Miami – President-elect Donald Trump is seeking to privatize mail service, which could impact Black postal employees, and has threatened to fire remote federal workers who refuse to return to government agency offices.

Trump’s political agenda, including declaring a national emergency to launch one of the largest deportation operations in U.S. history, has already become a lightning rod of criticism as he prepares to return to power on Jan. 20, 2025.

Trump wants to use the U.S. military to carry out his mass deportation operation which targets over one million migrants living in this country legally or not. They include those with criminal records and were ordered by an immigration judge to leave the country.

But other migrants fear they might be targeted as well, including Haitian Americans.

South Florida has one of the largest Haitian populations in the U.S.

And now Trump is targeting the United State Postal Services, once again.

According to the Washington Post, Trump has a desire to privatize the mail services which could impact Black labor in America.

Such action would shake up consumer shipping and business supply chains and most likely force hundreds of thousands of workers out of government.

According to the USPS website, African Americans constitute 29 percent of the postal workforce in the United States.

Trump, whose mail privatizing proposal failed during his first term, said privatizing USPS, which was founded in 1775, would stop the financial losses by the federal agency and save money.

According to the Post citing the postal agency’s annual financial report, the USPS lost an estimated $9.5 billion during the previous fiscal year, as more people are using Amazon and digital carrier services to receive mail and packages.

The agency faces nearly $80 billion in liabilities.

“The government is slow, slow, slow, decades slow on adopting new ways of doing things, and there’s a lot of other carrier services that became legal in the ’70s that are doing things so much better with increased volumes and reduced costs,” said Casey Mulligan, who served as a top economist in the first Trump administration. “We didn’t finish the job in the first term, but we should finish it now.”

According to Inequality.org, a website that provides analysis and data on economic inequality, Black labor could suffer the most if the federal government decides to privatize USPS.

After the Civil War, postal work became among the top opportunities for middle-class jobs in the early 20th century.

Leaders of the Civil Rights Movement advocated for more opportunities for Black postal workers. In the late 1960s, more African Americans were employed by the USPS in the biggest post offices in the country – Los Angeles, New York and Chicago.

Some were led by Black postmasters, and the Black leadership in the postal service expanded from the 1970s to the 2000s.

Since 2022, Black workers made up 29 percent of the Postal Service workforce which is more than double their 12.6 percent share of the total U.S. labor force.

According to the Institute for Policy Studies analysis of Bureau of Labor Statistics data, postal workers have by far the highest median annual wage of $51,730 and the highest median hourly wage at $24.87 among the 10 occupations with the heaviest representation of Black workers.

Three of the occupations have median hourly wages below $15 per hour.

Of the 10 occupations with the largest shares of Black workers, USPS was the fifth largest employer with more than 600,000 employees.

Democrats said axing the federal agency could put a lot of employees out of work.

“With much more runway ahead of them, they may very well focus on privatization, and I think that’s our big fear. That could have disastrous consequences, because when you go private, the profit motive is everything,” Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Virginia), a leading postal backer, told The Post.

Trump is also going after federal workers who work remotely, threatening to fire them if they refuse to return to government offices.

He said the COVID-19 pandemic, which allowed the workers to work from home to stop the spread of the virus, has long been over and it’s time for them to come back to the offices.

However, many federal union contracts allow remote or hybrid work schedules including a new deal reached between the Social Security Administration and its union representing more than 40,000 employees.