As More Unions Oppose ICE and Israel, the Right Is Cracking Down

The right is trying to gain access to labor unions’ minutes, membership lists, and Zoom chats.By Blanca Missé , Truthout Published October 21, 2026

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On September 22, The Free Press attacked the California Faculty Association (CFA), which represents about 29,000 faculty, librarians, counselors, and coaches across the California State University (CSU) system. Drawing on private discussions about a proposed Jewish caucus, including communications from a union Zoom meeting, the article accused CFA of antisemitism. How those communications reached the publication remains unclear. Two days later, the Jewish Journal amplified those allegations, urging Gov. Gavin Newsom to consider them as he weighed California Assembly Bill (AB) 2551, CFA-sponsored legislation challenging campus protest restrictions imposed after the 2024 Palestine solidarity encampments. Less than a week after The Free Press story was published, Newsom vetoed the bill.

Pro-Israel and Jewish advocacy organizations had already campaigned against AB 2551 before the union’s internal deliberations were targeted, arguing that greater scrutiny would weaken rules needed to protect Jewish students from harassment and intimidation. Newsom’s veto does not prove coordination, but the campaign portraying CFA as hostile to Jewish students had become entangled with the union’s fight against campus protest restrictions.

The CSU’s systemwide policy prohibits encampments, overnight demonstrations, and unauthorized structures. The CSU Academic Senate immediately condemned the restrictions as undermining academic freedom when it was instituted in 2024, while CFA warned that vague definitions of disruption threatened constitutionally protected speech, assembly, protest, and future strike activity. A major 2026 ACLU-Amnesty study, investigating 80 campuses over two years, documented sweeping repression of Palestine solidarity protests. As the report found, universities “have imposed sweeping restrictions on student speech, initiated disciplinary actions against students, and imposed severe punishments, including expulsions and suspensions.” The ACLU has insisted that even legitimate time, place, and manner restrictions “must leave ample room for students to express themselves.”

The controversy reaches beyond CFA and CSU. Unions and rank-and-file organizations committed to Palestine solidarity have been forced to relitigate, again and again, whether anti-Zionism and solidarity with Palestinians constitute antisemitism — and whether such organizing should be systematically policed, investigated, or surveilled. At stake is a more fundamental right of the exploited: Can workers democratically connect economic struggles with Palestine solidarity, resistance to anti-immigrant and anti-Black racism, and the defense of civil liberties without exposing their organizing and deliberations to external pressure or repression?

Pressfare: Naming, Targeting, Silencing

We already have a word for the use of legal process as a political weapon: lawfare. You do not necessarily have to win. Investigation, expense, compelled disclosure, and possible sanctions can exact their own price.

Call its media counterpart pressfare: leaked material, selective or doctored quotations, and public identification can turn people into political targets and invite pressure on employers, universities, or government agencies.

The leaked CFA meeting should not be adjudicated through fragments selected for publication, especially when CFA’s statewide record contradicts the portrayal of a union indifferent to antisemitism. During the 2024 encampments, CFA opposed antisemitism and Islamophobia “in all forms” while supporting the encampments. Amid a 2025 federal antisemitism investigation, it stated that “as CFA members, we are united against antisemitism; it has no place in our communities,” while defending members’ academic freedom. CFA’s Palestine, Arab, and Muslim Caucus likewise defines its mission as confronting racism “in all its manifestations,” explicitly including antisemitism. The Free Press story — a clear example of pressfare — sought to overwrite this legacy with weaponized accusations, undermining the trust that workers place in the sanctity of their union spaces and processes.

Antisemitism demands to be taken seriously — which is why accusations of anti-Jewish discrimination should not be instrumentalized. Kenneth Stern, director of the Bard Center for the Study of Hate, has warned that using the International Holocaust Remembrance Association (IHRA) definition of antisemitism as a regulatory code threatens academic freedom by equating criticism of Israel with antisemitism, while the Jerusalem Declaration warns that the definition’s ambiguities have generated confusion and controversy, “hence weakening the fight against antisemitism.” And as Jewish Voice for Peace and Jerusalem Declaration scholars have argued, combating antisemitism is not helped by conflating hostility toward Jews with anti-Zionism, criticism of Israel, or Palestine solidarity. Requiring Palestinian and anti-Zionist unionists to prove otherwise reverses the burden of proof, allowing accusations to substitute for evidence and cultivating fear and suspicion that inhibit collective action while fueling an ever-expanding search for evidence.

