Welcome (back) to 'The Jungle'

We have been following the Postville, IA raid on Agriprocessors, Inc literally since the day it happened, and have been dismayed at the way the whole sorry spectacle has played out. Especially surreal has been the draconian way the workers have been treated, contrasted with the fact that the employers are not only still free, but the business is still operating.

We are not alone in our dismay. The New York Times editorial board is equally dismayed, albeit late to the party by our standards.

The conditions at the Agriprocessors plant cry out for the cautious and deliberative application of justice.

In May, the government swoops in and arrests ... the workers, hundreds of them, for having false identity papers. The raid’s catch is so huge that the detainees are bused from little Postville to the National Cattle Congress fairgrounds in Waterloo. The defendants, mostly immigrants from Guatemala, are not charged with the usual administrative violations, but with “aggravated identity theft,” a serious crime.

They are offered a deal: They can admit their guilt to lesser charges, waive their rights, including the right to a hearing before an immigration judge, spend five months in prison, then be deported. Or, they can spend six months or more in jail without bail while awaiting a trial date, face a minimum two-year prison sentence and be deported anyway.

Nearly 300 people agree to the five months, after being hustled through mass hearings, with one lawyer for 17 people, each having about 30 minutes of consultation per client. The plea deal is a brutal legal vise, but the immigrants accept it as the quickest way back to their spouses and children, hundreds of whom are cowering in a Catholic church, afraid to leave and not knowing how they will survive. The workers are scattered to federal lockups around the country. Many families still do not know where they are. The plant’s owners walk freely.

This is law enforcement run amok. As Julia Preston reported in The Times, the once-silent workers of Agriprocessors now tell of a host of abusive practices, of rampant injuries and of exhausted children as young as 13 wielding knives on the killing floor. A young man said in an affidavit that he started at 16, in 17-hour shifts, six days a week. “I was very sad, and I felt like I was a slave.”

The defendants are also victims, but instead of receiving any sort of merciful treatment, they have been branded as predatory felons, the sort of people who steal identities and empty bank accounts, but nothing could be further from the truth. “Most of the clients we interviewed did not even know what a Social Security number was or what purpose it served,” said Erik Camayd-Freixas, a Spanish-language interpreter for many of the workers. “This worker simply had the papers filled out for him at the plant, since he could not read or write Spanish, let alone English.”

The heavy-handed prosecution of the workers at Agriprocessors is a 180-degree pivot for the bu$h administration, which had for years insisted that immigration needed to be fixed comprehensively, or not at all.

Before Postville, the one redeeming quality of this bunch of crooks had been a compassion for exploited workers, but all pretense of mercy and proportionality have been abandoned as they have gone after the workers with zeal and fervor, exaggerating the threat of the workers to society at large, while predatory employers who prey on the weak, the poor and the desperate remain free.

In the move to make undocumented workers by definition a criminal class, the government overstates the threat posed by those workers. They do this to justify the rabid pursuit of employees, while glossing over the crimes of the treasonous employers who are engaged in economic warfare against the United States.

It is more than a fraudulent exercise. It is a national disgrace.

Arrests Made in Postville IA

We've been watching this story since the raids against the Postville meat processing plant happened--and now there are arrests and charges that a veritable fake documents ring was operating on the processing floor:

The arrest warrant was issued for Hosam Amara, 43. In interviews after the raid, several workers said Mr. Amara was a floor manager with more authority than line supervisors. They said he was a link between workers on the slaughterhouse floors and meatpacking lines and more senior management.

Agriprocessors, which before the raid was the country’s largest producer of kosher meat, is owned by Aaron Rubashkin. Two weeks after the raid, he removed his son Sholom as chief executive.

Most of the illegal immigrants arrested at the plant were from rural Guatemala. In expedited proceedings, 270 workers were sent to federal prison on criminal charges, most for presenting false documents when they were hired.

In a criminal complaint unsealed on Thursday, federal authorities said Mr. [Juan Carlos]Guerrero was the supervisor of four departments in the Postville plant, including a slaughterhouse called Beef Kill. Workers cited anonymously in the complaint said Mr. Guerrero was running a business obtaining fraudulent immigration documents, known as green cards.

In the days before the raid, the workers said, according to the complaint, Mr. Guerrero told them in a meeting that “they needed new IDs and Social Security numbers to continue working at the company.” Mr. Guerrero collected $200 and a photograph from each worker, promising to provide new documents, the complaint says.

