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Imperialist war and anti-immigrant repression go together. Above: Over 1,000 striking miners in Bisbee, Arizona, led by the revolutionary syndicalist IWW, were rounded up in July 1917, loaded into box cars and stranded in the New Mexico desert. Hundreds were later deported.

Now U.S. rulers are preparing to launch anti-immigrant repression on a massive scale. The New York Times (3 February) reported that the Army Corps of Engineers awarded a $385 million contract to the Kellogg Brown & Root subsidiary of Halliburton Corporation for the construction of a string of “temporary immigration detention centers,” each holding up to 5,000 people. KBR would build these concentration camps for the Department of Homeland Security, to hold “an unexpected influx of immigrants,” people fleeing from a natural disaster (another New Orleans), or “for new programs that require additional detention space.”

And what might those programs be? This is part of a Homeland Security program codenamed “ENDGAME” which is described by the DHS as “a mission first articulated in the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798” (which the Supreme Court has never ruled on, although past Court opinions presumed them to be unconstitutional). Its goal is the capability to “remove all removable aliens,” including “illegal economic migrants, aliens who have committed criminal acts, asylum-seekers” and “potential terrorists.” Last year, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) division of the DHS included the pursuit of a “fugitive population of 400,000 illegal aliens ordered removed.”

http://socialistindependent.org/images/endgamecover.gif

http://www.internationalist.org/fullcitizenshiprights0604.html

The Bisbee Deportation 1917

The Bisbee Deportation of 1917 was an event specific to Arizona that influenced the labor movement throughout the United States. What started as a labor dispute between copper mining companies and their workers turned into vigilante action against the allegedly nefarious activities of the Industrial Workers of the World (I.W.W.).

"How it could have happened in a civilized country I'll never know.
This is the only country it could have happened in. As far as we're concerned, we're
still on strike!" ~ Fred Watson*

The Bisbee Deportation was still fresh in Fred Watson's mind when interviewed 60 years later. This is not surprising, because on July 12, 1917, Watson and 1,185 other men were herded into filthy boxcars by an armed vigilante force in Bisbee, Arizona, and abandoned across the New Mexico border. The Bisbee Deportation of 1917 was not only a pivotal event in Arizona's labor history, but one that had an effect on labor activities throughout the country. What led to this course of action by the Bisbee authorities?

Arizona in the early 1900s was home to huge copper mining operations. The managers and engineers controlling these mines answered primarily to eastern stockholders. During World War I, the price of copper reached unprecedented heights and the companies reaped enormous profits. By March of 1917, copper sold for $.37 a pound; it had been $.13 1/2 at the outbreak of World War I in 1914. With five thousand miners working around the clock, Bisbee was booming.

To maintain high production levels, the pool of miners was increased from an influx of southern European immigrants. Although the mining companies paid relatively high wages, working conditions for miners were no better than before the copper market crash in 1907-1908. Furthermore, the inflation caused by World War I increased living expenses and eroded any gains the miners had realized in salaries.

The mining companies controlled Bisbee, not only because they were the primary employers but because local businesses depended heavily on the mines and miners to survive. Even the local newspaper was owned by one of the major mining companies, Phelps Dodge.

Prior to 1917, union activity had repeatedly been stifled. Between 1906 and 1907, for example, about 1,200 men were fired for for supporting a union. Conversely, the Bisbee Industrial Association, an alliance that was pro-company and anti-union, was easily organized around the same time. Finally, in 1916, the International Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter (formerly the Western Federation of Miners) successfully enrolled 1,800 miners.

The Industrial Workers of the World's (I.W.W.) presence in Arizona was also increasing. Founded in 1905, the I.W.W. never recruited more than five percent of the trade unionists in the country, but many others were exposed to its ideas. Some of the I.W.W.'s tactics, such as advocating slowdowns and sabotage, were of great concern to the controlling interests. In addition, the I.W.W. adopted two successful recruiting practices. They actively recruited miners from minority groups. As a result, the IWW was particularly successful recruiting Bisbee's Mexican workers, who were routinely given lower paying jobs outside of the mine. The I.W.W. was also successful recruiting southern European immigrants, who were allowed in the mines but given lower paying jobs.

