By ANABELLE GARAY
Associated Press
December 30, 2009
DALLAS (AP) -- Federal investigators will not prosecute Pilgrim's Pride Corp. for employing illegal immigrants and have dropped an investigation into the chicken producer and its workers, the U.S. Attorney's Office in the Eastern District of Texas said Wednesday.
The Pittsburg, Texas-based company in turn agreed to pay $4.5 million to a law enforcement fund at the Department of the Treasury and improve how it screens prospective employees to ensure they are allowed to work in the United States, the office said in a statement.
An investigation by Immigration and Customs Enforcement led to the arrest in December 2007 of 25 people involved in a scheme to secure jobs for illegal immigrants at Pilgrim's Pride plants in East Texas. Some of those arrested were human resources employees at the company.
They were prosecuted for immigration violations or crimes stemming from document and identity fraud, said Arnold Spencer, the federal prosecutor who oversaw the case.
The arrests were followed in April 2008 with raids of Pilgrim's Pride plants in Texas, Florida, West Virginia, Arkansas and Tennessee. The company cooperated and ICE agents arrested 338 illegal workers. Of those, 38 were convicted of misuse of a Social Security number and others faced deportation or other immigration proceedings.
All immigration-related investigations into the company and its current and former employees have been closed, the U.S. Attorney's Office said Wednesday.
"This case demonstrates that the government and business, working together, can go a long way to resolving the issue of employment of illegal aliens," U.S. Attorney John M. Bales said in the statement.
Pilgrim's Pride pointed out that no civil or criminal charges were ever filed against the company.
"The settlement does not constitute any admission of civil or criminal misconduct on the part of Pilgrim's Pride or any of its directors, officers, management or other employees," the company said in its statement.
Federal authorities have increasingly used non-prosecution agreements over the last five years to encourage companies to comply with immigration laws, Spencer said.
"There were points in time in which companies took the position that if the applicant had a valid social security (number) that matched a name, then that was sufficient information. It didn't matter that they knew other people were using the exact same number in another state or ... that this person had worked for the company under a different name," he said.
Pilgrim's Pride announced Monday it was emerging from bankruptcy protection. Under a reorganization plan, Pilgrim's Pride will sell a 64 percent stake in the company, worth $800 million, to Brazilian beef giant JBS - the world's biggest meat producer.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/feedarticle/8878644
Showing posts with label ICE Raids One Year Later. Show all posts
Showing posts with label ICE Raids One Year Later. Show all posts
Thursday, December 31, 2009
Thursday, May 14, 2009
One Year Later ...
The Jewish Exponent, Volume 226, Issue 7
May 14, 2009
One year after a federal raid on the nation's largest kosher meat-packing plant, the Jewish community is rightly engaged in constructive dialogue about just what it means to be kosher.
The May 12, 2008 raid nabbed 389 undocumented workers at the Agriprocessors plant in Postville, Iowa. The owners of the plant face charges of labor violations, money-laundering and immigration fraud.
The revelations about the unsanitary and exploitative working conditions at the plant sparked an uproar in the Jewish world. It spurred renewed activism on immigration reform and gave legs to what had been a fringe movement known as "ethical kashrut," extending the concept beyond the way food is prepared to applying ethical standards for employment practices.
It's too late for the Agriprocessors workers, most of whom have already been deported back to Guatemala and Mexico.
It is ironic that just last week, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that undocumented workers who use phony identification can't be considered identity thieves unless they knowingly use I.D. numbers from real people. Among those arrested in Postville, 270 were charged with identity theft. Fearful of a harsher sentence for that crime, they accepted plea deals in which they agreed not to fight deportation.
And it could be too late for Postville itself, a small town that once boasted 2,000 where a vibrant Chabad community had sprung up, drawn to employment at the kosher plant. Now the community -- Jewish and non-Jewish -- has been decimated.
But following the shock and dismay, the ethics of kashrut has taken on a life of its own. "Kosher food and kosher-food production has been a hot topic of conversation, even among those who never kept kosher before," says Sue Fishkoff, a veteran journalist who is working on a book about kashrut and the kosher-food industry.
