Meta Cafeteria Workers Did What Execs Won’t: Took on ICE and Won

As immigration agents raided factories and other workplaces across the United States last June, staff at a Meta café in Bellevue, Washington, made a pact: They would rally together if the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown affected any one of them. In December, the agreement met its first test.

Under a US Immigration and Customs Enforcement program, federal authorities had detained Serigne, a Senegalese asylum seeker and the brother of dishwasher Abdoul Mbengue. “I didn’t know what to do at first, but we had this community, and I told them this news,” Mbengue says through a coworker who is translating his French.

A number of the cooks, dishwashers, and front-of-house staff at the Meta café known as Crashpad are from Africa, the Caribbean, or Ukraine. Some of them, including Mbengue, are in the US on temporary authorizations while awaiting the resolution of asylum or immigration cases. President Donald Trump has sought to curb temporary protection and granting of permanent asylum, though some of his directives are being challenged in court.

In December, Mbengue’s colleagues launched a fundraising campaign to pay for the legal defense of his brother, who came to the US in 2023 to escape challenging circumstances in Senegal. As café workers honored their earlier agreement, word spread on group chats among social and environmental activists at other big tech companies in the region. A longtime software engineer at Amazon, for instance, donated $100, then added $500 after learning more about the “nightmare,” he says, speaking anonymously because of company rules regarding media interviews. Thousands of dollars altogether came in from Meta, Microsoft, and Amazon workers. On February 24, a judge ordered the release of Mbengue’s brother. “He is back because of the efforts,” Mbengue says.

The undertaking shows how activism inside the tech industry may be shifting as big companies become less responsive to worker petitions and decline to take public stands against Trump policies. A decade ago, thousands of tech workers protested against Trump’s immigration bans alongside executives. Now, the workers contend they are having to step in to support colleagues with financial and administrative help that they believe their employers should be extending to the vulnerable and lower-income members of their communities.

In the case of Mbengue’s workplace, he and his more than 200 dining hall colleagues in Bellevue and nearby Redmond are employed by catering company Lavish Roots. Last year, over 60 percent of them asked Lavish and Meta to respect workers’ rights to form a union with Unite Here Local 8. Over 5,000 peers nationwide at Microsoft, Google, and different Meta offices employed by other catering companies have already unionized. But Lavish has allegedly campaigned against the workers through meetings, flyers, texts, and emails, according to Unite Here organizing director Sarah Jacobson. Union supporters have been disciplined, surveilled, and subjected to new rules making workplace communications more difficult, she alleges.

While better pay is a top demand, immigration raids have also fueled the organizing among Meta contractors. In their collective bargaining agreements, unionized workers for cafeterias inside Microsoft, Google, and other Meta offices have job protection while attempting to renew work permits. Immigration hearings count as excused time off. “They have the security and ability to live freely,” Mbengue says of Microsoft counterparts. And procedures also exist at the other workplaces for when ICE tries to enter offices.

Workers say it’s a legitimate concern. They allege that on January 29, two agents with “DHS” clothing looking for a specific non-Microsoft employee working at the company’s headquarters campus in Redmond were turned away at reception of the Commons building. Microsoft could not confirm the visitors were law enforcement.