That ever-expanding search has taken the form of several federal antisemitism inquiries targeting universities and their workers.

Federal antisemitism investigations have extended scrutiny to faculty speech and Palestine solidarity organizing, with consequences for unions. At Cal State LA, CSU disclosed employees’ personal information to federal investigators, prompting CFA to sue over violations of workers’ privacy.

What drove these federal inquiries on antisemitism? A 2025 study from the American Association of University Professors and the Middle East Studies Association examined 102 complaints that prompted federal civil rights investigations; pro-Israel and right-wing organizations were involved in 78 percent. All but one of the complaints concerned speech critical of Israel, and in 80 percent, complainants characterized criticism of Israel or Zionism that made no reference to Jews or Judaism as antisemitic. In at least half, the complaint rested solely on constitutionally protected political speech.

The study separately examined 28 Title VI antisemitism lawsuits brought against universities by pro-Israel groups. As of its cutoff, not one had produced a final judicial finding of discrimination in favor of the plaintiffs, although some resulted in settlements imposing new restrictions on campus speech and protest.

CFA’s political commitments long predate the renewed Palestine solidarity movement. In 2023, the union challenged CSU administrators on First Amendment grounds for restricting classroom discussion of strikes. In 2020, after years of organizing, CFA helped secure passage of AB 1460, the landmark law making Ethnic Studies a graduation requirement across the CSU system — a major victory for racial justice and educational equity in one of the nation’s most racially and ethnically diverse states. Since then, it has continued fighting CSU over its implementation, defending faculty control over curriculum and the integrity of Ethnic Studies programs.

Now, at the bargaining table, CFA is seeking protections against retaliation for faculty speech, assembly, and protest through an academic freedom article that would make those protections enforceable through the union contract.

Why are state agencies and outside political organizations seeking access to the networks through which workers organize political solidarity?

The Free Press article published names and private union messages, exposing faculty, particularly faculty of color vulnerable around employment and tenure, to potential retaliation. Among those identified was Omar Zahzah, whose scholarship includes the book Terms of Servitude, on U.S. technology companies and Israeli settler colonialism. He had also recently written about the “Michigan 8,” warning of “a broader targeting of the pro-Palestine movement.” Whatever the intent, the chilling message is clear: Continue this scholarship, political writing, or union organizing, and you, too, risk public exposure and targeting.

The consequences of this attack reach into union democracy itself: Fear of exposure changes what members dare to say, whom they trust, and how they are willing to organize together. In 2025, CFA sued CSU after Cal State LA disclosed faculty and staff members’ personal contact information to federal investigators conducting an antisemitism inquiry. The union secured a January 2026 settlement requiring CSU to notify employees before complying with any specified federal demands for personal information, unless legally prohibited.

From Leaks to Subpoenas

The exposure of CFA’s internal deliberations raises a question beyond leaked communications: Why are state agencies and outside political organizations seeking access to the networks through which workers organize political solidarity? In Minnesota and Michigan, that scrutiny has taken a more coercive form: undercover surveillance and federal subpoenas.

In Minnesota, federal agents infiltrated political meetings and activist chats under “Operation Puppet Master,” a surveillance operation exposed during the prosecution of the “Minnesota 15,” activists charged with conspiracy to impede federal officers. A Department of Homeland Security (DHS) slide titled “The Conspiracy” mapped 18 organizations, including unions, while Homeland Security Investigations used administrative subpoenas — requiring no judicial approval — to obtain years of financial records connected to Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and Communications Workers of America (CWA). Defense attorney Kevin Riach challenged the surveillance as lacking any “articulable criminal predicate” and violating constitutional protections; federal prosecutors maintained that the charges concerned criminal conduct alone.

At a February workers’ assembly at Minneapolis’s United Labor Centre, roughly 400 workers debated labor’s response to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). One undercover agent reported “no real threats”; another sought to “get phone numbers.” Defense attorneys are seeking federal surveillance reports, undercover device downloads, and communications between local prosecutors and Washington to establish the extent of infiltration and whether anti-ICE activists were selectively prosecuted.

Defense attorneys are seeking federal surveillance reports, undercover device downloads, and communications between local prosecutors and Washington to establish the extent of infiltration.

