By Nate A. Miller
The Tribune
Thursday, September 1, 2011
The recent Obama administration decision to allow many illegal immigrants who faced potential deportation despite having no criminal record to stay in the country will make an important difference for Weld County immigrants, University of Northern Colorado Hispanic studies professor Priscilla Falcon said.
“I think we went through a period there, maybe from 2006-2009, where there were many families that were deported,” she said. “If there is less of the workplace raids, then we won’t see so many families that are having one of the parents deported.”
Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano announced Aug. 18 that the department will focus on deporting illegal immigrants who have criminal records or pose a threat to national security or public safety.
Weld law enforcement officials, however, say the decision will not change much on the ground.
“It is a change in stated policy, or in formal policy, but it’s not a change in practical reality,” said Weld District Attorney and former U.S. Senate candidate Ken Buck. “The feds have always focused almost exclusively on the jails and catching people who have a criminal record. They’ve done some workplace enforcement.”
ICE officials say it will allow for more efficient use of resources to prevent illicit trade from crossing the border and to focus on security, according to a fact sheet from Immigration and Customs Enforcement about the policy shift.
Buck, who made a name for himself with aggressive prosecution of immigration-related identity theft before running for the Senate in 2010, said even the 2006 ICE raid at the then-Swift meatpacking plant focused on identity theft and did not cast a wide net to simply catch anyone in the country illegally.
“There has always been this acceptance that the feds didn’t have the resources to deal with overall immigration issues,” he said. “Rather, they were going to focus their resources on those who were a threat to this country.”
In 2007, Brazil-based JBS purchased the meatpacking plant from Swift.
The decision to focus deportation efforts on high-priority cases comes amid protests primarily from immigrant communities that the authorities have been too focused on deporting people whose only offense is being in the country without the proper documents — usually a civil offense — or who have been arrested for traffic violations or other misdemeanors.
There also have been widespread complaints about ICE’s Secure Communities program, which uses fingerprints collected in state and local jails to identify illegal immigrants in a federal immigration database.
Some states have balked at the program, arguing it requires them to enforce federal laws. There have also been complaints that immigrants arrested for simple misdemeanors can end up in deportation proceedings.
Weld County Sheriff John Cooke said he supports the Secure Communities initiative, which would mean when local authorities arrest people their fingerprints are sent to the FBI and ICE, regardless of where they were born.
“I’m wholeheartedly behind the Secure Communities that ICE wants to do,” he said. “Right now what we do is we ask someone when they get booked in where they were born. If they’re foreign born, it doesn’t matter where, it could be Canada, and if they tell us that they are foreign born, then we send that information to ICE. Then ICE takes it from there, basically. Under the Secure Communities, everybody gets sent. If you were arrested, your fingerprints would get sent to the FBI and to ICE, which is a lot better because it’s not self-reporting.”
He has mixed feelings, however, about the decision to refocus deportation efforts.
“ICE has limited resources. They only have so many people. They only have so many agents. They only have so much they can do with so many illegal immigrants that are here, so you’ve got to prioritize. That’s on the good part. They’re prioritizing. They’re focusing on criminals that need to be taken out of our society.”
On the other hand, Cooke said, the policy change doesn’t really address the problem of illegal immigration.
“If somebody comes here illegally, we’re a nation of laws,” he said.” If they come and break our laws, they should be suffering the consequences of breaking our laws and be deported back. I guess my frustration is that the federal government needs to do a better job on the front end, securing the border.”
Buck also said it’s important to enforce the laws on the books and the federal government should do a better job of addressing illegal immigration.
“My first part of the answer would be to find a way to get more people into this country legally,” Buck said. “In other words we need to improve our system and then also create a disincentive for the people who do it the wrong way.”
This would include giving employers a better way to check on whether someone is in the country legally, like an expanded version of the system known as E-verify, which allows employers to check the immigration status of prospective employees.
“Right now E-verify just checks to make sure that someone’s name matches a Social Security number and matches a date of birth,” he said. “What we need is to have the various state databases communicating with each other so that same identity isn’t being used in 10 different states.”
Falcon said for the immigrant community, the policy shift will make a key difference by reducing the trauma that’s associated with events like the raid at Swift.
“I just think, upon reflection, that Swift raid really devastated the economic base of the Latino community in Greeley. It made a major impact,” she said. “What Janet Napolitano announced, my reading of that is that they’re stepping back from the workplace raids. They’re going after more of the criminal element. If that is the case, then that’s a positive thing.”
The Associated Press contributed to this report
http://www.greeleytribune.com/article/20110901/NEWS/709019937/1002&parentprofile=1001
Showing posts with label Swift Meatpacking Raids. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Swift Meatpacking Raids. Show all posts
Saturday, September 3, 2011
Friday, January 29, 2010
A modern tale of meatpacking and immigrants
Grand Island, Neb., has long been a revolving door of immigrants, from Vietnamese and Bosnians to Latinos and Sudanese. But with Somali Muslims came a whole new set of conflicts.
By Kate Linthicum
The Los Angeles Times
January 28, 2010
Reporting from Grand Island, Neb.
Hawa Farah was living in Minneapolis three years ago making $8 an hour at a bakery when her fiance, Hussein Hussein, got a call about good jobs that paid better.
