworkers on H-2A visas attended the clinic, despite all of the obstacles they faced to get there!
CDM, alongside NC Justice Center and Duke School of Law, co-led the legal team conducting screenings, conducting trainings with workers, and reviewing deferred action application packets while NC FIELD and It’s Our Future helped farmworkers apply for the $600 payments from the Farm and Food Workers Relief Program (FFWR). The Mexican Consulate in North Carolina also provided orientation and consular support.
Thanks to an amazing collaboration, by the end of the clinic our organizations had supported 13 workers in completing (and mailing!) their deferred action applications, as well as 68 farmworkers in applying for their FFWR $600 payments.
There is nothing like advancing migrant justice alongside committed partners and brave workers!
We learned a lot from the clinic and from each other. Now that we have developed and tested this clinic collaborative model and created the necessary legal resources, we are excited to adapt it, scale it and replicate it, so that more workers can benefit from deferred action.
Will you support migrant and immigrant workers facing abuse right to immigration relief and justice?
On October 19, 2023, the White House H-2B Worker Protection Taskforce published a long-awaited report adopting many of the critical policy recommendations that CDM made and citing CDM’s research. This announcement follows on the heels of the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Department of Labor (DOL)’s proposed new rules for the H-2A and H-2B visa programs. The report and the rules include ambitious and potentially game-changing protections long advocated for by migrant workers, CDM, and allies.
Here’s what we are most excited about (It’s a long list but read on! This is all because of your support!):
The Taskforce urges the agencies to expedite H-2B workers’ requests for deferred action for workers involved in labor disputes (Action 1.2) and ensure that workers’ presence in the United States following a labor dispute will not negatively impact them (Action 1.1).
The Taskforce also adopted several of our recommendations for data accessibility—including sharing and integrating data on H-2B workers across agencies (Action 2.1), sharing and publishing data by “gender, sector, and occupation.” (Actions 2.2 and 2.3) and collecting new data on recruiters (Action 3.1).
The Taskforce also recommends crucial, ongoing engagement through meetings with stakeholders and establishing a standing Inter-Agency Working Group. (Actions 2.4 and 5.1)
Finally, the Taskforce adopted several meaningful recommendations that will directly protect workers—such as improving the agencies’ oversight of H-2B worker recruitment (Actions 3.2 and 3.3) and, crucially, providing workers with access to rights information and disseminating MigrantWorker.gov (Actions 4.1 and 4.5), information about their immigration status and pending employer-filed petitions (Action 4.2), real-time information about job opportunities (Action 4.3, contingent on resources), and improve the notification of returned workers about back wages owed to them (Action 4.4).
Under the proposed regulations, labor organizations will be able to visit workers in their employer-provided H-2A housing. We’ve advocated relentlessly for housing access!
Also, the proposed regulations would establish:
Groundbreaking protections for H-2A workers who take collective action and organize on the job.
Better ways to prevent and root out abusive employers in the program. Withholding workers’ passports to restrict their mobility would be cause for debarment from the H-2A program.
Greater accountability and harsher consequences for employers charging illegal recruitment fees.
Potential pathways for H-2 workers to pursue permanence and stability in the U.S.
Mobility protections that would enable workers to leave abusive employers and find new employment without losing their visa.
CDM and Migration that Works, a coalition we chair, have long advocated for these protections. While the rules aren’t perfect, we are thrilled with the proposed changes and feel optimistic that they will help shift the balance of power in what is still an employer-controlled and fundamentally flawed program. These strengthened protections will have a direct impact on the lives of thousands of migrant workers.
For now we’re celebrating, and over the coming days, we’ll be further analyzing the report and the more than 500 pages of rules and preparing to submit comments with workers in support of the key new provisions. We’ll also call attention to what still needs to be improved. As we continue to deepen our analysis on the potential impact on the daily lives of migrant workers, we’ll be sure to share any relevant findings with you.
A source of pride: CDM and five (!!) of our reports: Ripe for Reform, Engendering Discrimination, Recruitment Revealed, Breaking the Shell, and Fake Jobs for Sale are cited quite a few times as support for some of the most important new protections!
We did it! With contributions from dozens of workers, CDM and Migration that Works (a coalition of labor, migration, civil rights, anti-trafficking organizations and academics chaired by CDM) submitted a total of FIVE(!) extensive comments in support of the proposed rules to the H-2 guestworker programs. We just submitted the last three comments today!
I’m proud of our team for our hard work, but above all, I’m proud that our comments reflect the voices and experiences of workers who are directly affected by these flawed programs. During the last few weeks, we held feedback sessions with members of the Comité de Defensa del Migrante (Migrant Defense Committee), met with women who currently work in Maryland’s crab industry and spoke with more than a dozen additional workers by phone. And believe me, they all had a lot to say about the proposed changes to the H-2 programs!
As you may recall, back in September, DHS and DOL each announced a set of proposed rules which included potentially game-changing protections for migrant workers! We were especially thrilled because many of these protections had been long advocated for by CDM, migrant workers and our allies — including increased accountability for illegal recruitment practices, oversight and transparency, the possibility for workers to change employers, as well as stronger protections for workers who take collective action and organize on the job. You can read more about these protections in our October newsletter.
These changes could be a game changer for workers facing abuse. And talking with workers and listening to their testimonies, it’s clear how necessary these changes are and how much still needs to be done in order to build fair and just guestworker programs. Here is what one worker had to say:
“I’ve worked with an H-2B visa picking crab meat for a few years now. The first time I migrated for work, I had to pay $2000 and I was in debt. This affected the pressure I felt at work. I didn’t earn enough money during my first year to pay off my debt, so I had to return a second year so I could be rid of it. It was a struggle for me and emotionally draining. In general, I agree with the proposed changes with regards to recruitment, because that’ll ensure that employers pay more attention to what is happening – especially because of increased consequences they’ll face.”
I am deeply proud to do this work alongside migrant workers, who find the strength to fight back, organize and demand change. Ultimately, this is what our work is all about: ensuring that workers’ voices and priorities are reflected in the laws and policies that directly affect them. We are especially thrilled to share that in addition to sharing their powerful testimonies to strengthen our comments, many H-2 workers submitted individual comments to the proposed rules! Workers speaking out and getting directly involved in making change happen… I love it!
I’m so grateful for these workers and our team for their incredible work. And for you, for supporting migrant workers in making their voices heard. Momentum is on our side — let’s keep going.
Over the past seven days, we’ve celebrated CDM’s Week of Gratitude; seven days where we highlighted some of the people who have helped make this year a very special year for us and a very important year for migrant workers’ rights.
But before we close out this Week of Gratitude we want to take a moment to thank you for all your support throughout the past 18 years. Thank you for believing in us, encouraging us and helping us advance migrant justice. You are an integral part of our growing CDM family.
Thanks to you, we’ve been able to celebrate important wins this past year. But there is still so much left to do to build a labor migration system that is safe and just; where worker abuse is an exception and not the norm.
We need your support now more than ever.
Think of us this #GivingTuesday and help us get the resources we need to provide support to migrant workers in defending their rights and speaking out against abuse. Help us advocate for more worker power and strengthened protections. Join us and migrant workers in building a labor migration system that prioritizes the human rights of workers and their families.
This #GivingTuesday, help us continue advancing migrant justice.
