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      China promises ‘countermeasures’ after Trump threatens additional 10% tariff

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      Donald Trump has threatened China with an additional 10% tariff on its exports to the US, prompting a promise of “countermeasures” from Beijing and setting the stage for another significant escalation in the two governments’ trade war.The US president also claimed he planned to impose tariffs on Canada and Mexico starting next Tuesday, having delayed their imposition last month after talks with his counterparts.Posting on Truth Social on Thursday, Trump said illicit drugs such as fentanyl were being smuggled into the US at “unacceptable levels” and that import taxes would force other countries to crack down on the trafficking.“We cannot allow this scourge to continue to harm the USA, and therefore, until it stops, or is seriously limited, the proposed TARIFFS scheduled to go into effect on MARCH FOURTH will, indeed, go into effect, as scheduled,” the Republican president wrote. “China will likewise be charged an additional 10% Tariff on that date.”If Trump makes good on this latest threat, the move would further strain relations between the US and its largest trading partners.In response, China’s commerce and foreign ministries on Friday vowed to retaliate if Chinese companies were affected by the tariffs, accusing the US of using fentanyl as a “pretext” to threaten China.“Such behaviour is purely ‘shifting blame and shirking responsibility,’ which is not conducive to solving its own problems,” a commerce ministry spokesperson said. “If the US insists on proceeding with this course of action, China will take all necessary countermeasures to safeguard its legitimate rights and interests.”Canada and Mexico have promised to retaliate if the US imposes tariffs on their exports. China hit back swiftly when Trump imposed a 10% tariff on its exports earlier this month.The Trump administration has repeatedly raised the threat of tariffs, vowing to rebalance the global economic order in the US’s favor. A string of announced measures have yet to be introduced, however, as economists and businesses urge officials to reconsider.The duties on imports from Canada and Mexico have been repeatedly delayed; modified levies on steel and aluminum will not be enforced until next month, and a wave of “reciprocal” tariffs, trailed earlier this month, will not kick in before April.This week, the US president vowed to slap 25% tariffs on the EU, claiming the bloc was “formed to screw the United States”, although details remain sparse. Duties will be applied “generally”, Trump said, “on cars and all other things”.The prospect of escalating tariffs has already thrown the global economy into turmoil – with consumers expressing fears about inflation worsening and the auto sector possibly suffering if the US’s two largest trading partners in Canada and Mexico are slapped with taxes.The prospect of higher prices and slower growth could create political blowback for Trump.Associated Press contributed reporting More

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      Do Trump and co want a world reclaimed by straight white men? It’s not certain they’ll get it | Andy Beckett