So the couple, like many Somali immigrants who follow work around the country, headed 600 miles southwest to Nebraska, state slogan: "The Good Life."
They settled in Grand Island, a blue-collar railroad town on the flat Midwestern prairie. They got married and brightened their worn apartment with plastic flowers and colorful rugs. Hussein, 33, began working the early shift on the "kill" side of the local meatpacking plant. Farah, 24, took a job on the "fabrication" side, trimming fat from brisket.
The promise of better pay was true enough.
But the good life would prove elusive. The young couple didn't know the plant's history and what it would mean for them.
A magnet for immigrants
It was still dark when dozens of federal agents, guns drawn, swept into the gray, windowless buildings at Swift & Co. just before Christmas 2006.
They were Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents taking part in a six-state sting, and they had warrants to search for undocumented workers.
Like most of the nation's slaughterhouses, the Grand Island plant had always been a revolving door for immigrants.
Meatpacking is hard, dangerous work; the Department of Labor says it results in more injuries than any other trade. But it doesn't require workers to speak English, and in Grand Island it pays a starting wage of $12.25 an hour.
Ads placed in immigrant newspapers across the country had drawn war refugees from Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos in the 1970s and from Croatia and Bosnia in the 1990s.
Most made some money and moved on.
But many Latino immigrants, who started arriving in large numbers in the 1980s, stayed. They launched Spanish-language radio programs, founded churches, set up taco trucks. And unlike earlier immigrants who were legal refugees recognized by the U.S. government, many Latinos had crossed the border illegally.
When immigration agents came to town in 2006, Latinos comprised up to 11% of Grand Island's 45,000 residents, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
On the day of the raid, agents detained more than 200 of the plant's 2,500 workers. Another 200 Latinos from the evening shift, apparently fearful of deportation, promptly quit.
In town the raid triggered an eruption of resentment.
When Latinos marched in protest afterward, some townspeople lined the streets with a counter-demonstration, holding signs that read, "Go back to Mexico, wetbacks." The local newspaper was filled with venomous letters to the editor decrying Latino immigration.
"A lot of people don't like the Latinos, they just don't," said Jeff Fulton, a Grand Island native who has worked at the plant for 25 years. Latinos faced more discrimination than previous immigrants because they had put down roots, he said. One only had to drive down 4th Street, past La Solomera Guatemalan import store and El Tazumal Mexican restaurant, to see their influence.
"There has been more bigotry," Fulton said, "because there has just been more and more and more of them."
The emotions unleashed by the raid would soon find a new target -- Sudanese and Somalis attracted by the promise of work at the meatpacking plant.
The new immigrants, who had been granted refugee status because of strife in their homelands, posed new challenges to the status quo in Grand Island.
They were black, and some were Muslim.
A new kind of different
During each shift, at sundown, Farah asks her supervisor if she can put down her knives and go to the bathroom. Sometimes, if there are enough other trimmers to cover for her, the boss says yes.
Farah stands at the sink in the company locker room, away from the drone of the factory floor. She washes her hands, her face, her arms and her feet, turns northeast to face Mecca and begins to pray.
When the Somalis began arriving in 2007, supervisors learned that some of the more devout workers prayed five times a day, and that the sundown prayer fell before the plant's regularly scheduled 15-minute break. For the most part, they looked the other way.
That changed in 2008, during Ramadan, when virtually all the Muslim workers began leaving the assembly line en masse to pray. Even Muslims who are not particularly religious often make an effort to pray during the holy month.
Co-workers complained that they had to pick up the slack. Management told the Somalis they couldn't pray because the plant, one of the largest in the country, couldn't afford to stop the machines. Five hundred Muslim workers, infuriated, walked off the job.
Most came back after Swift & Co. agreed to accommodate them by changing break times.
But other workers protested that the Muslims had gotten preferential treatment, an idea fueled by a story published in a local Spanish-language newspaper that falsely claimed the Somalis had gotten a pay raise. Fights broke out in the lunch room. Hundreds of Latinos -- joined by the Sudanese, who are mostly Christian -- walked off the job.
Major conflict at the plant let up when Ramadan ended. But tensions in town mounted like never before.
At the Autumn Woods apartments on the southeast side of town, police were called several times a day to respond to stabbings, shootings and disputes.
A war was building between the Somalis, who lived on one side of the complex, and the Sudanese, who lived on the other side.
"It's chaotic anarchy," Police Chief Steve Lamken said recently.
In late August 2009, a Sudanese man was shot in the head at the apartment complex. Police arrested three Somalis in connection with the killing.Officer Robert Winton blamed the fighting on the Africans' violent homelands. "They're at war in their countries and they bring it here," he said.
Violent crimes in Grand Island have risen in the last two years and the community, surrounded by cornfields, now faces a gang problem.
Fidencio Sandoval and his wife, Herminda, two meatpacking workers who were born in Mexico but are now U.S. citizens, worry about the violence.
They moved here in 1997, bought a house on a quiet street lined with sycamore and maple trees, and paid it off 10 years later.
"When I first came I thought this is a nice, quiet town, this may be a nice place to retire," Fidencio said. "But the way it's going now, I'm not sure."
Mayor Margaret Hornady said she frequently heard complaints about the changes recent immigrants had wrought.
