A Piece of Work

If you haven’t checked the U.S. Department of Labor’s Instagram page lately, you’re not alone. Until recently, it was mostly a collection of photo ops of Secretary of Labor Lori Chavez-DeRemer grinning at people who do real jobs, interspersed with occasional pro-Trump graphics—hardly must-see content, and utterly useless for members of the media or workers seeking updates on policy. Beginning last July, however, more troubling content began to appear. The vanity photos continued but were joined by pseudo-Art Deco, AI-generated illustrations of white workers with slogans like “Blue Collar Boom” and “Build America’s Future.” By November, the account had gone full-tilt white nationalist.

The government agency tasked with enforcing the nation’s labor laws and protecting the interests of its workers was now posting stark, black and white propaganda images announcing that “globalism has failed” and “your homeland is calling,” along with Christian religious content insisting upon “One Nation Under God.” Earlier this month, the full force of its far-right turn was made clear in a post that read “One Homeland. One People. One Heritage. Remember who you are, American.” As many commenters pointed out, the phrasing recalls the Nazi slogan “Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer,” or “one people, one realm, one leader.” This one raised alarm bells far beyond the comment section.

“There are no words strong enough to condemn the propagandistic use of federal departments and their social media channels towards the administration’s ends, which are clearly to harm working people and to benefit billionaires, regardless of immigration status for either,” Puneet Maharaj, executive director of National Nurses United, told the Guardian. She was one of several union leaders who condemned the DOL’s fascist posting spree. A current DOL staffer added, “I wish the Department of Labor would remember who they are and what they do.”

Fortunately, there’s a simple way for them to do so—by reading the agency’s own website. Trump apparatchiks have not yet gotten around to scrubbing the DOL’s web presence in the same way they’ve ravaged hundreds of other federal webpages, like those of the National Park Service, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and even the Census Bureau. As such, the site still proudly features the department’s actual history, including one of Frances Perkins’s first big actions as secretary of labor: reining in a hostile deportation force. In 1933, Congress combined the Bureau of Immigration and the Bureau of Naturalization to create the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS); the new department fell squarely within the DOL’s purview, and gave Perkins greater control over the enforcement of immigration policies. The conduct of its agents also became Perkins’s problem—and it was a big problem.

The bureau’s “Section 24” squad of immigration investigators had been stirring up controversy and drawing public opprobrium with its “highly visible and extreme” raids on immigrant communities. As historian Rebecca Brenner Graham notes in a piece for the White House Historical Association, these agents “acted as a federally employed mob” that “took pride” in hunting down immigrant workers and “tricking” them into grounds for deportation. Perkins responded by pulling their funding, effectively disbanding Section 24. By kicking those jackbooted thugs to the curb, she set a precedent for dealing with a rogue law enforcement agency—something that the yellow-bellied Democrats in Congress performatively denouncing ICE might want to read up on.

After taking out the trash, Perkins also ordered a nonpartisan committee to investigate conditions at Ellis Island and then pushed hard for reform. Her goal was to restore respect and dignity to the immigration process, an approach that would prove unsurprisingly controversial as the decade went on. During her twelve years in office, Perkins engineered a dizzying array of important reforms and legislation aimed at improving the lives of working people (we have her to thank, in no small part, for the New Deal), but her concern was not limited to U.S. citizens. Rather, it was her belief in humanitarian ideals that led to her tireless fight to save the lives of thousands of Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany. Perkins found clever legal loopholes and exerted her personal political influence to help German and Austrian Jews—particularly children—make it through the country’s virulently xenophobic immigration restrictions to safety. All said, she helped secure visas for more than twenty thousand Jewish refugees. Had she not faced so much anti-immigrant, antisemitic resistance from her fellow cabinet members and government officials (who also later tried to impeach her for refusing to deport labor leader Harry Bridges), she could have saved far more.

Now, the agency Perkins once stewarded is run by a woman who happily boosts Nazi-coded messaging on social media, and who ordered enormous banners of an anti-labor, racist president’s face hung on the building that bears Perkins’s name. Section 24’s noxious spirit lives on in their modern-day equivalent, ICE, which carries out its brutal mission with the added benefit of military-grade weaponry, sophisticated surveillance tools, and near-total immunity from the Trump administration. In 1940, the INS was absorbed into the Department of Justice, meaning that immigration enforcement is no longer the labor department’s responsibility, but as we’ve seen, whoever’s running the DOL’s public communications seems to have missed that particular memo. And unfortunately, our current secretary has shown no signs of humanity toward the immigrant workers her New Deal-era predecessor fought so hard to protect. Instead, Chavez-DeRemer has proven to be as much of a far-right extremist as the man who appointed her, abandoning the needs of workers to instead spend her time indulging in photo ops, pushing anti-worker policies, and according to recent allegations, fleecing taxpayers for her personal travel, strip club visits, and extramarital affairs.