On June 24, 1917, the I.W.W. presented the Bisbee mining companies with a list of demands. These demands included improvements to safety and working conditions, such as requiring two men on each machine and an end to blasting in the mines during shifts. Demands were also made to end discrimination against members of labor organizations and the unequal treatment of foreign and minority workers. Furthermore, the unions wanted a flat wage system to replace sliding scales tied to the market price of copper. The copper companies refused all I.W.W. demands, using the war effort as justification. As a result, a strike was called, and by June 27 roughly half of the Bisbee work force was on strike.

Tensions heightened when rumors spread asserting that the unions had been infiltrated by pro-Germans. Another rumor suggested that weapons and dynamite were cached around Bisbee for sabotage. The Citizen's Protective League, an anti-union organization formed during a previous labor dispute, was resurrected by local businessmen and put under the control of Sheriff Harry Wheeler. A group of miners loyal to the mining companies also formed the Workman's Loyalty League. On July 11, secret meetings of these two so-called "vigilante groups" were held to discuss ways to deal with the strike and the strikers.

The next day, starting at 2:00 a. m., calls were made to Loyalty Leaguers as far away as Douglas, Arizona. By 5:00 a. m., about 2,000 deputies assembled. All wore white armbands to distinguish them from other mining workers. No federal or state officials were notified of the vigilantes' plans. The Western Union telegraph office was seized, preventing any communication to the town.

At 6:30 a. m., Sheriff Harry Wheeler gave orders to begin the roundup. Throughout Bisbee, men were roused from their beds, their houses, and the streets. Though armed, the vigilantes were instructed to avoid violence. However, reports of beatings, robberies, vandalism, and abuse of women later surfaced.

Two men died during the roundup. James Brew shot Loyalty Leaguer, Orson McRae, after warning McRae he would shoot anyone who attempted to take him. Brew was in turn shot and killed by men accompanying McRae.

The vigilantes rounded up over 1,000 men, many of whom were not strikers -- or even miners -- and marched them two miles to the Warren Ballpark. There they were surrounded by armed Loyalty Leaguers and urged to quit the strike. Anyone willing to put on a white armband was released. At 11:00 a. m. a train arrived, and 1,186 men were loaded aboard boxcars inches deep in manure. Also boarding were 186 armed guards; a machine gun was mounted on the top of the train. The train traveled from Bisbee to Columbus, New Mexico, where it was turned back because there were no accommodations for so many men. On its return trip the train stopped at Hermanas, New Mexico, where the men were abandoned. A later train brought water and food rations, but the men were left without shelter until July 14th when U. S. troops arrived. The troops escorted the men to facilities in Columbus. Many were detained for several months.

Meanwhile, Bisbee authorities mounted guards on all roads into town to insure that no deportees returned and to prevent new "troublemakers" from entering. A kangaroo court was also established to try other people deemed disloyal to mining interests. These people also faced deportation.

Several months after the deportation, President Woodrow Wilson set up the Federal Mediation Commission to investigate the Bisbee Deportation. The Commission discovered that no federal law applied. It referred the issue to the State of Arizona while recommending that such events be made criminal by federal statute. They did hold that the copper companies were at fault in the deportation, not the I.W.W.

The State of Arizona took no action against the copper companies. Approximately 300 deportees brought civil suits against the El Paso and Southwestern Railroad and the copper companies. None of these suits came to trial because of out-of-court settlements. Suits were also filed in state court against 224 vigilantes. Sadly, the only suit brought to trial ended in a "not guilty" verdict. The rest of the cases were dismissed.

Although efforts to organize pro-labor unions in Bisbee were crushed in 1917, the Deportation booste

d I.W.W. efforts across the country.

http://www.library.arizona.edu/exhibits/bisbee/

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Peace and Immigrants' Rights: The Militarization of Citizenship
By Jenna Loyd

When the Senate failed to pass comprehensive immigration reform in June of this year, many immigrants' rights activists were relieved. The Secure Borders, Economic Opportunity and Immigration Reform Act of 2007 promised to end the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. That historic act emphasized family unification and partially remedied the noxious national quota system that favored Europeans and disfavored people from Asian nations. Despite charges from anti-immigration advocates that this summer's bill granted 'amnesty,' it in fact promised to further criminalize US migration policy, increase the numbers of enforcement officers and detainment facilities, and place additional stumbling blocks on the path to legalization and citizenship.