"People say, 'Mayor, close down Swift, kick 'em out of town. All of our problems would be gone,' " she said.
Hornady said she had been "unsettled" by the presence of Somali women wearing head scarves. "It is startling," she said. "It's not what we're used to."
Just weeks after what she now terms "the Ramadan fiasco," Hornady made comments in the local and national media that the town's Somali leaders found offensive. As a peace offering, she issued an open invitation to all Somali women to attend a luncheon at her City Hall office.
She bought roses, ordered cucumber sandwiches and brought in her mother's silver tea service. Twelve men and six women showed up. Hornady was offended.
The event proved to her that the Somalis think life in Grand Island "is not good enough," Hornady said. "Well, it's what we've got."
She said it would take time for Grand Island to adjust to its immigrants, and vice-versa.
Attempting to integrate
There have been some attempts to foster unity in town.
Several groups offer free English classes and the city-funded Multicultural Coalition -- headed by a Latino woman who once worked at the plant -- helps connect new immigrants with social services.
The school district, where 15 years ago 90% of students were white and today 50% are, has reached out to immigrants to get their children enrolled.
But some Somalis decided Grand Island was no longer the place for them. After the Ramadan dispute, hundreds left town. Many moved to Lexington, an hour away, where the Tyson chicken plant pays less but is known for being more accommodating to Muslims.
Hawa Farah and Hussein Hussein aren't sure if they'll leave.
Last year, Ramadan did not trigger major conflict at the Grand Island plant, in large part because the Somalis had made arrangements with management beforehand.
Still, Farah and Hussein say they are frustrated by how co-workers treat them.
"They humiliate us like we are children," Farah said.
Farah said she her husband must keep working in order to support their families in Africa. "When we came here, it was not to relax," she said.Meanwhile, the company, which has since changed its name to JBS USA, has been grasping for employees once again.
Early last year, a man in Cuba named Jose Viol got a call from a friend in Miami.
The friend said recruiters from a meatpacking plant in Nebraska were looking for laborers. They would pay for three days of work what Viol could make all year in Cuba.
So he and his girlfriend got on a boat, fled Cuba for Mexico and crossed into the United States at the Texas border. They were granted refugee status and made their way to Miami, where they met up with other Cubans heading for Grand Island.
Seven hundred of them arrived in town last spring.
http://www.latimes.com/news/nation-and-world/la-na-immigrant-nebraska28-2010jan28,0,6078807.story
By Kate Linthicum
The Los Angeles Times
January 28, 2010
Reporting from Grand Island, Neb.
Hawa Farah was living in Minneapolis three years ago making $8 an hour at a bakery when her fiance, Hussein Hussein, got a call about good jobs that paid better.
So the couple, like many Somali immigrants who follow work around the country, headed 600 miles southwest to Nebraska, state slogan: "The Good Life."
They settled in Grand Island, a blue-collar railroad town on the flat Midwestern prairie. They got married and brightened their worn apartment with plastic flowers and colorful rugs. Hussein, 33, began working the early shift on the "kill" side of the local meatpacking plant. Farah, 24, took a job on the "fabrication" side, trimming fat from brisket.
The promise of better pay was true enough.
But the good life would prove elusive. The young couple didn't know the plant's history and what it would mean for them.
A magnet for immigrants
It was still dark when dozens of federal agents, guns drawn, swept into the gray, windowless buildings at Swift & Co. just before Christmas 2006.
They were Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents taking part in a six-state sting, and they had warrants to search for undocumented workers.
Like most of the nation's slaughterhouses, the Grand Island plant had always been a revolving door for immigrants.
Meatpacking is hard, dangerous work; the Department of Labor says it results in more injuries than any other trade. But it doesn't require workers to speak English, and in Grand Island it pays a starting wage of $12.25 an hour.
Ads placed in immigrant newspapers across the country had drawn war refugees from Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos in the 1970s and from Croatia and Bosnia in the 1990s.
Most made some money and moved on.
But many Latino immigrants, who started arriving in large numbers in the 1980s, stayed. They launched Spanish-language radio programs, founded churches, set up taco trucks. And unlike earlier immigrants who were legal refugees recognized by the U.S. government, many Latinos had crossed the border illegally.
When immigration agents came to town in 2006, Latinos comprised up to 11% of Grand Island's 45,000 residents, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
On the day of the raid, agents detained more than 200 of the plant's 2,500 workers. Another 200 Latinos from the evening shift, apparently fearful of deportation, promptly quit.
In town the raid triggered an eruption of resentment.
When Latinos marched in protest afterward, some townspeople lined the streets with a counter-demonstration, holding signs that read, "Go back to Mexico, wetbacks." The local newspaper was filled with venomous letters to the editor decrying Latino immigration.
"A lot of people don't like the Latinos, they just don't," said Jeff Fulton, a Grand Island native who has worked at the plant for 25 years. Latinos faced more discrimination than previous immigrants because they had put down roots, he said. One only had to drive down 4th Street, past La Solomera Guatemalan import store and El Tazumal Mexican restaurant, to see their influence.
"There has been more bigotry," Fulton said, "because there has just been more and more and more of them."
The emotions unleashed by the raid would soon find a new target -- Sudanese and Somalis attracted by the promise of work at the meatpacking plant.