The signs are encouraging. In New York, Fishkoff reports in JTA this week, an Orthodox social-justice organization awarded its first seals of approval for ethical business practices to six kosher restaurants and a kosher supermarket in Manhattan. Uri L'Tzedek, founded by rabbinical students at the liberal Orthodox Yeshivat Chovevei Torah in New York, timed its announcement to the anniversary of the Agriprocessors raid. The seals recognize fair wages, safe work environments and overall good treatment of workers.
The Conservative movement has spawned its own social-justice program for food manufacturers. And among Reform Jews, the movement's youth organization has proposed focusing on ethical Jewish eating as its yearlong study project for next year.
Keeping kosher has always forced adherents to think differently about the food they eat. Last year's scandal takes it one step further, enabling us to think about kashrut in a broader way.
http://www.jewishexponent.com/article/18843/
May 14, 2009
One year after a federal raid on the nation's largest kosher meat-packing plant, the Jewish community is rightly engaged in constructive dialogue about just what it means to be kosher.
The May 12, 2008 raid nabbed 389 undocumented workers at the Agriprocessors plant in Postville, Iowa. The owners of the plant face charges of labor violations, money-laundering and immigration fraud.
The revelations about the unsanitary and exploitative working conditions at the plant sparked an uproar in the Jewish world. It spurred renewed activism on immigration reform and gave legs to what had been a fringe movement known as "ethical kashrut," extending the concept beyond the way food is prepared to applying ethical standards for employment practices.
It's too late for the Agriprocessors workers, most of whom have already been deported back to Guatemala and Mexico.
It is ironic that just last week, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that undocumented workers who use phony identification can't be considered identity thieves unless they knowingly use I.D. numbers from real people. Among those arrested in Postville, 270 were charged with identity theft. Fearful of a harsher sentence for that crime, they accepted plea deals in which they agreed not to fight deportation.
And it could be too late for Postville itself, a small town that once boasted 2,000 where a vibrant Chabad community had sprung up, drawn to employment at the kosher plant. Now the community -- Jewish and non-Jewish -- has been decimated.
But following the shock and dismay, the ethics of kashrut has taken on a life of its own. "Kosher food and kosher-food production has been a hot topic of conversation, even among those who never kept kosher before," says Sue Fishkoff, a veteran journalist who is working on a book about kashrut and the kosher-food industry.
The signs are encouraging. In New York, Fishkoff reports in JTA this week, an Orthodox social-justice organization awarded its first seals of approval for ethical business practices to six kosher restaurants and a kosher supermarket in Manhattan. Uri L'Tzedek, founded by rabbinical students at the liberal Orthodox Yeshivat Chovevei Torah in New York, timed its announcement to the anniversary of the Agriprocessors raid. The seals recognize fair wages, safe work environments and overall good treatment of workers.
The Conservative movement has spawned its own social-justice program for food manufacturers. And among Reform Jews, the movement's youth organization has proposed focusing on ethical Jewish eating as its yearlong study project for next year.
Keeping kosher has always forced adherents to think differently about the food they eat. Last year's scandal takes it one step further, enabling us to think about kashrut in a broader way.
http://www.jewishexponent.com/article/18843/
Sunday, May 10, 2009
Postville decimated by immigration raid one year ago
By Orlan Love
The Gazette
orlan.love@gazettecommunications.com
May 10, 2009
For flat-broke landlord Gabay Menahem, the dog and cat feces littering one of his many vacant rental units symbolizes post-immigration-raid life in Postville.
The word he uses to describe the litter sounds incongruous coming from a learned member of the town's Orthodox Jewish community, but Menahem can hardly be blamed for letting slip the occasional epithet. He's lost a fortune in the year since federal agents raided kosher meatpacker Agriprocessors Inc.