Immigrants' rights and just immigration reform are imperative to the peace movement for two key reasons. First, military solutions to migration fail to resolve the social and economic forces fueling migration. To the contrary, 'domestic militarization' - in the form of border militarization and internal criminalization and policing - increases vulnerabilities to exploitation and human rights abuses while simultaneously reinforcing the xenophobic conviction that entire groups of people endanger the nation and should be kept out. This brings us to our second point. Like war, the violence of militarized solutions is justified and obscured through racism, even as charges of racism are denied by claims that the US is a nation that respects the rule of law. Treating migration as a national security issue creates internal and external enemies that shore up the popular feeling that the US is beleaguered. Such perceptions of insecurity in turn justify militarism as the key to safety. In short, just immigration reform is a fundamental part of peace and justice movements' long-term efforts to demilitarize society and craft non-violent solutions to social conflicts.

Militarized Border: A Failure of Legal and Moral Imagination

The US-Mexico border is a military spectacle that illustrates the utter failure of walls to stop the movement of people. The Southern border has been increasingly fortified since the 1930s, and particularly since the 1994 launch of Operation Gatekeeper (the same year as NAFTA). Since its creation soon after Sept. 11, 2001, the Homeland Security budget has grown dramatically with a 145% and 118% increase in spending on border security and immigration enforcement respectively. Nor has the US-Canadian border been ignored. At a recent town hall meeting, Congressman Jim Walsh, reiterated the myth that the 9/11 bombers entered the US across a lax Canadian border. This myth informs hard-line immigration restriction advocates who want 'enforcement first' before any change in visa policies or paths to legalization and citizenship for the approximately 12 million people living here without legal status. Yet border militarization has not decreased the numbers of people entering the US. In fact, fortifying the US-Mexico border has forced migrants to cross in more treacherous environs and use exploitative human smugglers. In the ten years following Operation Gatekeeper, deaths of migrants increased from 57 deaths in 1994 to some 422 deaths in 2003.

Since last spring's historic nationwide mobilizations of immigrants and their supporters, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has dramatically stepped up its raids, a number of which have been conducted in Central New York. While ICE claims their efforts are directed at people with criminal warrants, the vast majority of those who have been picked up have been those with civil immigration violations, that is, simply being here without proper papers. Once arrested these people are detained in city and county jails or ICE facilities, where many are put on the 'fast track' to deportation. According to the Detention Watch Network, 84% of people in ICE cells (at a cost of $1 billion annually) receive no legal counsel. This imprisonment nightmare is a result of the selective criminalization of immigration law. In short, since the mid-1980s Congress has been lengthening the list of immigration offenses yet migrants charged under these laws are not guaranteed the legal protections afforded for criminal cases, including state-provided legal counsel, prohibition of double jeopardy, and proof beyond a reasonable doubt. Last year's Sensenbrenner bill promised to step up the criminalization of migration policy by turning the civil violation of undocumented presence in the United States into an aggravated felony. Felony convictions make it impossible to become a US citizen.

Brown Terrorists: The Criminalization of Immigrants

The trend to criminalize migration is part of the 20+ year fury of what prison abolitionist Ruthie Gilmore calls domestic militarization. Since the early 1980s the prison population has skyrocketed some 400% to over 2.1 million today. Cages are being used as fixes for the systematic failure to fund social welfare and education services and respond to structural joblessness induced by global economic shifts. This fix simultaneously establishes new grounds for asserting white privilege in ever more precarious times. Inaugurated by Richard Nixon, the Right's appeal to 'law-and-order' worked to contain the powerful peace and freedom movements of the 1960s, which had cracked Jim Crow and won a series of social welfare entitlements.

Three pieces of Clinton-era legislation are important for understanding how immigrants also have been ensnared. The Illegal Immigrant Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA) expanded the list of crimes resulting in deportation and stripped immigrants charged with certain crimes of some basic legal rights. The Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA) requires mandatory detention for any immigrant charged with a crime with a jail time penalty of one year or longer, and applies retroactively. In the very same year as these bills, the destruction of welfare was accomplished by mobilizing the potent icons of the "black welfare queen" and the "acquisitive Mexican immigrant" as scapegoats for growing economic insecurity. Taken together with Clinton's so-called welfare reform, these laws further consolidated a perfect storm of white supremacist, anti-poor legislation, which has acted as a veritable dragnet for working class African American, Latino young people, as well as poor white folks.

Thus, the all too easy conflation of immigrant with "criminal" or "terrorist" is enabled by the equally facile treatment of people of color - regardless of citizenship - as criminals. Questioning and opposing the criminalization of migrants also means questioning and opposing the criminalization of entire groups of US citizens.