The new immigrants, who had been granted refugee status because of strife in their homelands, posed new challenges to the status quo in Grand Island.
They were black, and some were Muslim.
A new kind of different
During each shift, at sundown, Farah asks her supervisor if she can put down her knives and go to the bathroom. Sometimes, if there are enough other trimmers to cover for her, the boss says yes.
Farah stands at the sink in the company locker room, away from the drone of the factory floor. She washes her hands, her face, her arms and her feet, turns northeast to face Mecca and begins to pray.
When the Somalis began arriving in 2007, supervisors learned that some of the more devout workers prayed five times a day, and that the sundown prayer fell before the plant's regularly scheduled 15-minute break. For the most part, they looked the other way.
That changed in 2008, during Ramadan, when virtually all the Muslim workers began leaving the assembly line en masse to pray. Even Muslims who are not particularly religious often make an effort to pray during the holy month.
Co-workers complained that they had to pick up the slack. Management told the Somalis they couldn't pray because the plant, one of the largest in the country, couldn't afford to stop the machines. Five hundred Muslim workers, infuriated, walked off the job.
Most came back after Swift & Co. agreed to accommodate them by changing break times.
But other workers protested that the Muslims had gotten preferential treatment, an idea fueled by a story published in a local Spanish-language newspaper that falsely claimed the Somalis had gotten a pay raise. Fights broke out in the lunch room. Hundreds of Latinos -- joined by the Sudanese, who are mostly Christian -- walked off the job.
Major conflict at the plant let up when Ramadan ended. But tensions in town mounted like never before.
At the Autumn Woods apartments on the southeast side of town, police were called several times a day to respond to stabbings, shootings and disputes.
A war was building between the Somalis, who lived on one side of the complex, and the Sudanese, who lived on the other side.
"It's chaotic anarchy," Police Chief Steve Lamken said recently.
In late August 2009, a Sudanese man was shot in the head at the apartment complex. Police arrested three Somalis in connection with the killing.Officer Robert Winton blamed the fighting on the Africans' violent homelands. "They're at war in their countries and they bring it here," he said.
Violent crimes in Grand Island have risen in the last two years and the community, surrounded by cornfields, now faces a gang problem.
Fidencio Sandoval and his wife, Herminda, two meatpacking workers who were born in Mexico but are now U.S. citizens, worry about the violence.
They moved here in 1997, bought a house on a quiet street lined with sycamore and maple trees, and paid it off 10 years later.
"When I first came I thought this is a nice, quiet town, this may be a nice place to retire," Fidencio said. "But the way it's going now, I'm not sure."
Mayor Margaret Hornady said she frequently heard complaints about the changes recent immigrants had wrought.
"People say, 'Mayor, close down Swift, kick 'em out of town. All of our problems would be gone,' " she said.
Hornady said she had been "unsettled" by the presence of Somali women wearing head scarves. "It is startling," she said. "It's not what we're used to."
Just weeks after what she now terms "the Ramadan fiasco," Hornady made comments in the local and national media that the town's Somali leaders found offensive. As a peace offering, she issued an open invitation to all Somali women to attend a luncheon at her City Hall office.
She bought roses, ordered cucumber sandwiches and brought in her mother's silver tea service. Twelve men and six women showed up. Hornady was offended.
The event proved to her that the Somalis think life in Grand Island "is not good enough," Hornady said. "Well, it's what we've got."
She said it would take time for Grand Island to adjust to its immigrants, and vice-versa.
Attempting to integrate
There have been some attempts to foster unity in town.
Several groups offer free English classes and the city-funded Multicultural Coalition -- headed by a Latino woman who once worked at the plant -- helps connect new immigrants with social services.
The school district, where 15 years ago 90% of students were white and today 50% are, has reached out to immigrants to get their children enrolled.
But some Somalis decided Grand Island was no longer the place for them. After the Ramadan dispute, hundreds left town. Many moved to Lexington, an hour away, where the Tyson chicken plant pays less but is known for being more accommodating to Muslims.
Hawa Farah and Hussein Hussein aren't sure if they'll leave.
Last year, Ramadan did not trigger major conflict at the Grand Island plant, in large part because the Somalis had made arrangements with management beforehand.
Still, Farah and Hussein say they are frustrated by how co-workers treat them.
"They humiliate us like we are children," Farah said.
Farah said she her husband must keep working in order to support their families in Africa. "When we came here, it was not to relax," she said.Meanwhile, the company, which has since changed its name to JBS USA, has been grasping for employees once again.
Early last year, a man in Cuba named Jose Viol got a call from a friend in Miami.
The friend said recruiters from a meatpacking plant in Nebraska were looking for laborers. They would pay for three days of work what Viol could make all year in Cuba.
So he and his girlfriend got on a boat, fled Cuba for Mexico and crossed into the United States at the Texas border. They were granted refugee status and made their way to Miami, where they met up with other Cubans heading for Grand Island.