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      For people who believe that the world should be run by straight white men, these are heady times. Probably the most powerful social conservative on the planet occupies the White House again, and seems determined to drive “immoral” and “discriminatory” diversity policies out of American life.Two years ago, the US supreme court banned the use of affirmative action in university admissions. A growing list of American and British companies, from Ford to BT to Goldman Sachs, appear to be reducing their commitment to the once fashionable corporate principles of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI). Meanwhile, Reform UK promises to “scrap DEI rules that have lowered standards and reduced economic productivity”. In politics, commerce and education, a huge, potentially lasting counterrevolution seems to be under way.“The death of DEI is finally here,” wrote the columnist Michael Deacon in the Telegraph last year, “and it’s a joy to behold … A radical progressive ideology that, in recent years, has held countless western institutions in its miserable grip … is finally loosening.”For many companies, promoting diversity has only been a priority for a few years, since the surge of anti-racist activism set off around the world by Black Lives Matter in 2020. And in some ways the inclusive values of DEI and the winner-takes-all ethos of capitalism have always been an awkward fit. For all but the most ethical businesses, hiring and employing people in a more egalitarian way is less fundamental than maximising profits.In many supposedly diverse companies, progress towards a truly representative workforce, especially in senior positions, has been slow and far from complete. From rightwing and leftwing perspectives, it can be argued that diversity policies have just been a cynical experiment: yet another attempt to polish corporate capitalism’s increasingly tarnished public image. Now that the political climate has changed, the experiment is being unceremoniously abandoned.But is the situation really that clearcut? One of the key features of current rightwing populism is a desire to escape complicated social realities, and so it is with the revolt against diversity. Thanks to globalisation, immigration and trends in birthrates, Britain and the US, like most other rich countries, are much more multicultural than they were in the 1980s – the last time there was a big conservative pushback against diversity policies. Between 1980 and 2019, the minority ethnic proportion of the US population doubled to 40%. In England and Wales, the proportion of people who didn’t describe themselves as white British doubled between 2001 and 2021 alone: from one in eight to one in four. During these decades of flux, there were also profound shifts in how millions of Britons and Americans thought about feminism, gender, sexuality and disability.None of these socially embedded trends is likely to be completely reversed, however much rightwing populists rail against them. In a speech last week, Kemi Badenoch described diversity policies as “poison”, but the Conservatives have their own equal opportunities policy, with her face on the document’s first page. It commits the party to being “a supportive and inclusive environment where … the diversity of people’s backgrounds and circumstances will be positively valued … [and] where the party will also continue to work towards its dedicated goal of encouraging and promoting equality and diversity”. It’s easy to see these commitments as insincere or hypocritical, but they are also a sign of how far DEI ideas have spread.Back in the 1980s, the last transatlantic campaign against diversity policies was led by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. Her government caricatured Labour councils that helped minorities as “loony left”, and then took many of their powers away. Meanwhile, in the US, Ronald Reagan aimed to abolish the federal government’s affirmative action programme, which he saw as “bureaucratic” social engineering. He also reduced funding for the agency that enforced equal opportunities employment law, drastically reducing the number of cases it brought against companies.But his counterrevolution got no further. Strong opposition – hard to imagine now – came from relatively liberal senior figures in the Republican party. More relevant to today, further support for diversity policies came from big business. “When Reagan sought to tear down affirmative action,” wrote the American sociologist Frank Dobbin in his 2009 book, Inventing Equal Opportunity, “corporate America stood together to oppose the [president’s] idea.”Businesses argued that diverse workforces made the best use of the country’s range of talent and were more creative and productive, and more able to understand a broad spectrum of customers at home and abroad. Shrewdly, businesses also rebranded affirmative action in more neutral, less political language, as “human resources management”. Reagan’s attempt to abolish affirmative action was quietly abandoned.Might today’s war on diversity fail in a similar way? The forces of white male supremacy have a more relentless rightwing media on their side than in Reagan and Thatcher’s day. Donald Trump and other reactionary populists also seem less likely to compromise in culture wars than their more pragmatic conservative predecessors.Yet with multiculturalism now deeply entrenched, rooting out diversity policies will be harder than Trump’s confident executive orders suggest. Legal opposition is building, and there are already signs that business is hiding its diversity programmes behind euphemisms again. On Tuesday, Apple shareholders voted against ending the company’s diversity programme. “DEI is being rebranded – not disbanded,” complained the rightwing New York Post recently. It pointed out that some companies widely thought to have dropped DEI continued to promote it on their websites in slightly modified language. If diversity policies increase profits – and according to the president of the British Chambers of Commerce, Martha Lane Fox, “Businesses that embed diversity have 25% higher financial results” – then even the most determined anti-DEI campaign is unlikely to totally prevail.Moreover, what the reactionaries want is less clear and coherent than it first seems. Do they want to restore a society utterly dominated by straight white men, which is almost certainly impossible? Or do they accept the existence of a diverse society, as long as it isn’t actually shaped by diversity policies? On these questions, conservatives are divided.Even Trump sometimes acknowledges American diversity’s permanence and importance. In his inauguration speech, he boasted of his “increases in support from … young and old, men and women, African Americans, Hispanic Americans, Asian Americans …” Social conservatives around the world may be feeling triumphant now, but their revolt against diversity has probably come too late.

      Andy Beckett is a Guardian columnist More

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      Apple shareholders vote against ending DEI program amid Trump crackdown

