Sex Workers Are Being Abducted by ICE -- and Abandoned by Respectability Politics

Sex workers targeted by ICE need the migrant justice movement’s full solidarity.

By Kate Zen & Chanelle Gallant , Truthout
Published July 12, 2025

Since January 2025, police raids on massage parlors have intensified, targeting immigrant women suspected of sex work. Amid nationwide protests against Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), these workers — among ICE’s most systematically targeted — are largely excluded from community defense. “I’m scared to go to work,” a migrant massage worker in New York City told Red Canary Song, a New York-based collective of Asian and migrant sex workers. “Police cars, plainclothes cars, we all hide when [we] see them … we’ll be arrested as soon as we go out.”

On June 11, ICE and local police in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, raided nine massage parlors, detaining 10 Chinese women — their names and whereabouts have not been released. They disappeared into ICE’s sprawling detention system, with facilities from the U.S. to El Salvador and South Sudan. Yet not a single organization called for their release. Over 90 days in January and February, nearly 1,000 arrests in Queens, New York, targeted immigrant sex workers and street vendors. In Arizona, over 200 arrests were made. In Texas, 11 parlors were closed in February and May under emergency powers that bypass criminal charges. Across 20+ cities this year, police collaborated with ICE in similar raids.

Most go unreported, buried in sealed indictments. In Sanctuary Cities, ICE exploits legal loopholes to deport people through administrative channels, without judicial oversight, masking the true scale of its operations. In other labor sectors, worksite raids sparked massive outpourings of solidarity and creative resistance, including “Adopt a Day Laborer” campaigns and street vendor buyouts. But sex workers are left to fend for themselves.

Few immigrant rights organizations defend migrant sex workers. Support mainly comes from other sex workers in underfunded grassroots groups like Red Canary Song, Trans Immigrant Project, and DecrimSexWorkCA, the last of which has organized ICE patrols, and distributed over $20,000 in emergency relief to undocumented and other sex workers since 2023. Their model is mutual aid, not charity.

https://truthout.org/articles/sex-workers-are-being-abducted-by-ice-and-abandoned-by-respectability-politics/