Seven hundred of them arrived in town last spring.
http://www.latimes.com/news/nation-and-world/la-na-immigrant-nebraska28-2010jan28,0,6078807.story
Friday, January 1, 2010
Films: Swift Justice: Illegal Immigration in America
USA, 2009, 56 Minute Running Time
World Premiere
Genre/Subjects: Colorado, Documentary, Political, Social Issues
Program: Documentary Films
Language: "English, Spanish" English Subtitles
DIRECTOR: Mateos Alvarez, Julie Speer Hunniford
Producer: Julie Speer Hunniford, Mateos Alvarez, Sara Aderhold
Editor: Georgina Guidotti, Dutch Simpson
Screenwriter: Julie Speer Hunniford, Mateos Alvarez, Sara Aderhold, Steering Committee Members
Cinematographer: Julie Speer Hunniford, Sara Aderhold, Scott Reyes, Dutch Simpson, Georgina Guidotti, Mateos Alvarez
The raid on Swift meatpacking plants in Greeley and six other locations nationwide in December 2006 by agents of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Bureau (ICE) ignited a heated debate about the place of undocumented workers in the United States and their exploitation by employers. More than 1,200 workers were arrested, and many have been held in legal limbo ever since as their cases are sorted out – while others were immediately deported back to Mexico and Central America. Human rights advocates accused law enforcement officers of casting the workers as dangerous criminals, noting the atypical and unusually public steps of not only long-term incarceration but also burdensome fines imposed before deportation. A Swift official’s description of the raids (or “enforcement actions,” as one district attorney calls them) makes clear that ICE had planned its sweep with the single goal of making Swift an example for other companies.
Co-producers Mateos Alvarez and Julie Speer Hunniford of the activist media group Little Voice Productions explore the context and ramifications of the raid through interviews with people on both sides of the issue, from the impact on families coping with legal troubles and sudden loss of income to the arguable morality of current immigration statutes. Among the dozens of people interviewed are law enforcement personnel, immigration lawyers and reformers, the immigrants themselves, and the former mayor of Greeley, Tom Selders, who was defeated in the 2008 election largely because of his antiraid stance. Swift Justice premiered in Greeley in July of this year.
http://www.denverfilm.org/festival/film/detail.aspx?id=22872&fid=49
World Premiere
Genre/Subjects: Colorado, Documentary, Political, Social Issues
Program: Documentary Films
Language: "English, Spanish" English Subtitles
DIRECTOR: Mateos Alvarez, Julie Speer Hunniford
Producer: Julie Speer Hunniford, Mateos Alvarez, Sara Aderhold
Editor: Georgina Guidotti, Dutch Simpson
Screenwriter: Julie Speer Hunniford, Mateos Alvarez, Sara Aderhold, Steering Committee Members
Cinematographer: Julie Speer Hunniford, Sara Aderhold, Scott Reyes, Dutch Simpson, Georgina Guidotti, Mateos Alvarez
The raid on Swift meatpacking plants in Greeley and six other locations nationwide in December 2006 by agents of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Bureau (ICE) ignited a heated debate about the place of undocumented workers in the United States and their exploitation by employers. More than 1,200 workers were arrested, and many have been held in legal limbo ever since as their cases are sorted out – while others were immediately deported back to Mexico and Central America. Human rights advocates accused law enforcement officers of casting the workers as dangerous criminals, noting the atypical and unusually public steps of not only long-term incarceration but also burdensome fines imposed before deportation. A Swift official’s description of the raids (or “enforcement actions,” as one district attorney calls them) makes clear that ICE had planned its sweep with the single goal of making Swift an example for other companies.
Co-producers Mateos Alvarez and Julie Speer Hunniford of the activist media group Little Voice Productions explore the context and ramifications of the raid through interviews with people on both sides of the issue, from the impact on families coping with legal troubles and sudden loss of income to the arguable morality of current immigration statutes. Among the dozens of people interviewed are law enforcement personnel, immigration lawyers and reformers, the immigrants themselves, and the former mayor of Greeley, Tom Selders, who was defeated in the 2008 election largely because of his antiraid stance. Swift Justice premiered in Greeley in July of this year.
http://www.denverfilm.org/festival/film/detail.aspx?id=22872&fid=49
Thursday, April 2, 2009
Claims dismissed in Worthington immigration raid
Claims dismissed in Worthington immigration raid
Associated Press
March 31, 2009
A federal judge has dismissed all claims against the Department of Homeland Security over an immigration raid at the Swift & Co. meatpacking plant in Worthington.
The U.S. attorney's office says Judge Joan Ericksen dismissed the claims last Friday.
The lawsuit was filed by 10 people who claimed their constitutional rights were violated during the Dec. 12, 2006, enforcement action dubbed Operation Wagon Train. The raid followed a 10-month investigation into the alleged use and distribution of fraudulent identity documents by Swift employees in six states.
Immigration agents arrested 239 people on immigration violations in Worthington, out of a total of more than 1,200. Twenty of them were also charged with identity theft or related counts.
Ericksen ruled that the government's search warrant established a sufficient basis for questioning the workers about their citizenship, and that the agents were entitled to detain people who were present there.
http://www.startribune.com/local/42243397.html?elr=KArksLckD8EQDUoaEyqyP4O:DW3ckUiD3aPc:_Yyc:aUUZ
Associated Press
March 31, 2009
A federal judge has dismissed all claims against the Department of Homeland Security over an immigration raid at the Swift & Co. meatpacking plant in Worthington.
