US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents detained 12 Filipino educators from their residence on the island of Maui on May 6. All had been recruited under the J-1 non-immigrant visa programme – a cultural exchange scheme widely used to fill public school teaching posts amid chronic shortages in Hawaii.
The raid, which witnesses described as “traumatic”, lasted more than 45 minutes and ended without arrests.
The operation stunned the local community, with teachers’ unions and migrant workers’ groups condemning what they characterised as heavy-handed enforcement tactics against foreign workers engaged in legally sanctioned employment.
“For Filipinos, this is a chance to seek work abroad to provide for their families back home, but it can also come with challenges of racism and navigating an unfamiliar country,” according to Kami Yamamoto, interim executive director of the Hawaiʻi Workers Centre (HWC), a labour advocacy organisation.
Yamamoto argued the teachers on J-1 visas were deliberately targeted “because there is a concerted effort to crackdown on migrants in the US, regardless of their immigration status”.