His 3-1/2-year-old business, GAL Investments Ltd., generated monthly revenue of $192,000 before the May 12, 2008, raid that plunged Postville into an economic recession months ahead of the rest of the nation. Now, with just 19 of his 129 rental units occupied, Menahem took in $16,000 last month — a fraction of his expenses.
Like many other Postville residents, Menahem suffers the ill effects of what local clergy describe as a government-inflicted disaster comparable to the floods and tornadoes that ravaged other parts of Iowa last year.
The arrests of 389 Agriprocessors workers and the tearing apart of their families, followed by criminal charges against plant supervisors, including former top executive Sholom Rubashkin, plunged the town's leading employer into bankruptcy and a shutdown that put hundreds more employees out of work.
"Drive down main street, and you'll see the condition of Postville. Five businesses have closed, and more are in the process," said the Rev. Paul Ouderkirk, a leader in the Catholic Church's ministry to Postville's Latino community.
Hispanic attendance at Postville's St. Bridget Catholic Church, he said, declined sharply after the raid, which led to the deportation of hundreds of mostly Guatemalan and Mexican workers.
A year later, St. Bridget's Hispanic Ministry is still caring for 30 families, most of which include members awaiting court hearings, and Ouderkirk said the ministry has hired a psychiatric counselor to help church wards cope with stress caused by the raid and its aftermath.
Departing laid-off workers, some embittered by their Postville experience, left many of the town's rental units in shambles.
Menahem's property was trashed, he said, by transients recruited after the raid, not by the longer term Agriprocessors employees who had put down roots in the community. The loss of those productive, stable and family-oriented workers may prove to be one of the greatest downsides of the raid, Menahem and Ouderkirk say.
As for GAL Investments, "The company is long gone, man. There's nothing to save," Menahem said.
"A year ago it was impossible to buy a house in Postville. Now there are 228 houses for sale out of 700 total," said Menahem, who describes the town as "a sinking ship."
Mayor Leigh Rekow, who was appointed in April after Robert Penrod resigned, said the city has struggled financially since the raid and the subsequent virtual shutdown of Agriprocessors, which employed more than 900 full-time workers a year ago and now has about 350 part-time workers.
On June 1, the city likely will be unable to make its twice-annual $167,000 payment to the U.S. Department of Agriculture on the mechanical wastewater treatment plant built specifically to process wastes from the kosher plant.
City Clerk/Administrator Darcy Radloff said the USDA has denied the city's request to defer payments for at least a year while the future of the bankrupt plant is resolved.
Bankruptcy trustee Joseph Sarachek said he is confident the plant will be purchased by a responsible new owner but acknowledged that delay is one of the strategies employed by potential buyers to drive down the price.
Rekow said the town's most pressing problems include the hundreds of vacant and deteriorating housing units; an anticipated decline in the value of housing stock, with a corresponding reduction in property tax receipts; and a sharp decline in receipts for the municipal water utility.
Radloff said the city has assessed unpaid utility bills totaling $60,000 to Menahem's GAL Investments and another $24,000 to Nevel Properties Corp., a Rubashkin-owned company in Chapter 11 bankruptcy.
The town's economic plight is further illustrated in the decline of sales tax revenues since the raid.
In the quarter ending Dec. 31 — the last period for which data is available — the state collected $3,806,482 in sales tax from Postville businesses, down 27.3 percent from the comparable year-earlier figure of $5,238,204.
Unpaid property taxes also could crimp city, county and school district budgets, Allamakee County Treasurer Lori Hesse said. Among the leading delinquents, she said, are Agriprocessors, owing $259,000, and Nevel, owing $95,000.
While Postville's total population has fallen from an estimated 2,300 to fewer than 2,000, the city's Jewish community also has shrunk, said Rabbi Aron Schimmel, a 12-year Agriprocessors employee whose kosher slaughter work has been curtailed since the raid.
Schimmel, who also directs the Judaic Resource Center in Postville, said of the 80 Jewish families in Postville before the raid, about 55 remain.
Schimmel said most Postville Jews bear no hard feelings toward the Rubashkin family, whose practice of hiring illegal immigrants precipitated the raid.