Obviously, we can't have something like that going on. Perhaps a comprehensive reform of the laws is in order. Oh, and a union would be one way to try and ensure that the workers aren't being taken advantage of by management--but you can't be pro-union in this country anymore, can you? Well, too bad--despite the wingnut fantasies about corrupt unions, they are needed now more than ever--especially when immigrants are being ripped off, handed phony documents by a manager, and working for next to nothing.

What no one in this country wants to talk about are the hundreds of thousands of people being worked to death in food processing plants for lousy pay with no benefits while the owners reap unprecedented profits and exploit vulnerable people. It's an outrage that we have a third world food processing plant system in this country.

--WS

UPDATE: ICE Immigration Raid in Northeast Iowa

Israelis and Ukrainians among the detainees in Northeast Iowa:

On May 12, 2008 the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency (ICE) executed two search warrants at the Agriprocessors, Inc. plant in Postville, Iowa. The search warrants were for evidence of aggravated identity theft, fraudulent use of Social Security numbers, people illegally in the United States and other crimes. 390 people were detained. Of the original 390 detainees 314 were males and 76 were female. 12 of the detainees were juveniles. 290 are Guatemalans, 93 are Mexicans and the rest are Israelis and Ukrainians.

56 of the detainees were under supervised release. They were released for humanitarian reasons. (women with kids and the father was also detained, juveniles, etc.) The rest were transported to the National Cattle Congress Fairgrounds in Waterloo, Iowa for processing and their initial appearance in U.S. District Court.
In a press release May 13th the United States Attorney for the Northern District of Iowa Matt M. Dummermuth said, "Based on the number of those administratively arrested, this is the largest single-site enforcement operation of its kind ever in the United States."

Further information can be found here.

ICE leased almost the entire fair grounds from the beginning of May until May 25th under the premise that they were going to conduct training exercises. In preparation for the detainees they turned the main auditorium into a processing center, Estell exhibit hall into a detention center including portable heating and air conditioning, toilets and showers. The female detainees are reported to be being held at the Black Hawk County Jail in Waterloo and other local jails. The U.S. District Court temporarily relocated some of its judges and personnel from the federal courthouses in Cedar Rapids, Iowa and Sioux City, Iowa to a make-shift courtroom in the Electric Park Ballroom on the National Cattle Congress grounds.

Massive Immigration Raid in Postville, IA

[map image from the Des Moines Register]
Agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) have sealed a meatpacking plant in Northeastern Iowa in order to determine who is and who is not legally entitled to work in the facility:

Federal agents descended upon this northeast Iowa community at about 10 a.m. [Central] today to conduct an immigration raid at the nation’s largest kosher meatpacking plant.

The ICE agents entered the Postville plant to execute a criminal search warrant for evidence relating to aggravated identity theft, fraudulent use of Social Security numbers and other crimes, said Tim Counts, a Midwest ICE spokesman.

Agents are also executing a civil search warrant for people illegally in the United States, he said.

Immigration officials told aides to U.S. Rep. Bruce Braley that they expect 600 to 700 arrests. About 1,000 to 1,050 people work at the plant, according to Iowa Workforce Development.

Chuck Larson, a truck driver for Agriprocessing, was in the plant when the agents arrived. “There has to be 100 of them,” he said of the agents.

Larson said the agents told workers to stay in place then separated them by asking those with identification to stand to the right and those with other papers, to stand to the left.

“There was plenty of hollering,” Larson said. “You couldn’t go anywhere.”
When asked who was separated, Larson said those standing in the group with other papers were all Hispanic.

The people who are detained as a result of the raid, as documented by the Des Moines Register, will be transported to a facility in Waterloo, Iowa that has been set up as a detention center, capable of handling a large number of people:

Workers and immigration advocates in Iowa began girding for an immigration raid last week after learning that federal authorities had leased Waterloo’s Cattle Congress fairgrounds. Federal officials declined to explain their plans last week, but advocates worried the fairgrounds would be used as a detention center. That’s what happened in December 2006, when federal agents took people apprehended in a raid at the Swift & Co. meatpacking plant in Marshalltown to the Camp Dodge military base in Johnston.