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      Apple shareholders voted down an attempt to pressure the technology company into yielding to Donald Trump’s push to scrub corporate programs designed to diversify its workforce.A proposal drafted by the National Center for Public Policy Research – a self-described conservative thinktank – urged Apple to follow a litany of high-profile companies that have retreated from diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives currently in the Trump administration’s crosshairs.After a brief presentation about the anti-DEI proposal, Apple announced shareholders had rejected it without disclosing the vote tally. The preliminary results will be outlined in a regulatory filing later on Tuesday.The outcome vindicated Apple management’s decision to stand behind its diversity commitment even though Trump asked the US Department of Justice to look into whether these types of programs have discriminated against employees whose race or gender are not aligned with the initiatives’ goals.But Apple’s CEO, Tim Cook, has maintained a cordial relationship with Trump since his first term in office, an alliance that so far has helped the company skirt tariffs on its iPhones made in China. After Cook and Trump met last week, Apple on Monday announced it would invest $500bn in the US and create 20,000 more jobs during the next five years – a commitment applauded by the president.Tuesday’s shareholder vote came a month after the same group presented a similar proposal during Costco’s annual meeting, only to have it overwhelmingly rejected.That snub did not discourage the National Center for Public Policy Research from confronting Apple about its DEI program in a pre-recorded presentation by Stefan Padfield, executive director of the thinktank’s Free Enterprise Project, who asserted “forced diversity is bad for business”.In the presentation, Padfield attacked Apple’s diversity commitments for being out of line with recent court rulings and said the programs expose the Cupertino, California, company to an onslaught of potential lawsuits for alleged discrimination. He cited the Trump administration as one of Apple’s potential legal adversaries.“The vibe shift is clear: DEI is out and merit is in,” Padfield said in the presentation.The specter of potential legal trouble was magnified last week when the Florida attorney general, James Uthmeier, filed a federal lawsuit against Target for allegedly failing to properly disclose the financial risks of its DEI programs to stakeholders.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBut Cook conceded Apple may have to make some adjustments to its diversity program “as the legal landscape changes” while still striving to maintain a culture that has helped elevate the company to its current market value of $3.7tn – greater than any other business in the world.“We will continue to create a culture of belonging,” Cook told shareholders during the meeting.In its last diversity and inclusion report issued in 2022, Apple disclosed that nearly three-fourths of its global workforce consisted of white and Asian employees. Nearly two-thirds of its employees were men.Other major technology companies for years have reported employing mostly white and Asian men, especially in high-paid engineering jobs – a tendency that spurred the industry to pursue largely unsuccessful efforts to diversify. More

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      Trump is using tariffs as a blunt-force tool. It won’t work | Mike Williams

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      Last week, Donald Trump revived a trade war from his first term, implementing a 25% tariff on all imported steel. In doing so, he’s using tariffs as a blunt-force tool under the assumption that they’ll be sufficient to jump-start the American steel industry.But that’s not the case.Tariffs are important, but they’re far from enough. Thanks to decades of disinvestment and terrible trade policies, the steel industry has grappled with decline and stagnation for years. It now faces grave threats as China continues to flood the global market with artificially cheap steel, manipulating prices in its favor. Meanwhile, the global market has begun a shift towards “clean” steel produced with electricity and hydrogen, a process the United States has only just started to support.To survive, the steel industry must modernize. To support that effort, the federal government should be implementing targeted tariffs alongside investments and incentives that help the industry grow and transition.Strategic tariffs can help protect steel manufacturing from excessive overcapacity and unfair price manipulation by foreign competitors. They can also be used to account for other effects, such as the impact of high-emissions steel production on health and the environment. For example, a tariff that considers carbon emissions in the production of a given unit of steel would help protect the domestic steel industry from foreign competitors’ cheap, high-emissions steel. The European Union is already implementing this kind of tariff, called a carbon-border adjustment mechanism. Revenue from this tariff – and others – could help our steel industry transition to clean technologies and accelerate the industry’s modernization.When tariffs are used for negotiation without being combined with other government tools, they can backfire. Already, Canada and the EU are preparing reciprocal tariffs on American steel and aluminum, which will make American steel even less desirable in those markets. Steel is a critical material in countless supply chains, from cars and planes to housing and infrastructure, and across-the-board increases in steel prices carry widespread economic risks. Trump’s 2018 tariffs on steel provide a roadmap for what we can expect: while production temporarily ticked up, exports declined almost 25% between 2018 and 2020, and after retaliation from China and Mexico, economists downgraded growth estimates, and business investment slowed.Tariffs are necessary for correcting distortions in global trade but are a poor tool for catalyzing the kind of investment needed for the long-term viability of the American steel industry, which needs to transition to clean technology to remain competitive globally. While tariffs can protect existing production capacity from being undercut, they won’t necessarily yield large infrastructure and modernization investments from domestic steel companies already operating at slim margins.But just as it has started to do for our domestic semiconductor industry, the federal government can combine fortified trade policies with structural support for the steel industry’s transformation. This could include investment tax credits for revamping steel-production facilities to use clean technologies and production tax credits for making domestic clean steel, spurring private investment across the steel industry.The federal government could leverage existing policies as well. For example, expanding the Biden administration’s “Buy America” requirements for federally funded projects, such as highway and bridge construction, to include domestically produced, 100% clean steel would strengthen demand for US-produced steel. Reviving “Buy Clean” standards for steel used in federal projects could also accelerate the industry’s modernization. These structural supports could be funded by the revenue from targeted, well-designed tariffs.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionTrump has claimed his tariffs will create a “manufacturing boom”, turn America into a manufacturing “powerhouse” and “make America rich again”. But going all in on tariffs alone is an unsteady foundation for industrial policy. Unless Trump expands his strategy to include incentives and investment for the steel industry, his approach will be like a game of Jenga: eventually, it will all come crashing down.