"It's illegal. Maybe you shouldn't do it, but it is how it's done in the meatpacking business. You have illegal workers all over America. If you want good workers cheap, you have to take them," he said.
Schimmel said the Jewish boys' and girls' schools in Postville still have enough students to justify continued operation. The future is less certain for the yeshiva, which educates about 40 13- to 16-year-old boys, most of whom are boarders, he said.
One community bright spot is that enrollment in Postville schools has declined only 3.1 percent after the raid, from 542 to 525, Superintendent Galen Reinsmoen said. "We could gain 40 to 50 students by next fall if the plant goes back to full production," he said.
A level of quiet anxiety born of suffering and uncertainty grips many Postville residents, said Maryn Olson, a coordinator with the Postville Response Coalition, a group established after the raid to help its victims.
Though some have said the raid was necessary to depose exploitative owners of the Agriprocessors plant, Olson said Postville would not wish a similar raid on any other community.
"I don't think anyone will ever look back and say it was a good thing. This is a community that is deeply hurt and grieving," she said.
http://www.gazetteonline.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20090510/NEWS/705109994/1006
The Gazette
orlan.love@gazettecommunications.com
May 10, 2009
For flat-broke landlord Gabay Menahem, the dog and cat feces littering one of his many vacant rental units symbolizes post-immigration-raid life in Postville.
The word he uses to describe the litter sounds incongruous coming from a learned member of the town's Orthodox Jewish community, but Menahem can hardly be blamed for letting slip the occasional epithet. He's lost a fortune in the year since federal agents raided kosher meatpacker Agriprocessors Inc.
His 3-1/2-year-old business, GAL Investments Ltd., generated monthly revenue of $192,000 before the May 12, 2008, raid that plunged Postville into an economic recession months ahead of the rest of the nation. Now, with just 19 of his 129 rental units occupied, Menahem took in $16,000 last month — a fraction of his expenses.
Like many other Postville residents, Menahem suffers the ill effects of what local clergy describe as a government-inflicted disaster comparable to the floods and tornadoes that ravaged other parts of Iowa last year.
The arrests of 389 Agriprocessors workers and the tearing apart of their families, followed by criminal charges against plant supervisors, including former top executive Sholom Rubashkin, plunged the town's leading employer into bankruptcy and a shutdown that put hundreds more employees out of work.
"Drive down main street, and you'll see the condition of Postville. Five businesses have closed, and more are in the process," said the Rev. Paul Ouderkirk, a leader in the Catholic Church's ministry to Postville's Latino community.
Hispanic attendance at Postville's St. Bridget Catholic Church, he said, declined sharply after the raid, which led to the deportation of hundreds of mostly Guatemalan and Mexican workers.
A year later, St. Bridget's Hispanic Ministry is still caring for 30 families, most of which include members awaiting court hearings, and Ouderkirk said the ministry has hired a psychiatric counselor to help church wards cope with stress caused by the raid and its aftermath.
Departing laid-off workers, some embittered by their Postville experience, left many of the town's rental units in shambles.
Menahem's property was trashed, he said, by transients recruited after the raid, not by the longer term Agriprocessors employees who had put down roots in the community. The loss of those productive, stable and family-oriented workers may prove to be one of the greatest downsides of the raid, Menahem and Ouderkirk say.
As for GAL Investments, "The company is long gone, man. There's nothing to save," Menahem said.
"A year ago it was impossible to buy a house in Postville. Now there are 228 houses for sale out of 700 total," said Menahem, who describes the town as "a sinking ship."
Mayor Leigh Rekow, who was appointed in April after Robert Penrod resigned, said the city has struggled financially since the raid and the subsequent virtual shutdown of Agriprocessors, which employed more than 900 full-time workers a year ago and now has about 350 part-time workers.
On June 1, the city likely will be unable to make its twice-annual $167,000 payment to the U.S. Department of Agriculture on the mechanical wastewater treatment plant built specifically to process wastes from the kosher plant.