The U.S. attorney's office says Judge Joan Ericksen dismissed the claims last Friday.
The lawsuit was filed by 10 people who claimed their constitutional rights were violated during the Dec. 12, 2006, enforcement action dubbed Operation Wagon Train. The raid followed a 10-month investigation into the alleged use and distribution of fraudulent identity documents by Swift employees in six states.
Immigration agents arrested 239 people on immigration violations in Worthington, out of a total of more than 1,200. Twenty of them were also charged with identity theft or related counts.
Ericksen ruled that the government's search warrant established a sufficient basis for questioning the workers about their citizenship, and that the agents were entitled to detain people who were present there.
http://www.startribune.com/local/42243397.html?elr=KArksLckD8EQDUoaEyqyP4O:DW3ckUiD3aPc:_Yyc:aUUZ
Monday, January 12, 2009
Attorney defends actions during 2006 Swift raids
Attorney defends actions during 2006 Swift raids
By KEN BLACK
TIMES-REPUBLICAN
POSTED: January 10, 2009
U.S. Attorney Mathew Whitaker speaks to the Marshall County Pachyderm Club Friday. Whitaker said he was proud of his time in office, including his part in the immigration raid at the Marshalltown Swift & Co. meatpacking plant.
U.S. Attorney Matthew Whitaker defended his actions during the Swift immigration raids in Marshalltown in 2006 and said he was happy with the number of criminals taken off the street.
"It's a constant battle," Whitaker said. "The forces of good are cooperating as best we can."
Whitaker said that while there may have been some mistakes made, overall the raids took care of a serious problem.
"When immigration comes to me and says, 'We have 664 people at a plant in Marshalltown and we don't know who they are,' I hope you would expect we would do something about that and we did," he said.
Identity theft is a serious problem across the country and some of it stems from undocumented workers, according to Whitaker. It can not only cause tax problems, but credit problems as well.
In addition, it becomes a matter of national security, especially after the terrorist attacks in 2001.
"We just cannot have people in our country that we don't know who they are," he said.
The U.S. attorney also believes the raid had a net positive benefit in Marshalltown, claiming the average starting wage went from $8 per hour before the raids to $10 per hour after the raids.
Whitaker also said he was pleased with the focus the office has had in recent years on crimes against children. He hopes there is continued focus on that area after he leaves.
He believes the Obama Administration will likely have a replacement for him within a few months, if not sooner.
"In this position, you serve at the pleasure of the president and we all knew that going in," he said. "I would expect, within four to six months, to have moving on to other opportunities."
http://www.timesrepublican.com/page/content.detail/id/513747.html?nav=5005
By KEN BLACK
TIMES-REPUBLICAN
POSTED: January 10, 2009
U.S. Attorney Mathew Whitaker speaks to the Marshall County Pachyderm Club Friday. Whitaker said he was proud of his time in office, including his part in the immigration raid at the Marshalltown Swift & Co. meatpacking plant.
U.S. Attorney Matthew Whitaker defended his actions during the Swift immigration raids in Marshalltown in 2006 and said he was happy with the number of criminals taken off the street.
"It's a constant battle," Whitaker said. "The forces of good are cooperating as best we can."
Whitaker said that while there may have been some mistakes made, overall the raids took care of a serious problem.
"When immigration comes to me and says, 'We have 664 people at a plant in Marshalltown and we don't know who they are,' I hope you would expect we would do something about that and we did," he said.
Identity theft is a serious problem across the country and some of it stems from undocumented workers, according to Whitaker. It can not only cause tax problems, but credit problems as well.
In addition, it becomes a matter of national security, especially after the terrorist attacks in 2001.
"We just cannot have people in our country that we don't know who they are," he said.
The U.S. attorney also believes the raid had a net positive benefit in Marshalltown, claiming the average starting wage went from $8 per hour before the raids to $10 per hour after the raids.
Whitaker also said he was pleased with the focus the office has had in recent years on crimes against children. He hopes there is continued focus on that area after he leaves.
He believes the Obama Administration will likely have a replacement for him within a few months, if not sooner.
"In this position, you serve at the pleasure of the president and we all knew that going in," he said. "I would expect, within four to six months, to have moving on to other opportunities."
http://www.timesrepublican.com/page/content.detail/id/513747.html?nav=5005
Friday, September 5, 2008
After the Raids in Colorado
After the Raids
News report, New American Media
Valeria Fernández , Posted: Sep 04/05, 2008
ERASMA ZUNÚN LOPEZ lives a cautious life since the day she was arrested during an immigration raid almost two years ago. Now, doors are always double-locked and curtains are shut at her home. She lives near a police station in Greeley, Colorado, and she shivers any time she sees a police officer. She rushes back into her house when a white van approaches the station. She cries often for no immediate reason. Recurring nightmares haunt her. She no longer takes her eight grandchildren to the park a few blocks away. Her worst fear is to be separated from them again.
Lopez was one of 262 people who were arrested in 2006 when federal immigration agents raided the Swift & Company meatpacking plant in Greeley where she worked. About 1,300 workers were arrested at six of the company’s sites nationwide. Since the raid, justice has been postponed for at least 32 immigrant families like hers who live in legal limbo while they wait to see an immigration judge in October.
