WITNESSES: IMMIGRATION’S IOWA RAID SMASHES FAMILIES, TOWN

Friday, July 25, 2008

(PAI)WITNESSES: IMMIGRATION’S IOWA RAID SMASHES FAMILIES, TOWN

By Mark Gruenberg

PAI Staff Writer

            WASHINGTON (PAI)--The Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency’s now-infamous raid on the nation’s biggest kosher meat processing plant, Agriprocessors of Postville, Iowa, smashed families and the town, witnesses told Congress on July 24.

            But the GOP Bush regime’s raid, which rounded up 390 workers, is part of a pattern of ICE actions targeted almost solely at workers, they added at both the congressional hearing and an informal press conference afterwards.

            ICE agents swooped in at 10 a.m. on May 12, surrounding the plant with agents and helicopters. The workers, virtually all with Spanish-sounding surnames, were taken to a cattle-processing facility miles away. ICE said it had warrants for 697 workers.

            The workers, many of whom spoke either Spanish or Mayan, got half an hour at most to meet with hurriedly recruited lawyers, many of whom had no background or training in immigration law. ICE set a 7-day “fast track” deadline for the workers to decide whether to accept a short jail term, then deportation, or to contest their citation, face a longer term, longer detention and deportation.

            One witness told the House Judiciary Immigration subcommittee the workers’ lack of knowledge of English and limited education means people “with a third-grade education” had to cope with these life-or-death decisions, with virtually no help. An immigration lawyer testified half an hour “is barely enough time to learn their names.”

            But what was even worse was the climate of fear instilled in the town, said the Rev. Paul Ouderkirk, pastor of St. Bridget’s Roman Catholic Church, which ministers to many of the workers--and which has to handle the shattered families.

            “I wasn’t prepared for the scope of this raid,” though ICE had raided elsewhere in the area twice before, the pastor said. “The church was full of people, the rectory was full of people” and because of fear, they won’t come out. “We’re bedding down 800 people a day, and feeding them every meal” because they’re afraid to go home.

            Literally, he said, kids would refuse to go to school because they feared they’d be picked up on the street by ICE agents, as their parents were. The kids are all U.S. citizens. The parents were a combination of undocumented workers, documented workers, and green card holders from Guatemala, Mexico, elsewhere in Latin America and--ironically for a kosher meat plant--two Israelis.

            “What had been done over 15 years on diversity” to build up relations in the community between its white majority, the immigrant workers and the plant’s Orthodox Jewish owners from Brooklyn, N.Y., “was destroyed in one day,” Ouderkirk said.

            But the problem isn’t just one plant in Postville, or one ICE raid, speakers said. United Food and Commercial Workers President Joe Hansen, whose union was trying to organize Postville when the raid occurred, cited other ICE raids nationwide.

            After ICE raids on seven Swift & Co., packing plants nationwide rounded up thousands of workers--only 62 of whom turned out to be suspects--UFCW opened a campaign against the agency, based on defending workers’ constitutional rights. UFCW represented the workers in six of those plants. The raids so crippled the historic Chicago meatpacker that it had to be sold to a Brazilian meatpacking firm.

            “Agriprocessors is the poster child for how companies game our immigration system and how they exploit workers and drive down wages and working conditions in our industries,” he said.

            “We know Agriprocessors employed children as young as 13…Government documents have also exposed allegations of violence against workers. They describe a supervisor duct-taping a worker’s eyes and beating him with a meat hook. The worker says he was too afraid to come forward and report the incident. He was afraid he would be fired,” Hansen said.

            The firm’s record of child labor violations, work and safety violations, wage and hour violations and other violations is so long it has drawn hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines. Its workers’’ rights record is so band that in May one of the three Jewish authorities that certify kosher meat yanked its recognition from Agriprocessors.

            And Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D-Ill.) said that it is easier for ICE “to round up people who look like me” than fairly enforce immigration laws. “They have 750 lawyers and thousands of agents, but they’re not going after drug traffickers” along the U.S.-Mexico border. They’re pursuing workers, using an enforcement bent, he said.

            The solution, all the speakers said, was a rewrite of U.S. immigration law that would both set priorities for border enforcement and also provide a path of legalization for the estimated 12 million undocumented workers now in the U.S. Deporting them, as ICE forced on the Postville workers, is not a solution, Hansen said.

            “If you take 10 million-15 million workers out of the country, you wouldn’t have any meat to eat, you wouldn’t have any chicken to eat, many of your hotel rooms wouldn’t be clean and half of all fast-food places would close,” he said. “There’s no reason for ICE to violate anyone’s constitutional rights.” ###