      Mike Williams is a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress and former deputy director of the BlueGreen Alliance More

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      Trump threatens 25% tariffs on foreign cars and semiconductor chips

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      Donald Trump stood firm against warnings that his threatened trade war risks derailing the US economy, claiming his administration could hit foreign cars with tariffs of around 25% within weeks.Semiconductor chips and drugs are set to face higher duties, Trump told reporters at a news conference on Tuesday.The White House has repeatedly raised the threat of tariffs since Trump returned to office last month, pledging to rebalance the global economic order in America’s favor.A string of announced tariffs have yet to be introduced, however, as economists and business urge the Trump administration to reconsider.Duties on imports from Canada and Mexico have been repeatedly delayed; modified levies on steel and aluminum, announced last week, will not be enforced until next month; and a wave of so-called “reciprocal” tariffs, also trailed last week, will not kick in before April.Tariffs are taxes on foreign goods. They are paid by the importer of the product – in this case, companies and consumers based inside the US – rather than the exporter, elsewhere in the world.Asked on Tuesday if he had decided the rate of a threatened tariff on cars from overseas, Trump said he would “probably” announce that on 2 April, “but it’ll be in the neighborhood of 25%”.Upon being asked the same question about threatened tariffs on semiconductors and pharmaceuticals, Trump replied: “It’ll be 25% and higher, and it’ll go very substantially higher over the course of a year.”The ramp-up, he explained, was designed to lure manufacturers to the US. “When they come into the United States, and they have their plant or factory here, there is no tariff.”Executives have cautioned that the administration’s plan for tariffs risks harming the US economy. A 25% tariff on Mexico and Canada “will blow a hole in the US industry that we have never seen”, Jim Farley, the Ford CEO, told an investor conference in New York last week. More

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      The Guardian view on Trump’s diplomacy: when the US knows the price and ignores values | Editorial

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      The Trump administration did not take red lines on Ukraine to its talks with Russia in Saudi Arabia on Tuesday: it cares about the bottom line. The secretary of state, Marco Rubio, underscored that when he said the two sides would create a team, not only to support Ukraine peace talks but also to explore the “incredible opportunities” to partner with Moscow geopolitically “and, frankly, economically” that might result.Kyiv and other European capitals are still reeling at the full extent of Donald Trump’s cynicism when it comes to world affairs, and callous disregard for the people caught up in them. But it should be no surprise that business dealings were high on the agenda. Vladimir Putin would dearly love to end his country’s economic isolation. Russia is making the case that American energy firms and others could profit handsomely by doing business with it again.For Mr Trump, his two key interests – money and power – are not only interrelated but fungible, just as US goals and his personal interests often appear indistinguishable to him. (This is a man who launched his own cryptocurrency token days before returning to the White House, and as he sought to ease regulation of the industry).When he talks of the future of Ukraine or Gaza, he speaks not of human rights and security, lives and homes, but of laying US hands on $500bn of minerals and a “big real-estate site” respectively. He believes in cutting deals, not making peace. At the heart of his foreign policy team is Steve Witkoff, not a diplomat but a billionaire real-estate developer and golf buddy. Mr Witkoff was first appointed as Middle East envoy and then dispatched to negotiate with Moscow. The head of Russia’s sovereign wealth fund, Kirill Dmitriev, was also in Riyadh – while Ukraine and European allies have been denied a seat.Mr Trump’s merging of wealth and strength were obvious even before he took office the first time. He suggested he could use Taiwan as leverage with China on issues including trade. John Bolton, who became his national security adviser, later said (though Mr Trump denied it) that the president pleaded with China’s leader, Xi Jinping, to ensure he would win the next election, “stress[ing] the importance of … increased Chinese purchases of soybeans and wheat in the electoral outcome”.Mr Trump’s Middle East policy is not only pleasing to his evangelical Christian supporters. His repugnant proposal to ethnically cleanse Palestinians from Gaza, allowing the construction of an American-owned “Riviera”, is shocking but in many ways builds upon ideas long held by businessman friends as well as Israeli settlers. His son-in-law, Jared Kushner, a former real-estate developer charged with overseeing Middle East policy in Mr Trump’s first term, suggested last year that Gaza’s “waterfront property” could be “very valuable”. (Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, incidentally, became a major investor in Mr Kushner’s private equity firm after he left the administration.)Volodymyr Zelenskyy tried to capitalise on Mr Trump’s economic transactionalism by offering access to Ukraine’s resources, notably minerals, in exchange for security. He got Mr Trump’s attention – but the terms of the resulting US demand make it look less like diplomacy than extortion. The US president prices up everything and knows the value of nothing. Others must now endeavour to show him that his plans will not come as cheaply as he believes.