In Michigan, following the indictment of the Michigan 8 — eight Palestine solidarity activists accused of conspiracy — a federal grand jury subpoena demanded Graduate Employees’ Organization (GEO) records dating to January 1, 2023: current and former membership information, officers, meeting minutes, personnel, and finances.

GEO President Hiab Teshome faced felony embezzlement and false-pretenses charges over alleged misuse of student organization funds. University police also sought to bar her from campus, potentially excluding a member of the union’s bargaining team from her workplace. Both charges were dismissed on August 6 — the day the federal subpoena was signed. GEO denounced the prosecution as politically motivated and moved to quash the subpoena. The dismissal does not establish a political motive behind the federal investigation, but the juxtaposition is striking: The charges against one union leader collapsed, yet federal scrutiny extended to the entire union — who belonged to GEO, who led it, what its members discussed, and how they spent their money.

Those records could reveal how solidarity was organized. Meanwhile, GEO says university management struck proposed contract language barring disclosure of workers’ union membership to the federal government. The constitutional stakes are hardly new: In the 1958 case of NAACP v. Alabama, the Supreme Court recognized that compelled disclosure of membership lists can expose people to retaliation and deter lawful political association.

Membership lists, meeting minutes, financial records, and private communications reveal who organizes with whom. Historian Ellen Schrecker identifies a disturbing historical precedent in McCarthyism’s system of “guilt by association”: Private groups compiled dossiers, government investigated political affiliations, and employers and universities imposed punishment. She sees today’s assault on higher education as even more dire: “Today, what’s happening is worse, so much worse that we have to really find a new phrase for it,” she told Democracy Now!.

Solidarity by Association

Labor has its own answer to “guilt by association”: solidarity by association — where association is not a risk to be feared, but a means of repairing what injustice or oppression has torn apart. In the words of the Minnesota 15 solidarity campaign, “Community Is Not Conspiracy.” Rather than accept the social hierarchies that divide and oppress workers, union organizers build relationships that can dismantle and transform them. In organizing with those under attack, workers discover capacities for collective action that none could exercise alone. An injury to an immigrant family facing deportation, a Black community confronting police violence, or Palestinians facing repression thus becomes a concern for workers beyond those immediately targeted.

“An injury to one is an injury to all” means little if solidarity becomes competitive or selective — if defending Jewish workers requires silence about Palestinians, if defending citizens means abandoning undocumented workers, or if wages are labor’s concern while police violence, deportations, and attacks on civil liberties belong to somebody else.

Workers need room to reflect, make mistakes and acknowledge them, disagree, organize, persuade one another, and make collective decisions without employers, the state, or outside political organizations dictating the limits of debate.

Union meetings, caucuses, and other forms of association create spaces where workers connect economic and political struggles, building solidarity across sectors rather than dividing struggles against racism, gender oppression, political repression, and exploitation into separate constituencies. Through these relationships, workers build collective power, expanding their capacity to think, feel, and act together beyond the narrow and isolated roles assigned to them in the workplace and, more broadly, under capitalism.

Yet none of this is possible without preserving unions’ internal democracy and political independence. Workers need room to reflect, make mistakes and acknowledge them, disagree, organize, persuade one another, and make collective decisions without employers, the state, or outside political organizations dictating the limits of debate. Pressfare undermines that democracy when unproven allegations and internal deliberations become material for public targeting; lawfare erodes the independence of unions when accusations and investigations impose political costs before wrongdoing is established. Undercover agents mapping worker assemblies and prosecutors demanding years of union records bring far greater coercive power to bear on those same democratic spaces.

These methods differ in form and intensity, but they reproduce the same political effects: fear, suspicion, sadness, and isolation. These are effects that weaken the relationships through which workers might act together and change their circumstances. Solidarity, by contrast, nurtures compassion, courage, and the joy of gathering in assemblies, discovering what we can accomplish together. It strengthens our capacity not only to resist oppression and exploitation but to transform the social relations that sustain them. Perhaps that is what those who fear organized labor solidarity find most threatening.

This article is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), and you are free to share and republish under the terms of the license.

Blanca Missé

Blanca Missé is an associate professor of French at San Francisco State University, a member of the executive board of the San Francisco State University Chapter of the California Faculty Association, a member of California Scholars for Academic Freedom, and a militant of Workers’ Voice.