Feminist and anti-militarist Cynthia Enloe explains that the militarization of citizenship occurs in conditions in which the military promises to meet everyday needs (such as housing, health care, and a college education) that otherwise are not universally available. Despite the US' shrinking welfare state and growing wealth inequalities, US citizenship itself remains valuable. As the African American enlistment rate has plummeted since the early 1980s, the military has turned its attention to recruiting Latinos, including offering citizenship to immigrants seeking legal status. As Iraq war resister and immigrant Camilo Mejia explains, war and the global economic system that creates the poverty-driving migration are the "same struggle, the same injustice." Thus, in tandem with the continued destruction of public social services and stringent immigration restrictions, the militarizat

ion of citizenship takes two distinct, but related, forms: martialization, or the 'poverty draft,' and criminalization, or mass incarceration. Military service confers privileges while criminalization strips citizenship rights, but both trends are rooted in sharpened hierarchies of race and class.

Immigrants' Rights are Human Rights

Demilitarizing US society is a fundamental aspect of the long term effort to forge nonviolent solutions to social conflicts. Immigrants' rights are important for peace activism because just treatment of immigrants undercuts the scapegoating and xenophobia that justify military solutions. The common belief that immigrants are to blame for overtaxed health and education services diverts attention from war and the vast sums of tax dollars devoted to building military infrastructures around the world, from border fences to prison cells.

Peace and social justice activists have done well to criticize the racism fueling the war on terror, anti-immigrant sentiment, and the prison industrial complex. But we need to be able to connect the dots among these apparently separate issues in order to fully appreciate how militarization and racism support one another. Thinking about the militarization of citizenship allows us to do this. We are talking about deadly struggles over who is and who is not a legitimate part of the citizenry. Disenfranchisement of felons and the creation of 'illegal' humans are both legal tools that strip political power from entire groups of people in the service of institutionalized racial and class hierarchy. Opposing the ideologies and legal tools that create internal and external enemies is a necessary part of the peace agenda.

http://www.peacecouncil.net/pnl/07/767/767immigrant.htm

The Children of Postville, Iowa

Shuya Ohno, Director of Communication for the Massachusetts Immigrant and Refugee Advocacy Coalition, flew into Iowa this weekend to help with the aftermath of the largest raid in the U.S. history. The New Bedford raid wasn't too far behind.


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My fingers ache trying to type out this entry because there is so much that is wrong here. Postville, Iowa, truly became POSTville after 389 people were yanked out of town with only 2,273 people in it. What about the employers you say? No officials at Agriprocessors have been charged.

But these migrants were bringing down wages for U.S. citizens you say? The United Food and Commercial workers were actually in the process of trying to unionize people at the plant. There was also government investigation of labor law violations under way which probably would have resulted in officials at Agriprocessors being charged.

But this fight isn't about statistics, or the law. This is a cultural war. This is attrition through enforcement. Nativists want migrants to suffer and the U.S. government is carrying out their wishes. That's why I ask any nativist reading this to look into the faces of the children above. These children have done nothing to deserve the suffering that you wish upon them. The only sin their parents committed was to pursue happiness in a nation that refuses to recognize their humanity.

Read this from the Washington Post:


Half of the school system's 600 students were absent Tuesday, including 90 percent of Hispanic children, because their parents were arrested or in hiding.

Spencer S. Hsu - Washington Post (18 May 2008)

As is always the case, most of these 300 now missing students were probably U.S. citizens. These children are not going away. They will grow up and remember the terror that the U.S. government put them through. Terror that other U.S. citizens stood by and watched.

Kurt Ulrich's article in the Chicago Tribune actually spoke the most to me after the Iowa raids. There are no statistics, it doesn't even really state a position. It just describes the scene at Electric Park Ballroom in Waterloo, Iowa, where migrants are being processed.


At the Electric Park Ballroom in Waterloo, Iowa, on a recent May day the only dancing being done was what you might call the "shackle shuffle." Those doing the shuffle are detainees of the U.S. government, all workers at a kosher meat processing plant in nearby Postville. Charged by the feds with either: 1) "making false representations about Social Security numbers," 2) "aggravated identity theft" or both, 390 workers were arrested. More arrests are promised, as 697 criminal complaints and arrest warrants have been issued thus far.

The latest, and reportedly largest ever, Immigration sweep was undertaken this week by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency here in Iowa, of all places. It seems that the good folks who own and operate AgriProcessors in Postville have been routinely and systematically hiring illegal immigrants to work in their plant. In the time I spent watching prisoners being "processed," I didn't see a single owner or representative of the company. My guess is their wing-tipped lawyers will claim they didn't know that half their workforce was here illegally.