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      To the CEOs who’ve joined Trump’s fight against diversity, I say this: you’re making a big mistake | Stefan Stern

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      The mask has slipped and the gloves are off. A company which in 2022 boasted that it had exceeded its target, “spending $1.26 billion with US certified diverse suppliers”, is now ending diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives.That company is Meta (formerly known as Facebook), whose chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, announced DEI dismantling shortly before he had a prominent seat at Donald Trump’s recent inauguration. Perhaps from that privileged spot he was able to imbibe some of the “masculine energy” he says he wants to see at work.Meta is not alone in signalling a shift from its previous position. Amazon, McDonald’s, Accenture, Google, General Motors, Pepsi, Walmart and Boeing are among the corporate giants who are downplaying or removing altogether references to DEI and public commitments to it. The consultancy Deloitte used to declare that “diversity, equity and inclusion are core to our values”. But, the FT reports, the page those words appeared on has been wiped from its website.It is possible these decisions were taken partly on legal advice. Zuckerberg seems to have pre-empted the attorney general, Trump’s Florida favourite Pam Bondi, as she recently declared that there should be an end to what she called “illegal DEI” and “accessibility” discrimination. You can imagine that in-house counsel had anticipated legal trouble and so were moved to suggest caution on DEI issues. Zuckerberg is not merely being cautious, however. He has moved Maxine Williams, former chief diversity officer, to a role concerned with “accessibility and engagement”. Whether that restructuring will be enough to satisfy the Maga overlords remains to be seen.Some of the changes at other companies may be merely symbolic or presentational. And not everyone is backing down. The investment bank Goldman Sachs stated: “We strongly believe that organisations benefit from diverse perspectives” – although this belief has not stopped them from removing one of their former requirements for diversity in their clients. Goldman Sachs is still “committed to operating our programmes and policies in compliance with the law”, it says. Jamie Dimon, the boss of JPMorgan Chase, dared anti-DEI activists to challenge his bank’s pro-diversity stance. (But he is taking a hard line on forcing people to return to the office, despite remote working being key for modern diverse workforces.)All the same, the overriding effect of seeing that array of (newly) admiring CEOs lining up in Washington to salute the incoming chief was to recall the timeless Marxist dictum (Groucho, not Karl): “Those are my principles and if you don’t like them … well, I have others.”View image in fullscreenMaybe the pressure has finally got to some of these top bosses. A recent article from senior partners at McKinsey noted that “CEOs are on the job 24/7, responsible for addressing an ever-shifting array of problems and threats”.But perhaps part of the problem is feeding already narcissistic CEOs the sort of grandiose advice offered by the blue-chip consultants in their article. Likening the boss to an “elite athlete”, the authors argue that CEOs need to use their time purposefully (like LeBron James, the basketball star), “perfect the art of recovery” (like the footballer Cristiano Ronaldo), keep learning (like the golfer Bryson DeChambeau), embrace data and analytics (like a Formula One grand prix driver) and be adaptable and resilient (like the gymnast Simone Biles and … Muhammad Ali).The end product sounds like a remarkable person indeed: “This is how leaders can … build their resilience muscle, and become … ready to thrive in the 21st century, while staying humble, celebrating noble failures, and always helping team members.” Yep, nobody I know, either.In fact, bosses risk being cut off from the everyday concerns of their staff. An academic study into this phenomenon looking back decades, published in the American Journal of Sociology and called The Great Separation, draws on evidence from a dozen countries. The highest earners inhabit the same narrow terrain, and have limited contact with lower earners, the researchers found. This can affect how elites engage with the rest of society, and how in turn lower earners see them. This “great separation” may have had an impact on “the key social and political challenges of our time”, the study says. Brexit, Trump, populism and the rise of the new right may all be symptoms.Can the media do anything to help? The new media business Semafor has just launched a weekly newsletter called The CEO Signal, available (for free!) to bosses running companies with annual turnover of at least $500m (£400m). Its editor, Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson, says there is a need for such a specially targeted publication: “There’s a place here in the market for something that’s much more tightly focused to the people at the very top of the org chart – who are actually trying to run exceedingly complicated organisations, at an increasingly complicated time,” he told the Press Gazette.“And there’s nobody in any organisation who faces the same list of challenges as the CEO does,” he added. “It’s a cliche to say that it’s lonely at the top, but there is something to that.” The venerable Harvard Business Review is also about to launch a new service specifically for the “C-suite” – that is, for people whose job title begins with the word “chief”.How these new publications will help to mitigate some of the problems highlighted by the “great separation” study is not immediately clear. I am, however, reminded of what Laura Empson, a professor at Bayes Business School in London, has observed: that if a leader complains it is lonely at the top then they “are not doing it right”.Rather than an ever-narrowing elite of CEOs becoming more and more detached from their workforce, we would do better to try to reconnect. Companies and workplaces should be vibrant and cohesive communities of people.The ghastly alternative could be seen at the White House last week, when Elon Musk cavorted around the Oval Office firing off wild and unsubstantiated accusations against public officials, while Trump looked on calmly. Musk confidently asserted, without offering any evidence, that some officials at the now gutted USAid had been taking “kickbacks”. This is not model CEO behaviour. And this is not the leadership we need.