Postville is not a stranger to controversy:

Postville, on the border of Allamakee and Clayton counties, is a community of more than 2,500 people that includes natives of German and Norwegian heritage and newcomers who include Hasidic Jews from New York, plus immigrants from Mexico, Russian, Ukraine and many other countries.

The Agriprocessors plant, known as the nation’s largest kosher slaughterhouse, is northeast Iowa’s largest employer.

About 200 Hasidic Jews arrived in Postville in 1987, when butcher Aaron Rubashkin of Brooklyn’s Crown Heights neighborhood reopened a defunct meat-packing plant with his two sons, Sholom and Heshy, just outside the city limits. Business boomed at the plant, reviving the depressed economy while pitting the newcomers against the predominately Lutheran community.

Stephen Bloom is the author of a book that details what he found in Postville in the late 1990s, titled “Postville: A Clash of Cultures in Heartland America,” and this is from the transcript of an interview he did with CNN on October 24, 2000:

For years, meat processors had shipped the corn-fed rich Iowa beef to slaughterhouses, sometimes thousands of miles away. It made sense for the slaughterhouse to be located next to the beef, instead of visa versa. So when the Hasidic community moved to Postville, they moved their entire ethos with them from Brooklyn to northeastern Iowa. They created immediately a shul or synagogue. They made two mikvehs, or ceremonial bath houses, as well as a yeshiva, or school for their children. They replicated in northeastern Iowa the community they had established in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. So in my mind, they were not suffering any degree of cultural deprivation. They moved their world, lock, stock, and barrel, one thousand miles westward.

In December, 2006, ICE conducted raids throughout the Midwest, targeting meatpacking plants:

Today [December 12, 2007] marks the one year anniversary of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency’s (ICE) raids of Swift and Co. meatpacking plants in six cities in Nebraska, Texas, Iowa, Minnesota and Utah. In all, 1,282 Swift employees were arrested.

In December, 2007, ICE notified a warehouse company in New York called Fresh Direct that its employee records were going to be reviewed, resulting in over 40 people simply quitting or leaving the company, reportedly without even being paid for their work.

Companies that knowingly hire illegal immigrants can face fines or criminal charges, but until recently, prosecutions were extremely rare. In some workplaces elsewhere in the country, workers without proper documents were summoned to the main office without warning, and taken away in handcuffs.

Union officials said that many Fresh Direct employees, who earn between $7.50 and $9.75 an hour, were so frightened of being detained and separated from their children that they stayed home on Wednesday. Others said they were told not to come back.

Ms. Pope said that some employees were warned by company officials not to show up for their paychecks. She said the union was scrambling to find clergy members or other volunteers to collect paychecks for workers who feared going back to the warehouse.

One 41-year-old woman from Ecuador, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of deportation, said she was let go with an expression of regret when she told human resources workers at the company that the Social Security number she had been using for nearly four years was false.

“I’m really desperate now because I have no money to send to my kids,” she said, referring to four children in Ecuador. “I don’t know what I’m going to do with my life.”

Congress is currently considering the "New Employee Verification Act" (NEVA) that is being presented to replace the current ineffective federal government's employee verification process with a new electronic verification system. Under H.R. 5515, employers would use the state systems to confirm the work eligibility of an individual for I-9 purposes, therefore, it should provide more reliablity and less risk to us as employers.

The following is from an E-mail being circulated on behalf of supporters for the new legislation:

In addition, the bill also would create a voluntary biometrics option that employers could choose to use in the verification process. This system would include a standard background check and the collection of a "biometric" characteristic - such as a thumbprint - to secure an employee's identity and prevent the illegal use of a Social Security number, stolen or fraudulently-obtained drivers' license, or altered identification documents. Other key aspects include:

Electronic Attestation - Allows the entire attestation requirements to be done electronically and eliminates the current Form I-9.

New Hires - Applies only to employers' newly hired employees and would not require employers to re-verify all existing employees as is required by other bills.

Post Offer and Acceptance, Pre-Start - Allows employers to check the employee's work eligibility through the electronic system beginning on the date of hire and ending on the third day after the employee has reported to work.

Federal Law Preemption - Provides that federal immigration law preempts any state law with regard to employer fines for immigration-related issues or in requiring employers to verify identity or work authorization of employees.

Employer Responsibility - Requires employers to be responsible only for the hiring decisions of their own employees, not those of their subcontractors.