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Coca-Cola is facing social media backlash in the wake of rumors that the soft drink giant laid off Latino staff and reported them to Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, with a grassroots movement already calling for boycotts against the beverage company.
The “Latino Freeze Movement” arose in response to Donald Trump’s executive orders to roll back federal diversity, equity and inclusion programs and crackdown on immigration.
The retaliatory campaign urges Latinos to stop making purchases from large American corporations that are believed to have ties with the Trump administration or have recently rolled back their DEI programs in the wake of Trump’s return to office.
While Coca-Cola hasn’t publicly announced any revisions to its DEI program, its CEO James Quincey gifted Diet Coke-loving Trump a commemorative bottle of the beverage ahead of his inauguration last month – a tradition starting with George W. Bush in 2005.
“Latinos and Latinas stop spending money,” the movement’s website reads. “Hold the line. We can all collectively make a big impact by simply holding and not spending our money.”
The Coca-Cola boycott began gaining traction after rumors emerged that, not only had it fired Latino employees from a Texas bottling plant, but it was reporting them to immigration officers.
However, no such evidence has been verified.
“The accusation that The Coca-Cola Company called immigration authorities to assist in the separation of undocumented workers is unequivocally false,” a Coca-Cola spokesperson told fact-checking site Snopes.
The Independent has contacted Coca-Cola for more information.
In a TikTok video that garnered almost two million views, employment lawyer Trang Tran claimed Coca-Cola laid off “thousands of Latin American workers” at the “Cerberus Bottling Plant” in Texas and then called ICE.
Other videos on the social media app – including one in Spanish that received nearly three million views – baselessly claimed that the company attempted to apologize for making calls to the federal agency.
There have been no reports that Coca-Cola has terminated large numbers of staff – which would need to be disclosed as a publicly traded company. The rumored Texas location, the Cerberus Bottling Plant, doesn’t exist.
Several social media posts appeared to have mistakenly combined calls for a Coca-Cola boycott with the ICE rumors.
The Latino Freeze Movement has also called for people to switch from U.S. products to Latin-American-based goods instead to oppose Trump’s proposed tariffs on Mexico and Canada.
Latinos make up nearly 20 percent of the U.S. population according to 2023 census data. Coca-Cola’s website states it serves approximately 530 million consumers in Latin America, equating to a retail value of $120 billion.