“They are stuck,” said Ricardo Romero, a Colorado immigrant rights activist. “They can’t work...what the hell are you doing giving them court dates two years after they’ve been arrested?”
"We used to have two checks coming in, now it's only one...we're limited in food [and] clothes, and gas is expensive." Many of the workers arrested in Greeley were Mexicans and Guatemalans, but the group also included Hondurans, Ethiopians and Laotians.
Among those from Mexico and Guatemala were many indigenous peoples from those countries who lived in families here with mixed documentation status. While they may not be citizens, they have U.S.-born children and spouses, or siblings who are citizens. Most of those arrested that day signed documents for voluntary deportation.
Others, like Lopez, chose to fight in court to stay, even if their likelihood of winning was remote. Some who were deported have already crossed the border again and are back with their children and working in Greeley’s underground economy.Al Frente de Lucha, a nonprofit organization run by Romero, has been helping 17 families with supplies and food coupons with the support of a local church, but help is running out.
http://news.newamericamedia.org/news/view_article.html?article_id=3236feeaa1f7e54635ded906974f7641
News report, New American Media
Valeria Fernández , Posted: Sep 04/05, 2008
ERASMA ZUNÚN LOPEZ lives a cautious life since the day she was arrested during an immigration raid almost two years ago. Now, doors are always double-locked and curtains are shut at her home. She lives near a police station in Greeley, Colorado, and she shivers any time she sees a police officer. She rushes back into her house when a white van approaches the station. She cries often for no immediate reason. Recurring nightmares haunt her. She no longer takes her eight grandchildren to the park a few blocks away. Her worst fear is to be separated from them again.
Lopez was one of 262 people who were arrested in 2006 when federal immigration agents raided the Swift & Company meatpacking plant in Greeley where she worked. About 1,300 workers were arrested at six of the company’s sites nationwide. Since the raid, justice has been postponed for at least 32 immigrant families like hers who live in legal limbo while they wait to see an immigration judge in October.
“They are stuck,” said Ricardo Romero, a Colorado immigrant rights activist. “They can’t work...what the hell are you doing giving them court dates two years after they’ve been arrested?”
"We used to have two checks coming in, now it's only one...we're limited in food [and] clothes, and gas is expensive." Many of the workers arrested in Greeley were Mexicans and Guatemalans, but the group also included Hondurans, Ethiopians and Laotians.
Among those from Mexico and Guatemala were many indigenous peoples from those countries who lived in families here with mixed documentation status. While they may not be citizens, they have U.S.-born children and spouses, or siblings who are citizens. Most of those arrested that day signed documents for voluntary deportation.
Others, like Lopez, chose to fight in court to stay, even if their likelihood of winning was remote. Some who were deported have already crossed the border again and are back with their children and working in Greeley’s underground economy.Al Frente de Lucha, a nonprofit organization run by Romero, has been helping 17 families with supplies and food coupons with the support of a local church, but help is running out.
http://news.newamericamedia.org/news/view_article.html?article_id=3236feeaa1f7e54635ded906974f7641
Monday, July 21, 2008
In Immigration Cases, Employers Feel the Pressure, But Critics Fault Laws as Ineffective
By Spencer S. Hsu
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, July 21, 2008
A three-year-old enforcement campaign against employers who knowingly hire illegal immigrants is increasingly resulting in arrests and criminal convictions, using evidence gathered by phone taps, undercover agents and prisoners who agree to serve as government witnesses.
But the crackdown's relatively high costs and limited results are also fueling criticism. In an economy with more than 6 million companies and 8 million unauthorized workers, the corporate enforcement effort is still dwarfed by the high-profile raids that have sentenced thousands of illegal immigrants to prison time and deportation.
Stewart A. Baker, assistant secretary for policy at the Homeland Security Department, recently told immigration experts the disparity can be traced to ineffective policies that need to be addressed by Congress.
"Companies tell me, 'We have an immigration system that allows us to hire illegal workers, legally,' " Baker said. Asked to defend President Bush's track record, he said, "Why are employers not punished more often? Because the laws we have don't really authorize that."
In the first nine months of this fiscal year, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) made 937 criminal arrests at U.S. workplaces, more than 10 times as many as the 72 it arrested five years ago. Of those arrested this year, 99 were company supervisors, compared with 93 in 2007.
The arrests have led to several convictions, including a union official at a Swift meatpacking plant; three executives of a Florida janitorial services company; a temporary-staffing agency manager for a Del Monte Fresh Produce plant in Oregon; two supervisors of a Cargill pork plant cleaning contractor in Illinois; and seven managers of IFCO Systems North America, a pallet services company, among others.
But Baker's comments acknowledged criticism by labor union leaders, immigrant rights' groups and Democrats about the limits of employer enforcement. His remarks also illuminate why the White House, Congress and some states have scrambled recently to adopt new steps to compel companies to identify illegal workers, and why such efforts will probably remain ineffective.
Political opposition from big business, labor and immigrant and civil rights interests has diluted immigration law for two decades, according to analysts in both parties.
"If you want law enforcement, you have to have laws that are enforceable," said Doris M. Meissner, who headed the former Immigration and Naturalization Service under the Clinton administration. The 1986 law banning the hiring of illegal immigrants, she said, "has just been chronically flawed from the time it was passed."
