“You don’t leave your human rights in one country when you cross into another. You don’t check your human rights at a border; you keep them with you”—Solidarity Center Executive Director Shawna Bader-Blau in interview with International Catalan Institute for Peace.

Starting in mid-December, the Solidarity Center, which works closely with workers and unions, documented instances in which 14 national union federations were either forced by police to shut their offices in Ashulia, Gazipur, and Chittagong, or closed them because of police harassment.​​​

The factories reopened in late December, but a “really intense” security presence is everywhere, Jennifer Kuhlman from the Dhaka office of the Solidarity Center, an AFL-CIO allied organization, told me: not just in Ashulia, but also in other industrial areas across the country. She said the arrests, the mass firings and the continuing heavy surveillance by police have created a climate of fear among workers and labor organizers.