August 28, 2025 11:38 AM UTC

This Is Why We Keep On Protecting Everyone

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• by: Colorado Pols

As FOX 31’s Brooke Williams reports, the climate of fear the Trump administration has deliberately cultivated among the nation’s millions of undocumented immigrant residents, the overwhelming majority of whom are law-abiding and contributors to their communities and the economy, is resulting in a not new but now more urgently persuasive form of exploitation: threatening to report workers hired in good faith to federal immigration authorities if they complain about violations of Colorado labor law.

The Colorado Attorney General has issued an alert reminding employers and employees of their rights after reports of employers illegally threatening deportation to immigrant workers who report wage theft.

AG Phil Weiser’s office said in a press release on Wednesday that it has received informal reports of employers retaliating against immigrant workers who reported wage theft by threatening to report them to law enforcement for deportation.

In Colorado, it is illegal to report or threaten to report a worker to any local, state or federal law enforcement organization, including Immigration and Customs Enforcement, in retaliation for that worker asserting their legal rights, such as their rights under the Colorado Wage Act.

There are no doubt those who would argue that the threat of deportation if a migrant worker complains about employers stealing their wages is another desirable incentive for those workers to leave the country. It’s not a straw man argument to suggest that there are plenty of employers who would like nothing more than to wield this kind of power over their employees. But even though the administration has deported some 200,000 people since Trump took office, that’s only barely on track to match the record of the last “deporter in chief” Barack Obama a decade ago–for which Obama receives absolutely no credit from the right, but that’s for another blog post.

The point is that there are still millions of undocumented workers in the United States, and even if the administration keeps up the current rate of mass deportations, millions will still be here when Trump leaves office. We can’t just stand by and allow a whole class of workers to be exploited because of the short-term fashionableness of mistreating immigrants. In the end, that hurts all workers much more than simply ensuring labor laws apply to everyone.

It’s also a human rights thing, lest we forget those apply even to people not born in the land of the free.