MAGA activists called for a boycott of Starbucks on Saturday as the unions in some cities recently held a casework protesting against the detention of their co-workers by ICE. The protest took place earlier this month, but the boycott call came as several videos of their protest went viral.
“We are stopping work for a few minutes to read a statement in protest of actions against our fellow workers,” Starbucks Workers United members at the Ellicott City location in Maryland said in a statement during their strike on April 1.
The baristas called out the ICE detention of Service Employees International Union (SEIU) members Rümeysa Öztürk and Lewelyn Dixon, among other students and activists arrested in recent weeks as part of the Trump administration’s crackdown on immigration and Palestine solidarity activism.
Öztürk, a Tufts University PhD student and member of SEIU Local 509, was in Massachusetts after she published an article in the school newspaper criticizing the administration’s response to calls for divestment from Israel. The 30-year-old student was arrested and physically restrained by immigration officers.
Dixon, a 64-year-old UW Medicine lab technician and member of SEIU Local 925, was detained in Washington last month after living in the US for over five decades. She had a green card.
“We have a message for Starbucks, ICE, and the Trump administration: if you mess with one of us, you mess with all of us,” Starbucks workers in Iowa City said in a message to the company as well.
Starbucks and its union sued each other in 2023 over a social media post on the Israel- Hamas war. Starbucks sued Workers United in federal court in Iowa, saying a pro-Palestinian social media post from a union account early in the Israel-Hamas war angered hundreds of customers and damaged its reputation. On October 9, two days after Hamas militants rampaged across communities in southern Israel, Starbucks Workers United posted “Solidarity with Palestine!” on X, formerly known as Twitter. Workers United — a Philadelphia-based affiliate of the Service Employees International Union — said in its lawsuit that workers put up the tweet without the authorization of union leaders. The post was up for about 40 minutes before it was deleted.