City Clerk/Administrator Darcy Radloff said the USDA has denied the city's request to defer payments for at least a year while the future of the bankrupt plant is resolved.
Bankruptcy trustee Joseph Sarachek said he is confident the plant will be purchased by a responsible new owner but acknowledged that delay is one of the strategies employed by potential buyers to drive down the price.
Rekow said the town's most pressing problems include the hundreds of vacant and deteriorating housing units; an anticipated decline in the value of housing stock, with a corresponding reduction in property tax receipts; and a sharp decline in receipts for the municipal water utility.
Radloff said the city has assessed unpaid utility bills totaling $60,000 to Menahem's GAL Investments and another $24,000 to Nevel Properties Corp., a Rubashkin-owned company in Chapter 11 bankruptcy.
The town's economic plight is further illustrated in the decline of sales tax revenues since the raid.
In the quarter ending Dec. 31 — the last period for which data is available — the state collected $3,806,482 in sales tax from Postville businesses, down 27.3 percent from the comparable year-earlier figure of $5,238,204.
Unpaid property taxes also could crimp city, county and school district budgets, Allamakee County Treasurer Lori Hesse said. Among the leading delinquents, she said, are Agriprocessors, owing $259,000, and Nevel, owing $95,000.
While Postville's total population has fallen from an estimated 2,300 to fewer than 2,000, the city's Jewish community also has shrunk, said Rabbi Aron Schimmel, a 12-year Agriprocessors employee whose kosher slaughter work has been curtailed since the raid.
Schimmel, who also directs the Judaic Resource Center in Postville, said of the 80 Jewish families in Postville before the raid, about 55 remain.
Schimmel said most Postville Jews bear no hard feelings toward the Rubashkin family, whose practice of hiring illegal immigrants precipitated the raid.
"It's illegal. Maybe you shouldn't do it, but it is how it's done in the meatpacking business. You have illegal workers all over America. If you want good workers cheap, you have to take them," he said.
Schimmel said the Jewish boys' and girls' schools in Postville still have enough students to justify continued operation. The future is less certain for the yeshiva, which educates about 40 13- to 16-year-old boys, most of whom are boarders, he said.
One community bright spot is that enrollment in Postville schools has declined only 3.1 percent after the raid, from 542 to 525, Superintendent Galen Reinsmoen said. "We could gain 40 to 50 students by next fall if the plant goes back to full production," he said.
A level of quiet anxiety born of suffering and uncertainty grips many Postville residents, said Maryn Olson, a coordinator with the Postville Response Coalition, a group established after the raid to help its victims.
Though some have said the raid was necessary to depose exploitative owners of the Agriprocessors plant, Olson said Postville would not wish a similar raid on any other community.
"I don't think anyone will ever look back and say it was a good thing. This is a community that is deeply hurt and grieving," she said.
http://www.gazetteonline.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20090510/NEWS/705109994/1006
Wednesday, February 11, 2009
Immigrant raids mark start of years of limbo
Immigrant raids mark start of years of limbo
The Associated Press
Monday, February 9th 2009
GREELEY, Colo. — Ernesto Garcia counted himself lucky after he was swept up in a 2006 immigration raid on a northern Colorado meatpacking plant: Unlike hundreds of co-workers here illegally, he was allowed to stay in the U.S.
Two years later, he's jobless and barely getting by while he waits for his immigration case to be resolved.
The 34-year-old Guatemalan is among hundreds of people across the country stuck in limbo while their cases inch their way through immigration courts.
A favorable ruling would get them a green card. But in the meantime — and the meantime can be years — they are barred from working.
Julien Ross, director of the Colorado Immigrant Rights Coalition, calls it a "sadistic" way to get immigrants to give up and go home.
"This is another example of why the raids don't work," Ross said. "It's almost salt on the wound to have them wait for years for their cases to be resolved. And the government knows they can't work."
Immigration cases do not have the same "speedy trial" requirements as criminal cases.
