Immigration Is Snaring U.S. Citizens In Its Raids
By Darryl Fears
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, August 16, 2008; A03
Marie Justeen Mancha was at home alone when she heard strange voices inside the house. As she crept down a hallway to make sure she wasn't hearing things, the voices erupted into shouts.
" 'Police! Illegals!' "
Testifying in a House subcommittee hearing, Mancha recalled the words she said the immigration agents shouted during the September 2006 raid on her home. She was 15 at the time, a Mexican American, born in Texas but living in Reidsville, Ga.
"I walked around the corner from the hallway and saw a tall man reach toward his gun and look straight at me," Mancha, now 17, said in a thick Southern accent. "My heart just dropped."
As the Department of Immigration and Customs Enforcement compiles a record number of arrests through household and work-site raids seeking illegal immigrants, a growing number of U.S. citizens such as Mancha say they have gotten caught in the net.
The agency, known as ICE, a division of the Homeland Security Department, recently reported that its arrests in the current fiscal year have surpassed last year's record total of about 4,900. The number of arrests has soared since 2005, when a Government Accountability Office report concluded that work-site enforcement was not a priority for ICE.
An ICE spokesman did not respond directly to a question about complaints that U.S. citizens and legal residents are getting swept up in the raids. "We target egregious employers, those who have built their business model on hiring an illegal workforce," spokesman Brandon Alvarez-Montgomery said in a statement this week. "This practice undercuts legal, law-abiding companies and can create an environment where employee welfare and labor standards are not enforced."
But there have been significant missteps. More than 100 citizens and legal residents were snared along with nearly 140 illegal immigrants in a raid on a software company in Van Nuys, Calif., early this year. Five citizens in Texas joined a lawsuit against the department, asserting that they were subjected to unreasonable search and seizure when agents raided a meatpacking plant where they worked last year. An African American worker said in a hearing that he was handcuffed and detained for hours without food and water during a raid on an Iowa meatpacking plant in 2006.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/08/15/AR2008081503208.html