Dark and bleak, the ballroom is set up as a makeshift courtroom, complete with seating in the back for the public and the curious. Detainees are being housed nearby in the large building on the grounds of the National Cattle Congress. Judges preside from the center of the dance floor, robed and imperial. The place is depressing, smelling of decades of cheap beer, cheaper cigarettes, and unbridled lust. Flaglike, a red, white and blue Bud Light sign hangs in a window on the west side.

Wrists manacled in front, ankles shackled, detainees shuffle in 10 at a time. Heads down, mostly, they are fitted with plastic headsets for translation purposes and then seated facing the judge. Federal Judge Linda Reade is respectful, almost pleasant, not an easy task in an environment filled with government men and women with 9 mm handguns on their hips. The detainees seem to appreciate her demeanor. Handed a copy of the complaint against them, they soon hear the standard litany from Judge Reade: "You have the right to remain silent . . . and anything you say can and will likely be used against you." At those words three detainees in one group, Aurelio Hernandez-Lopez, Silvestre Pena-Chavez and Antonio Perez, look up, but express zero emotion. No translation needed. Most of them are young men and they seem to know that all they can do is sit silently as they watch their lives slide from view.

Back in tiny Postville, others are likely packing, or already gone, gone to wherever it is folks go who don't want to be found. Clearly many thought Iowa was that place. Electric Park Ballroom is a place where young Iowans have been showing up for decades, a place for live music. It's the kind of place your mother warns you about, where evangelicals say the windows are shaded to cover the sin. But it's not the worst place in town, so generally it's OK. Oh sure, a few police calls and bloodied noses in the parking lot over the years, but you get that on warm testosterone-laden nights in towns where there isn't much to do.

Holding thick files, lawyers in charcoal suits sit at tables, keeping watch over their flocks of 10. Multiple burly ICE agents border collie the detainees in and out, seldom speaking, pointing mostly. Ten more shuffle in, followed by 10 more, and 10 more. It seems never-ending.

None of the manacled shufflers is from anywhere like oh, say Denmark or Canada. They come from places like Guatemala and Mexico, here in search of the Promised Land.

There are questions to be asked here but I fear the answers, so I don't ask, content to squirm in a sort of rolling ambivalence about our Immigration policies.

Ancient, dust-covered 12-inch public address speakers hang from the ceiling in the half-light of the old ballroom. I half expect to hear the plaintive voice of Roy Orbison singing something fitting, like "Running Scared," or maybe Johnny Cash singing the blues about being incarcerated in a place called Folsom Prison. Cash captured it nicely when he sang, "I bet there's rich folks eating in a fancy dining car. They're probably drinkin' coffee and smoking big cigars. Well, I know I had it coming, I know I can't be free."

Kurt Ulrich - Chicago Tribune (16 May 2008)

http://www.citizenorange.com/orange/2008/05/the-children-of-postville-iowa.html#more

Immigration Officials Turn to Schoolyard Bullying

Corinne Ramey

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials in California have stooped to a new, almost unbelievable low: intimidating schoolchildren.

Allow me to state the obvious: schools should be safe. And they should feel safe for the kids, their parents, and the teachers and staff who work there. But for the students at four Oakland schools and Berkley High School on Wednesday, school felt anything but safe. That day, rumors spread throughout the schools that ICE were nearby, possibly planning raids at the schools. Parents text-messaged their kids, warning them that ICE agents were close by so that the undocumented parents couldn't come to the schools to pick their children up. The Berkley school district became so overwhelmed with calls that they set up an automated voice message for parents, which according to the San Francisco Chronicle, stated that the administration would "not allow any child to be taken away from the school." The schools -- including Stonehurst Elementary, where immigration officials were parked across the street -- became a panic scene. Undocumented parents called friends and neighbors, asking them to pick up their children since the parents were afraid to come near the school. ICE spokespeople claimed that their intention was not to raid the schools but rather to make arrests at nearby locations.

Unfortunately, yesterday's Berkley and Oakland cases are not isolated incidents. ICE agents have routinely engaged in intimidation of workers -- both documented and undocumented -- and students. In Tucson, Arizona, a 17-year-old undocumented student at Catalina High Magnet School was arrested for possession of marijuana. Police came to the school, and then called the Border Control. When Border Control found out that the student was undocumented, they deported his father, who returned to Mexico accompanied by his wife and two sons.