Denver's four immigration judges each have up to 2,000 cases at a time, so delays are inevitable, said Christina Fiflis, an attorney who has represented some of the workers detained in the federal raid on the Swift & Co. plant in Greeley on Dec. 12, 2006.
Some can apply for work permits, but often there is an "extraordinary delay" in getting them, she said.
Unable to work, many rely on friends, family and charity.
"In many cases, the families will exhaust all options to see if they can remain in the country, especially families who have been here for a long time," said Rosa Maria Castaneda, a researcher with the Urban Institute, a Washington-based group that tracks the impact of workplace raids.
Carl Rusnok, a spokesman for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said the agency does not know how many people arrested in raids are still in the United States waiting for immigration court hearings.
"Although this is their right, there are limits on what they can and cannot do in the meantime. There is no provision in law to give work authorization to those who have been found working illegally in the United States," Rusnok said.
Elaine Komis, spokeswoman for the U.S. Department of Justice's Executive Office for Immigration Review — the immigration court system — said it is common for immigration cases to take years when people appeal a decision by the immigration judge.
Castaneda's group doesn't have an exact count of pending cases from recent work-site raids.
http://www.nydailynews.com/latino/2009/02/09/2009-02-09_immigrant_raids_mark_start_of_years_of_l-2.html
The Associated Press
Monday, February 9th 2009
GREELEY, Colo. — Ernesto Garcia counted himself lucky after he was swept up in a 2006 immigration raid on a northern Colorado meatpacking plant: Unlike hundreds of co-workers here illegally, he was allowed to stay in the U.S.
Two years later, he's jobless and barely getting by while he waits for his immigration case to be resolved.
The 34-year-old Guatemalan is among hundreds of people across the country stuck in limbo while their cases inch their way through immigration courts.
A favorable ruling would get them a green card. But in the meantime — and the meantime can be years — they are barred from working.
Julien Ross, director of the Colorado Immigrant Rights Coalition, calls it a "sadistic" way to get immigrants to give up and go home.
"This is another example of why the raids don't work," Ross said. "It's almost salt on the wound to have them wait for years for their cases to be resolved. And the government knows they can't work."
Immigration cases do not have the same "speedy trial" requirements as criminal cases.
Denver's four immigration judges each have up to 2,000 cases at a time, so delays are inevitable, said Christina Fiflis, an attorney who has represented some of the workers detained in the federal raid on the Swift & Co. plant in Greeley on Dec. 12, 2006.
Some can apply for work permits, but often there is an "extraordinary delay" in getting them, she said.
Unable to work, many rely on friends, family and charity.
"In many cases, the families will exhaust all options to see if they can remain in the country, especially families who have been here for a long time," said Rosa Maria Castaneda, a researcher with the Urban Institute, a Washington-based group that tracks the impact of workplace raids.
Carl Rusnok, a spokesman for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said the agency does not know how many people arrested in raids are still in the United States waiting for immigration court hearings.
"Although this is their right, there are limits on what they can and cannot do in the meantime. There is no provision in law to give work authorization to those who have been found working illegally in the United States," Rusnok said.
Elaine Komis, spokeswoman for the U.S. Department of Justice's Executive Office for Immigration Review — the immigration court system — said it is common for immigration cases to take years when people appeal a decision by the immigration judge.
Castaneda's group doesn't have an exact count of pending cases from recent work-site raids.
http://www.nydailynews.com/latino/2009/02/09/2009-02-09_immigrant_raids_mark_start_of_years_of_l-2.html
Thursday, November 13, 2008
More than 15,000 deported from Northern California in past 12 months
More than 15,000 deported from Northern California in past 12 months
By Matt O'Brien
Contra Costa Times
11/12/2008
The number of immigrants deported from Northern California increased by about 56 percent in the past year, according to federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
In the fiscal year that ended in October, 15,241 people were deported from a region that stretches from Bakersfield to the Oregon border, and a record 349,041 people were deported nationwide, said Immigration and Customs Enforcement spokeswoman Virginia Kice.
