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.

Frank Shaw, Microsoft’s chief communications officer, says the company permits law enforcement access to its buildings “only with a valid warrant or through defined, pre‑authorized arrangements coordinated by Global Security and legal teams for specific purposes.” They added that “officers are not allowed to enter or move through our campuses at will.”

Meta and Lavish Roots declined to comment for this story. Amazon and Google didn’t respond to requests for comment.

“I Choose to Fight”

Mbengue says he fled Senegal in 2023 and landed in Memphis with family. He moved to Des Moines, Washington, which he says is about a two-hour commute in traffic from Meta’s Seattle office, where a friend helped him land the dishwashing job in 2024. “There is no respect. The work is very hard,” Mbengue says. “There is not enough money, and it’s not an equitable environment.”

Those were his reasons for quickly getting involved in union organizing efforts. He didn’t want to be suffering in hiding. “I choose to fight,” he says. “It was the only option after I learned about the union and what we could do together.”

He and other organizing leaders have been spreading the success of the fundraising campaign for his brother in meetings with activists from several tech companies, including a four-hour session one Saturday in March. “We as full-time employees of Microsoft are aware Microsoft is not going to respond to our demands in a way that is satisfactory,” says one activist inside the company who attended the meeting. “To be in a room with folks who had done the work required to make changes happen was really cool.”

The group hopes to formalize an ongoing legal defense fund and a network of immigration attorneys. They are also developing a list of workers able to escort people to hearings or help with paperwork or other logistics. Last month, $2,000 in donations enabled one of Mbengue’s Senegalese coworkers in the kitchen to keep his immigration case in a US court instead of in Uganda. Last week, 35 employees and dining workers from Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, and Google met to discuss further support for colleagues’ immigration cases.

People at Meta and Microsoft are still trying to petition the companies to take on some of the work, like creating needs-based immigration defense funds for their extended workforces. They also want vulnerable workers to have permission to stay home on days that they fear ICE may be near. Meta hasn’t responded to workers. The group inside Microsoft hasn’t submitted their demands yet.

The veteran Amazon engineer says he and fellow desk workers at the company have a history of supporting warehouse and delivery workers. The collaboration with food workers is new. But he felt having their backs was important should he and fellow engineers need their support on future campaigns, like about environmental or AI issues. “Solidarity means showing up in the ways they ask for,” the Amazon employee says. “Sometimes they just need money. It’s not always big lofty demands or marches.”

Mbengue and others in the Meta dining hall have been frustrated that even what they consider a simple request to fulfill their desire for increased safety hasn’t been addressed. The workers allege that since the start of this year they have been asked to pay about $300 a month to use an underground parking garage with a secure elevator directly into the building. That’s more than some workers who earn as low as $22 per hour can afford. So spots in the garage sit empty on a daily basis. Instead, workers watch over their shoulders for ICE as they walk to more affordable public parking nearby or commute by train. Mbengue claims Meta is needlessly exposing them to danger. The company, he says, views dining as “a very important amenity and part of campus, but this feels like one of the many ways their words don’t match their actions.”