The incident created an outrage in the school and community. The teenagers quoted in the Tucson Citizen article about the event state the facts that the adults around were apparently missing. "We think that shouldn't be allowed, because school is where we're supposed to be safe," said 16-year-old Mario Portillo. "No matter if you're an illegal alien, you have the right to an education." Eighteen-year-old Jorge Guerrero asked the somewhat obvious question, "How can we learn if we've scared the Border Patrol is going to come for us?" Araceli Sanchez, 14, said that she knew that the arrested student and his family were undocumented, but said that "he was just another student." And it was up to 14-year-old Ener Lopez to state the really obvious. "We should be safe in school," he said. Following a protest by more than 100 students in front of the Tucson Police Department headquarters, Tucson police have said that they will no longer call U.S. Border Patrol into schools or churches.

More recently, ICE agents in the raided 11 Taqueria El Balazo restaurants in the Bay Area, detaining 63 immigrant workers, including two 17-year-olds and a 15-year-old. Given the recent May Day protests by immigrant rights groups, it's unlikely that the timing of the raid was a mere coincidence. As Larisa Casillas, director of Bay Area Immigrant Rights Coalition, said, “I don’t think it is a coincidence that this happened a day after May Day. It wreaks havoc on the community." She sees the target as a strategic one. “When they hit a popular taqueria with a series of raids it sends a message, and our message back is that we need immigration reform. These are people who are working and contributing to the economic health of our region,” she said.

Casillas, I think, hits the nail on the head. Not only are these incidents -- both the school and taqueria raids -- likely part of a purposeful campaign to intimidate the Latino community, but in both cases the intimidation is bad not just for undocumented workers but for their communities at large. School raids cause widespread fear among students, parents, and teachers, and, at the very least, cause serious disruption in the ability of students to learn and feel safe in what should be a guaranteed safe environment. And, as Casillas says, immigrants -- even undocumented ones -- are vital to the economies of the regions where they live.

Immigrants make up 15% of the civilian workforce, and account for half of the labor force growth in the past 10 years, according to a White House report. They pay a significant amount of taxes and produce goods and provide services that are vital to the American middle class. They're vital to keeping our social security system afloat, pumping $6-7 billion a year into the Social Security system, most of which they can't claim because of their immigrant status. According to the same White House report, immigrants increase the earnings and productivity of native-born workers a significant amount, estimated at $37 billion a year. The bottom line is, decent, humane treatment of immigrants isn't just good for immigrants -- it's good for the current and aspiring American middle class.

This kind of conduct by ICE is incredibly destructive to families as well. If schools continue to be a scene of ICE intimidation, undocumented parents are less likely to send their native-born children to school, fearing that raids could result in families being deported. With immigrant families already being hit hard by the current recession and recent crackdowns on undocumented workers -- according to a recent Times article, remittances to Latin America have dropped significantly, yet another sign of the economic squeeze on immigrant families -- worries about deportation because of their kids attending schools are the last thing that immigrant families need.

Notably, it's not all bad. When reading news reports of the raids, in between all the eye-rolling at the fairly inane things that ICE agents said, I've been impressed by how supportive mayors and local officials have been of immigrant rights. "In my view, that is the ugly side of government," Oakland Mayor Ron Dellums said. "No way children should ever be treated to that kind of harassment and fear." Mayor Dellum said that Oakland should be free from raids. "As a sanctuary city," Dellums said, "we're all in unison. We don't want this type of intimidation. Immigrants are human beings, and need to be dealt with respect." Vice Mayor Larry Reid said that local officials were never told about the raids. "ICE just rolls in and tells our police department after the fact," he said. "The students are upset and crying. The school's administration said some of the kids are very shook up."

These local officials get it. When will ICE and the Border Control figure out that schoolyard bullying isn't an effective -- or humane, for that matter -- route to immigration reform?

http://www.dmiblog.com/archives/2008/05/immigration_officials_turn_to.html

Deported in a Coma

GILA BEND, Ariz. — Soon after Antonio Torres, a husky 19-year-old farmworker, suffered catastrophic injuries in a car accident last June, a Phoenix hospital began making plans for his repatriation to Mexico.