The regional spike in deportations was sharper than the nation's 21 percent increase over the past year. Kice said it partly reflected the federal agency's effort to track down illegal immigrants housed in state and local jails.
"We're getting increasing cooperation from law enforcement with recognition that criminal aliens are a public safety issue," she said.
The number of people deported from Northern California was 9,782 in fiscal year 2007; 7,155 in 2006; and 6,046 in 2005. Along with undocumented immigrants, the numbers include convicts who may have green cards but are deportable because of the crimes they committed. Kice said, however, that the numbers do not include a smaller percentage of people who were arrested in Northern California but transferred to deportation proceedings elsewhere.
An increase in arrests made by fugitive operation teams around the region accounts for some of the spike. Those teams arrested 3,073 people in the 12 months leading up to Sept. 30, including 1,880 people described as immigration fugitives — or those who have ignored a judge's order that they be removed from the country. A total of 669 of the arrestees had criminal convictions. Hundreds were not specifically targeted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, but nevertheless were picked up during the course of the operations because they were living in the country illegally.
Others were arrested in raids on businesses. In May, the agency conducted the biggest work site raid in recent Bay Area memory, arresting 63 workers at the El Balazo restaurant chain in the East Bay and San Francisco.
In September, the agency raided a chain of buffet restaurants in San Pablo, Vacaville and Vallejo, as well as a group of houses where unauthorized workers lived in cramped conditions. Immigration and Customs Enforcement said the businesses used a Los Angeles firm to recruit undocumented Asian employees. Four owners pleaded guilty Oct. 23 to unlawful employment of illegal immigrants and could face fines and up to six months in prison, and two owners face an additional charge of concealing a felony.
http://www.contracostatimes.com/localnews/ci_10968330
By Matt O'Brien
Contra Costa Times
11/12/2008
The number of immigrants deported from Northern California increased by about 56 percent in the past year, according to federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
In the fiscal year that ended in October, 15,241 people were deported from a region that stretches from Bakersfield to the Oregon border, and a record 349,041 people were deported nationwide, said Immigration and Customs Enforcement spokeswoman Virginia Kice.
The regional spike in deportations was sharper than the nation's 21 percent increase over the past year. Kice said it partly reflected the federal agency's effort to track down illegal immigrants housed in state and local jails.
"We're getting increasing cooperation from law enforcement with recognition that criminal aliens are a public safety issue," she said.
The number of people deported from Northern California was 9,782 in fiscal year 2007; 7,155 in 2006; and 6,046 in 2005. Along with undocumented immigrants, the numbers include convicts who may have green cards but are deportable because of the crimes they committed. Kice said, however, that the numbers do not include a smaller percentage of people who were arrested in Northern California but transferred to deportation proceedings elsewhere.
An increase in arrests made by fugitive operation teams around the region accounts for some of the spike. Those teams arrested 3,073 people in the 12 months leading up to Sept. 30, including 1,880 people described as immigration fugitives — or those who have ignored a judge's order that they be removed from the country. A total of 669 of the arrestees had criminal convictions. Hundreds were not specifically targeted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, but nevertheless were picked up during the course of the operations because they were living in the country illegally.
Others were arrested in raids on businesses. In May, the agency conducted the biggest work site raid in recent Bay Area memory, arresting 63 workers at the El Balazo restaurant chain in the East Bay and San Francisco.
In September, the agency raided a chain of buffet restaurants in San Pablo, Vacaville and Vallejo, as well as a group of houses where unauthorized workers lived in cramped conditions. Immigration and Customs Enforcement said the businesses used a Los Angeles firm to recruit undocumented Asian employees. Four owners pleaded guilty Oct. 23 to unlawful employment of illegal immigrants and could face fines and up to six months in prison, and two owners face an additional charge of concealing a felony.
http://www.contracostatimes.com/localnews/ci_10968330
Sunday, September 28, 2008
Remembering the raid one year later
Remembering the raid one year later
Mayor Nyce, raid victims, Island employers recall ICE action in Greenport
By Carol Galligan
Shelter Island Reporter
September 28, 2008
Last spring and fall, agents of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, often referred to as ICE, conducted raids across Long Island, hitting both Nassau and Suffolk counties. Last September 27 they arrested over 100 people on the North Fork. The raid had impacts on the Greenport Latino population, workers and employers on Shelter Island and local governments, as remembered one year later in this last installment of the Reporter’s series on life in the Latino community.
