Migrant sex and massage workers face range of dangers – including increasing violence from ICE

March 16, 2026, New York – On the fifth anniversary of the attacks on workers in two spas and a massage parlor in Atlanta on March 16, 2021, the Center for Constitutional Rights offered the following statement:

Today we remember the eight people, including six Asian women, who were murdered in the attacks. Our thoughts are also with the communities who endured the horror and with migrant sex and massage workers across the country as they resist violence – including the rampant violence of the Trump administration’s brutal campaign against immigrants. 

The killings occurred during the COVID pandemic, when the scapegoating rhetoric of politicians and other public figures spurred a surge in violence nationwide against Asians, Asian-Americans, and Pacific Islanders. The man who committed the murders targeted businesses where he had paid for sex. His personal shame over sex spawned his murderous rage at Asian workers; patriarchy and misogyny joined with racism and killed eight people. 

These age-old, interlocking systems of oppression have also made immigrant sex workers particularly vulnerable to state violence, whether from the police, the FBI, or ICE. The Trump administration’s targeting of migrant massage and sex workers should be seen in the context of not only its campaign against all immigrants, but also its patriarchal attacks on the bodily autonomy of all LGBTQIA+ people and all women. It’s terrifyingly obvious that Trump is trying to create an authoritarian state where people’s bodies do not belong to them. 

Immigrant sex workers fall on the wrong side of the pernicious good immigrant/bad immigrant dichotomy, leaving them too often without support from would-be allies. Immigrant rights advocates should not only stand with migrant sex workers; we should follow their leadership. Forced to exist on the dangerous margins of an exploitative capitalist system, and criminalized for their efforts to sustain themselves, they have found creative ways to care for each other and survive in the face of demonization, sexualized brutality, and racist immigration laws that long predate the Trump administration. 

The government wages its police-and-punishment approach to sex work in the name of combating human trafficking, pitting workers against survivors. For example, in New York, unlicensed massage is a class E felony, and, historically, 95 percent of arrests have been of Asian women. Yet criminalization deters sex and massage workers from reporting trafficking and enables traffickers to use the threat of legal consequences to keep survivors entrapped. Policing and criminal and immigration consequences only increase sex workers’ vulnerability by reducing their negotiating power over things like safety and protection. Decriminalization is the best way to protect the rights and wellbeing of both workers and survivors. 

We’re proud to stand in solidarity with sex workers as they push for decriminalization, assert their dignity, and fight for control of their bodies. Together, we will dismantle the oppressive systems that create hierarchies of worth, and we will build a world where safety is no longer a pretext used by the state to control marginalized people, but a reality for all.