Mr. Torres was comatose and connected to a ventilator. He was also a legal immigrant whose family lives and works in the purple alfalfa fields of this southwestern town. But he was uninsured. So the hospital disregarded the strenuous objections of his grief-stricken parents and sent Mr. Torres on a four-hour journey over the California border into Mexicali.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/09/us/09deport.html

ICE raids on immigrants meet quick resistance
Union and community fightbacks around the country check government offensive

by Monica Hill

Has La Migra gone berserk! Renamed Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, it is on the warpath, terrorizing as many immigrant workers and their families as possible.

Why? They are not terrorists or human traffickers. They are workers. U.S. Congress and companies want to force immigrants into guest-worker programs where they become “guests” in the U.S. and are entirely dependent upon their employer.

Raids and roadblocks are exploding everywhere, especially in small towns where there are fewer people to raise the alarm and counter-organize. But outraged community activists, unions and civil liberty groups are putting the federal government’s feet to the fire anyway. Here are just a few of the stories.

Iowa protest. One thousand marchers took to the streets in July to denounce ICE raids and hideous labor conditions at the Agriprocessors meatpacking plant in Postville, Iowa — population 2,500. In May, ICE arrested 389 workers, tricked them into pleading guilty to criminal charges, and deported them to Guatemala.

United Food and Commercial Workers was in a union drive when the raid took place. Now, the company wants the U.S. Supreme Court to reverse its 1984 ruling that undocumented workers are protected by the National Labor Relations Act.

Many of the marchers came from Chicago and Minneapolis. Law professors and the union exposed the lack of due process and unionbusting tactics in special Congressional hearings. Somali workers with refugee documents were hired as replacements and are reporting the same plant atrocities. They are not alone in their struggle as the union and local immigrant rights activists continue to organize.

Virginia and Maryland rallies. The National Capital Immigrant Coalition (NCIC) was quick to respond to two more attacks by picketing ICE’s office in Fairfax, Virginia, rallying in Baltimore and holding press conferences. NCIC demanded that ICE let detainees talk to lawyers, and not be jailed miles from home. In both cases, ICE charged them with immigration violations, not crimes. The Feds apparently learned after Postville’s protests to be less cavalier about inventing criminal charges and denying due process.

Mississippi fightback. In August, Mississippi Immigrants Rights Alliance (MIRA) warned that ICE was circling above — readying courtrooms and reserving hotel space. MIRA assembled attorneys and identified possible raid targets. Employees at Howard Industries, producing electrical equipment in the small town of Laurel, turned out to be the mark. Nearly 600 were detained in the largest single-plant raid in history.

The International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers union was negotiating an expired contract at Laurel when ICE hit, and many immigrants had begun to join the union. Said Jim Evans of the Mississippi legislature’s Black Caucus, the ICE invasion was “an attempt to drive a wedge between immigrants, African Americans, white people and unions.”

Checkpoints in Washington. Residents of the Olympic Peninsula were incensed when they learned in late August that the U.S. Border Patrol had set up highway roadblocks, and arrested and deported a 15-year-old, and an 18-year-old who had been in the U.S. since infancy. Within days, nearly 100 people demonstrated their dissent in Forks, a logging town of 3,200 where the boys lived.

Soon, there were more arrests and entire communities living under a cloud of fear. Port Angeles Radical Women called a meeting and scores showed up from Port Townsend, Sequim, Forks and Port Angeles to plan a rally and march for September 20. Native Monica Charles of the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe told the crowd, “This is a test case. If they can get away with these checkpoints here on the Peninsula, they will try it everywhere.”

Union resolve. Indispensable in the defense of immigrant workers are unions. Organized Workers for Labor Solidarity (OWLS), multiracial, multicultural labor activists in Seattle, wrote a profoundly humane and encompassing resolution in defense of immigrant rights. It pulls no punches. Several union locals passed it, as well as did the state convention of the Washington State Labor Council. San Francisco and Los Angeles locals have also approved it. The full text of this powerful organizing and educational tool is available at www.wslc.org/2007res.htm#5.

http://www.socialism.com/fsarticles/vol29no5/ICEraids.html

An Unfolding Crisis in the Wake of Mississippi ICE Raid
The workplace raid at the Howard Industries electronics plant in Laurel, Miss., was the largest in U.S. history

By Kari Lydersen

On Aug. 25, federal agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raided the Howard Industries electronics factory in Laurel, Miss., taking into custody 592 immigrant workers—the largest single workplace raid in U.S. history.

But as in Postville, Iowa, New Bedford, Mass. and other sites of recent massive workplace raids, local immigrants and advocates say the real story is only now unfolding, as the waves of fear unleashed by the raids ripple throughout the community.