Raids against Swift packinghouses in six states in December 2006 highlight the administration's strategy to seek criminal indictments and felony convictions against corporate violators. An earlier approach that relied on administrative fines and forfeitures was increasingly dismissed by executives as a cost of doing business.
The tactics used now are similar to law enforcement techniques honed in developing cases against mobsters and drug lords. In June 2007, federal agents wired a Mexican slaughterhouse worker who had been arrested on immigration charges and sent him to call at the home of his former boss at a meatpacking plant in Marshalltown, Iowa.
The informant, nicknamed "Memo," carried a false ID. He told Christopher Lamb, now the plant's human resources manager, that he was free pending a hearing and wanted to return to work.
Lamb, 38, coached Memo but seemed to realize he was walking into a trap, court records show. "Where's the migra?" he asked later, using the Spanish term for immigration agents.
The informant's tapes led Lamb to plead guilty in March to one charge of harboring an illegal immigrant. In a deal with prosecutors, he agreed to serve a year's probation, pay $300 in fines and cooperate against others targeted after immigration raids in 2006 against meatpacker Swift, now JBS Swift.
An undercover agent taped union official Braulio Pereyra advising new employees at an orientation speech on how to protect false identities.
"You can lie to your boss or whomever, but not to the police," Pereyra was recorded as saying. "That's a federal offense."
He was convicted in May on one charge of harboring illegal immigrants, and faces as much as five years in prison and a $250,000 fine. Pereyra's lawyer, Keith Rigg, said his client committed no crime and had a First Amendment right to give the speech. He is seeking a retrial.
Enforcement disparities were displayed vividly May 12 when ICE agents swept into an Agriprocessors Inc. kosher meatpacking plant in Postville, Iowa. They arrested 389 illegal workers; 270 were convicted within days in expedited court proceedings at a cattle fairgrounds; and many were sentenced to five months in prison, mostly on criminal document-fraud charges.
By contrast, ICE agents arrested two supervisors and issued an arrest warrant for a third man on July 3. The firm remains in operation.
Frank Sharry, executive director of America's Voice, a newly formed group that promotes citizenship for the estimated 12 million illegal immigrants, said the raid shows the misdirected policy of criminalizing illegal immigration for workers while not shutting down the jobs "magnet" that lures them. Several critics, including a federal court interpreter who participated in the Agriprocessors hearings, said the government's legal tactics are coercive and threaten defendants' due process rights.
"There's no question this administration is coddling unscrupulous employers while arresting undocumented immigrants in order to make their statistics look good," Sharry said.
But he echoed Baker's frustration at politicians who seek to look tough on immigration and yet do not provide effective law enforcement tools or address the nation's labor needs and underground population. "The dysfunctional immigration system really is the fault of Congress, for failing to lead," Sharry said.
Piecemeal measures to combat illegal hiring are under way this year, but the moves remain controversial and their effects uncertain.
In March, the White House attempted to jump-start a campaign to notify 140,000 employers about workers' use of suspicious Social Security numbers, seeking to force businesses to resolve questions or fire workers within 90 days.
If companies do not respond to "no-match" letters, ICE could use that failure as evidence of illegal hiring. But the plan remains stalled by a federal lawsuit filed by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the AFL-CIO and the American Civil Liberties Union, which allege that it will disrupt businesses and discriminate against legal U.S. workers.
Also in dispute is another effort to expand use of a voluntary online system that checks whether new hires are eligible to work in the United States. The Bush administration on June 9 ordered 60,000 federal contractors to use the government's E-Verify system, which checks workers' information against Social Security and immigration-status databases.
Still, 12 years after Congress mandated that such a tool be piloted in 1996, the change will enroll about 2 percent of U.S. companies.
Critics warn that the system has a high error rate that will exclude legal workers, cannot detect the fraudulent use of stolen Social Security numbers, and will permit some employers to harass workers.
Frustrated by the stalemate, Arizona, Missouri and South Carolina since January have passed laws or have begun requiring businesses to use E-Verify under certain conditions. But Illinois has gone the opposite direction, barring companies from participating until the government proves that E-Verify is 99 percent error-free.
The conflicting moves show how opposition has frustrated enforcement of the ban on hiring illegal immigrants. In 1986, Congress required law enforcement agencies to show that an employer knowingly violated the law, but provided few tools, agents or dollars to do so.
Under the law, employers need only to verify that a new hire present at least one "facially valid" form of identification. The overhaul simply created a huge fake-ID industry, while granting unscrupulous employers a ready defense since the government had no system to validate a document's authenticity. At the same time, employers face discrimination complaints if they unduly scrutinize new hires.
Few expect the situation to change soon with this fall's elections looming. Some GOP congressional campaigns are talking tough, but the party is wary of further alienating its traditional business base. Democrats in turn rely on labor and immigrant support, leading the House to propose a $40 billion DHS budget bill that would require ICE to prioritize $800 million in enforcement funding next year to deporting illegal immigrants with criminal records, not workers.
At a Georgetown Law School conference in May, Baker of DHS described a sense among voters that "both parties owed their base a kind of collusion of pretend enforcement of the immigration laws." He added, "I can't say that was completely misplaced skepticism."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/07/20/AR2008072002293.html
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