      Stefan Stern is co-author of Myths of Management and the former director of the High Pay Centre. His latest book is Fair or Foul: the Lady Macbeth Guide to Ambition
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      ‘It comes from racism’: immigrant workers on Trump’s deportation push

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      Donald Trump has ramped up anti-immigration fervor into his second presidency, promising mass deportations, pushing to increase arrests and bolstering public relations efforts to amplify arrests. The moves have sent a wave of terror through the undocumented worker community that underpins large parts of the US economy.“Every day I wake up and walk out the door, I go with the hope of going to work, but with the fear of not being able to come back,” said a construction worker and single parent in Texas who obtained immigration protection under the Biden administration. She requested to remain anonymous due to fears about her immigration status.“Every day I worry if something happens, who will take my kids,” she said. “I have only one child born in the US. They are the only one who might be able to return, but me and the other kids would not be able to come back.”She claimed that since Trump took office for his second term, there had been fewer opportunities to work construction jobs given the increased fear of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) raids at workplaces.Despite being in the US for 10 years and constantly trying to obtain documentation, she explained it took her experiencing weeks of wage theft to be able to get documentation through the deferred action program, which provides temporary status and work authorization to immigrants who have been victims of labor abuses.“Unfortunately, these next few years will be years of fear, years of silence,” she said. “I believe the anti-immigrant pushes are racist. People have been taken away without criminal records. We used to have the ability to pay fines before because we didn’t have criminal records, but I’ve heard from other immigrants, anyone being taken into custody by Ice, regardless of their situation, will be deported.”Trump has signed an executive order to allocate military resources at the US border with Mexico and opened Guantánamo Bay prison in Cuba to the detention of undocumented immigrants. The Department of Homeland Security also rolled back a policy of restricting Ice arrests at sensitive locations such as hospitals, places of worship and schools and the agency is pushing to recruit IRS agents to assist in immigration enforcement. The administration is also reportedly planning to reopen family detention centers.View image in fullscreenThe changes come as Trump campaigned with misleading and false statements about immigrants, portraying them as criminals and taking away jobs, including making a baseless claim that Haitian immigrants in Ohio were eating pets.Despite this rhetoric fomenting xenophobic sentiments, an October 2024 report by the Economic Policy Institute on the benefits of immigration to the US cited the enabling of economic growth as the US-born workforce declines, and the payment of nearly $100bn annually in taxes, and noted mass deportations actually result in job losses for US-born workers due to reduced local demand output.Several industries rely heavily on immigrant workers. Nearly 2.9 million immigrants, the most in any occupation group, are employed in construction and extraction, comprising 34% of employment in these occupations in the US.The Guardian spoke with several immigrant workers in construction about their experiences and fears caused by Trump’s immigration policies and the anti-immigrant sentiments stoked by his rhetoric and policies.Another undocumented construction worker in Texas said there is a “constant fear” in going to work every day that his workplace will be raided by Ice or that he will return home to find his family, the majority of whom are undocumented, taken away.