The ongoing protests in Los Angeles against President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown have once again thrust unions into the political spotlight, galvanized by the arrest of one of their own prominent leaders. Federal agents arrested David Huerta — the well-known head of California’s largest public sector union — while he was demonstrating outside of a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement raid at a worksite in Los Angeles on Friday.

Huerta’s arrest helped fuel the intense, days-long protests in Los Angeles over the weekend, as calls for his release mounted among unions and protesters. It also inspired smaller rallies in cities across the country, many of the latter organized by the union Huerta belongs to, the Service Employees International Union. The United Auto Workers and the AFL-CIO, the nation’s largest federation of labor unions, demanded Huerta’s release alongside SEIU.

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The scenes were striking given how, decades ago, the U.S. labor movement largely opposed immigration, at one point helping impose restrictions against employers who hired undocumented workers.

The protests highlight how unions have become a bulwark against Trump’s immigration agenda, challenging his administration’s intensifying enforcement tactics. The shift is in part driven by immigrants who have joined unions in growing numbers since the 1990s — and as organized labor objects to broader Trump policies that affect unions.

In a statement after Huerta’s release Monday, AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler said that the groups who demanded his release had “shown the power of the union.”

“If you come for one of us, you come for all of us,” she wrote in a post on X.

Huerta was taken into custody after he allegedly resisted against officers carrying out an immigration raid at a warehouse near downtown Los Angeles. Officials alleged that Huerta rallied a crowd outside the warehouse’s gate to block the agents from entering. Then, when an officer tried to move Huerta, he allegedly pushed back, according to an affidavit.

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He was charged Monday with conspiring to impede federal immigration efforts and released on bond.

“Let me be clear: I don’t care who you are — if you impede federal agents, you will be arrested and prosecuted,” Bill Essayli, the U.S. Attorney in Los Angeles, said in a post on X shortly after the arrest.

In a statement Monday, April Verrett, SEIU’s international president, praised Huerta’s release but added: “this struggle is about much more than just one man.”

“Thousands of workers remain unjustly detained and separated from their families,” Verrett said.

Paul Ortiz, a labor history professor at Cornell University, said that Huerta’s arrest and the fallout shine a light on unions’ growing resistance to Trump’s immigration enforcement, especially as he takes other actions against workers — such as trying to pare down the federal workforce.

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“This is all one attack,” Ortiz said. “It’s driven by the same goal, which is to seize the power.”

In the months since Trump took office, unions have been at the center of some of his executive actions — and they’ve launched challenges against the actions in turn.

In January, about one week after he was inaugurated, Trump moved to fire Democratic members of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the National Labor Relations Board — groups that oversee large numbers of workers, employers and unions in the U.S. In March, he attempted to cancel the union rights of workers at more than two dozen federal agencies and offices. And as his administration has slashed the federal workforce, labor unions have sued to block the cuts.

In each of those instances and in California, the labor movement has come out in opposition to Trump because they “fundamentally disagree” with the policies behind his actions, said Seth Harris, who formerly served as President Joe Biden’s top labor adviser.

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“They’re not making a political choice,” Harris said. “They are making a policy, economic and social choice that he is bad for the country, his policies are bad for the country, and they’re extremely bad for working people.”

The labor movement was built by immigrants in the early 19th century, Ortiz said. But for years, American unions, including AFL-CIO, opposed immigrant workers, who they worried would compete for already limited jobs and accept low wages.

Then, in 2000, AFL-CIO reversed its course. The union called for amnesty for 6 million undocumented immigrants and a repeal of a program that punished employers that hired them, which it had helped enact more than a decade earlier.

The change represented a “remarkable turnaround for the American labor movement,” The Washington Post reported at the time, adding that unions at the time recognized that immigrants provided their “best chance” to raise membership.

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Now, seeing unions at the forefront of immigrant rights efforts is not entirely a surprise, Harris said, because they are “against any effort to divide the working class” — including mass deportations of workers and raids at their workplaces.

“The labor movement is all in on organizing immigrant workers rather than trying to keep them out of the country,” he said.

Los Angeles was “ground zero” for the changing demographics of labor unions, as they became increasingly composed of immigrants, Ortiz said. Since then, unions have supported policy changes that would give immigrant workers a viable path to citizenship.

But without that option, ongoing raids and aggressive enforcement are likely to be met with an even more vocal response from labor unions across the country.

“I don’t think people are going to put up with this for much longer,” Ortiz said.