Since her confirmation last year, Chavez-DeRemer has consistently failed in her duty to uphold the department’s mission to “foster, promote, and develop the welfare of the wage earners, job seekers, and retirees of the United States.” Instead, the Department of Labor has done the exact opposite: rendering workplaces more dangerous for wage-earners, ripping opportunities away from jobseekers, and endangering retirees’ pensions and health care. Under her leadership, life-saving workplace safety regulations that were enforced or advanced under the Biden administration have been cut, ignored, or mothballed, like the long-awaited silica exposure rule for which black lung-stricken coal communities have been fighting for decades, and a badly-needed federal heat standard that languishes in limbo as summer temperatures continue to climb.

During the Elon Musk-branded DOGE purge, thousands of federal workers lost their jobs; more than a million others may have their hard-fought collective bargaining rights ripped away. And last year, over 1 million workers lost their jobs. Throughout it all, the secretary has continued to style herself as one of Trump’s biggest cheerleaders, inviting him to see his “big, beautiful face on a banner in front of the Department of Labor” during a particularly obsequious cabinet meeting last August.

The agency’s disastrous new policies mark a return to an earlier era and reflects the Trump administration’s dark obsession with immigration. On September 19, 2025, the DOL announced Project Firewall, an “enforcement initiative” aimed at policing H1-B temporary work visas. There are more than seven hundred thousand H1-B visa holders in the United States, two thirds of whom work in “computer-related jobs,” including at Silicon Valley behemoths like Google, Amazon, and Meta. The Employment Policy Institute found in 2020 that these migrant workers are at a high risk of wage theft, and that the program makes it easier for U.S. employers to “legally underpay H-1B workers relative to U.S. workers in similar occupations in the same region.” Trump Republicans have seized on H1-B visas as a cause célèbre, insisting that the program has depressed wages and prioritized the hiring of foreign workers over U.S. citizens. “The large-scale replacement of American workers through systemic abuse of the program has undermined both our economic and national security,” Trump blared in a proclamation.

The H1-B program has long been in dire need of reform, but under Secretary Chavez-DeRemer, the Department of Labor’s focus has shifted away from the migrant workers who are at the greatest risk of abuse. Instead, Project Firewall’s stated aim is to “protect the rights of American workers” by weighing the selection process for H1-B visas in favor of higher-paid, higher-skilled workers. Meanwhile, the administration has moved to restrict the number of new visas issued and has slapped a new $100,000 fee on petitions. “The Trump Administration is standing by our commitment to end practices that leave Americans in the dust,” Chavez-DeRemer announced in September. “By rooting out fraud and abuse, the Department of Labor and our federal partners will ensure that highly skilled jobs go to Americans first.” Countries like Germany, China, and the UK responded by emphasizing their desire to recruit the highly skilled workers the DOL is now working to alienate for the sake of the Trump regime’s white supremacist immigration priorities.

It’s obvious that workers can no longer count on the Department of Labor to serve their interests or offer any defense against an historically anti-union, anti-labor, authoritarian administration. The agency itself has already made that quite clear with its actions; there’s really no need to belabor the point. In choosing to pair that toxic agenda with an onslaught of Reichslop, the DOL and its leaders are actively signaling their allegiance to the Trump administration’s violently nativist, white supremacist project. Frances Perkins—a social worker who bore witness to the Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire, a reformer who dreamed of universal health care, a lifelong advocate for the poor and working class, a democratic socialist who defended the separation of church and state and struck terror into the hearts of robber barons and bad bosses—would weep to see what is happening inside the building that bears her name. They may as well continue Trump’s favorite new trend and rename it the Frick-Carnegie Building instead.

When Chavez-DeRemer released a statement in December looking to the future, she promised that “the Department of Labor will continue our efforts to execute President Trump’s mission to put American Workers First in 2026.” Coming from her and this version of the DOL, it’s hard to read that as anything less than a threat.