David Nyce, Greenport’s mayor, said he was taken aback by the event, and knew nothing about it until it happened. “It was a federal raid,” he said, “and the local police department is obligated to participate, even though it’s in conflict with their wish to keep people safe. It went down at five in the morning. They came in and the feds are yelling ‘Police’ and people opened their doors thinking it was local and it was ICE.”
The mayor went on to say that he and Southold Police Chief Carlyle “Ty” Cochran had worked very hard to build good relationships with the Latino community. Because Latinos are often the victims of crime, if they are afraid to report them, that represents a major problem. “In Greenport,” he said, “they are nearly 20 percent of the population. If they choose not to cooperate with the police department because they don’t trust them, then it affects everyone.
That’s a large percentage of the population not to be cooperative.”
According to sources within the Southold Police Department, ICE came with warrants for four men (although warrants are not legally required), all wanted for felony offenses in addition to being illegal. In Greenport they arrested 12. Only one, suspected of gang affiliations, was among the four wanted. The additional 11 were illegal and unlucky.
On that early morning after the raid, when housekeepers, yard men, restaurant workers and the employees of many Island businesses came across on the ferry, their terror came with them. Much of what Islanders were told, and much of what was believed by their employees, turned out to be hearsay, rumor and untrue. But they said the emotions were real — the fear was pervasive. “They arrested hundreds of people.” Untrue. “They took women away from their children.” Untrue. “They broke down doors.” True. “They had guns drawn.” True.
http://www2.timesreview.com/SIR/stories/I-raid-09-252008-09-25T08-32-42
Mayor Nyce, raid victims, Island employers recall ICE action in Greenport
By Carol Galligan
Shelter Island Reporter
September 28, 2008
Last spring and fall, agents of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, often referred to as ICE, conducted raids across Long Island, hitting both Nassau and Suffolk counties. Last September 27 they arrested over 100 people on the North Fork. The raid had impacts on the Greenport Latino population, workers and employers on Shelter Island and local governments, as remembered one year later in this last installment of the Reporter’s series on life in the Latino community.
David Nyce, Greenport’s mayor, said he was taken aback by the event, and knew nothing about it until it happened. “It was a federal raid,” he said, “and the local police department is obligated to participate, even though it’s in conflict with their wish to keep people safe. It went down at five in the morning. They came in and the feds are yelling ‘Police’ and people opened their doors thinking it was local and it was ICE.”
The mayor went on to say that he and Southold Police Chief Carlyle “Ty” Cochran had worked very hard to build good relationships with the Latino community. Because Latinos are often the victims of crime, if they are afraid to report them, that represents a major problem. “In Greenport,” he said, “they are nearly 20 percent of the population. If they choose not to cooperate with the police department because they don’t trust them, then it affects everyone.
That’s a large percentage of the population not to be cooperative.”
According to sources within the Southold Police Department, ICE came with warrants for four men (although warrants are not legally required), all wanted for felony offenses in addition to being illegal. In Greenport they arrested 12. Only one, suspected of gang affiliations, was among the four wanted. The additional 11 were illegal and unlucky.
On that early morning after the raid, when housekeepers, yard men, restaurant workers and the employees of many Island businesses came across on the ferry, their terror came with them. Much of what Islanders were told, and much of what was believed by their employees, turned out to be hearsay, rumor and untrue. But they said the emotions were real — the fear was pervasive. “They arrested hundreds of people.” Untrue. “They took women away from their children.” Untrue. “They broke down doors.” True. “They had guns drawn.” True.
http://www2.timesreview.com/SIR/stories/I-raid-09-252008-09-25T08-32-42
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