“It is a constant fear. It’s something we can’t take from our minds, every instance of the day,” they said. “My main worry is there will be one day where my family might be taken away from me and be sent back to Mexico.”Trying to acquire legal documentation has been “almost impossible”, they added. “The reason behind these policies, it comes from racism. The majority of immigrants aren’t criminals. Like myself, a lot of immigrants come to this country to be able to fulfill their dreams, to be able to work. We’re humans and we have rights. The things we go through when being held in immigration detention, unless you live them, you won’t be able to understand it.”Andres Surquia of Georgia currently has immigration protection through deferred action – a government policy that allows certain undocumented immigrants to work and avoid deportation for two-year periods.“I’m scared because Trump has said he wants to remove deferred-action protections, which took me so long to get,” he said. “As immigrants, we come into this country to work and we want to be respected and protected.”The International Union of Painters and Allied Trades, which represents 140,000 workers in the US and Canada, pushed to secure deferred-action immigration protections for workers experiencing labor abuses in construction for the past several years under the Biden administration.“It was one of the main pillars we put forth as a union, in coalition with other unions, that really view immigration as a working-class issue,” said the IUPAT general president, Jimmy Williams. “Now, under the Trump administration it’s going to go back to all these workers having no recourse, and the employers continuing to be able to use their status as a way to keep them further and further from being able to speak out.”Immigration is a labor and economic issue, Williams said. The union views it as a responsibility to fight and defend these workers because they are their union members. But he expressed disappointment with Democrats whom he feels have so far failed to support these workers.“Where’s the resistance?” Williams asked. “When will the Democratic party really get it right on framing this as a working-class issue and put the target solely on where it belongs, which is on the employers that have abused this system for decades now, keeping workers’ rights down, keeping wages down? You’ve seen limited to no response from the opposition.”A construction worker in Texas who has been pursuing asylum said she had seen fewer people show up to work out of fear in recent weeks.“There’s not many people going to work any more, because of the fear. The only reason why I go to work is it’s a necessity to bring food home and pay bills,” she said. “They want to extract the people that are working in the farms, that are working in the fields, that are working in the restaurants that they eat in, and now they’re taking them without any explanation. It’s not fair.”Milton Velásquez is a construction worker in Maryland from El Salvador who currently has temporary protected status (TPS), provisional protection given to nationals of some countries in crisis. Trump has already revoked these protections for 350,000 Venezuelans and has incited fears he will revoke or limit protections for 1 million immigrants in the US from 17 nations granted protections under the Biden administration.“It scares me because if my TPS does get revoked, I will lose a lot of job opportunities without it and it would limit my income,” he said. “There is always fear of deportation. I try not to think about it, but what scares me the most is having to go back to El Salvador. I would have to work 10 times as much to get paid $10 a day.”Under the first Trump presidential term, Velásquez faced issues with trying to bring his son and daughter to the US from El Salvador through the Central American Minors program, which Trump shut down in 2017. He is still separated from his daughter.“I tried to get her a visa,” Velasquez added. “I’ve been longing to bring them here. That’s what I work for, to provide for my family, to get my family to come here.”Send us a tipIf you have information you’d like to share securely with the Guardian about the impact of the Trump administration’s temporary protected status decision, please use a non-work device to contact us via the Signal messaging app at (929) 418-7175. More