The story of Maria Ramirez (not her real name) is sadly typical. On the morning of Aug. 25, Ramirez received a frenzied phone call from a friend, who informed her of the raid at Howard Industries, where her 18-year-old daughter “Ana” had been working for two weeks. Maria had come to the United States three years earlier, fleeing an abusive drug-addicted husband. She left Ana home in Vera Cruz to care for her two other children, a son who is now 11 and a daughter now eight.

“But Mexico is so poor, she couldn’t earn enough there to put food in their mouths, they needed money to buy things for school,” says Maria, who was sending money home from her job at a Mississippi office.

Ana pleaded with her mother to bring her to the United States for one year, so she could work and save money before returning to Mexico for college.

“She said, ‘I want to see you, I want to be with you,’” says Maria.

Maria paid coyotes $5,000 to take Ana across the desert and then to Mississippi, where Maria helped set Ana up with fake documents. Within a week, Ana had secured a job at Howard Industries, a leading manufacturer of electrical transformers.

Ana had ended her 12-hour night shift just before the raid by ICE agents, narrowly escaping the fate of hundreds of workers—from Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, Panama, El Salvador, Peru, Brazil and even Germany—who were held in a room in the factory for up to 13 hours, according to workers, without being able to talk to their families.

ICE spokesman Brandon Alvarez-Montgomery disputes that charge, saying the agency made several efforts to insure families could communicate with the detained.

“ICE (myself included) contacted everyone from the Governor’s office, the Mayor’s office, all major community groups and NGOs while onsite that morning, to provide a toll free number to call for status and updates on individuals being detained and where they were being sent or held,” he says. “We spoke to church leaders and NGOs who came to the site to give them reassurances and direct them on what they needed to do. There should be no reason that any advocate group could state we did not explain or assist in providing continued updated information throughout the day and following days on the status of those being questioned or ultimately detained.”

Ultimately, eight people were charged with aggravated identity theft, which could mean up to two years in prison and a $250,000 fine, and were turned over to U.S. marshals. Another 469 were charged with administrative violations and are being held in the LaSalle Detention Center in Jena, La. For humanitarian reasons, an additional 106 were not detained, released instead with electronic monitoring anklets pending court dates. Nine juveniles were turned over to the federal Office of Refugee Resettlement.

“Elena,” 40, is one of the workers at home with an anklet while she waits to learn her fate. She worked at Howard for two and a half years, and lost the tips of two fingers in an accident there. She believes she didn’t receive quality care because the doctor treating her accused her of being “illegal.”

“I’m here because of necessity,” she says. She sends money to her sick mother back in Mexico, and she is also the sole caregiver of her U.S.-born grandson, since her son is in jail. If Elena is deported back to Coahuila, Mexico, she is afraid she won’t be able to find a job because of her age and her hand injury.

“In Mexico there are no opportunities to get work, and for single women like me it is even harder,” she says. “At my age you can’t get work in Mexico. I don’t know what I’ll do.”

“Julia” is also confined with an anklet pending her Sept. 24 trial date, and was unable to seek medical care when she had an asthma attack. She thinks conditions in the factory aggravated her asthma.

“(The factory has) terrible working conditions,” she says. “It’s dirty work, heavy work, and so hot you start sweating the moment you walk in. Sometimes you can’t breath.”

She came to the United States from Pueblo, Mexico, four years ago to earn money to support four kids in Mexico and a two-year-old son here. She fears being deported because the father of her children is abusive; she still bears a scar by her eye from one of his attacks.

“The responsibility of all the women here is great, because we all have kids in Mexico,” she says. “That’s why we come here, out of necessity, not because we want to. We don’t want to make this our country, we just want to stay for a time and earn money.”

So far no charges have been filed against Howard Industries, where a spokesman declined to comment. Alvarez-Montgomery says ICE will gather evidence about the company’s practices based on interviews with immigrant detainees, and says that “if there is evidence against supervisors, owners, or the company in general, the information will be turned over to the U.S. Attorney’s office in Jacksonville for consideration. It’s up to them at that point if they will pursue criminal charges against the employer.”

Alvarez-Montgomery disputes the charges of local and national immigrants’ advocacy groups that the raid involved excessive force and intimidation.

“The operation was carried out with the utmost professionalism, it was orderly and everyone complied to ICE directives onsite,” he says. “The length of time those had to wait to be questioned and processed was due to the large number detained. ICE takes the time to interview and discuss each person’s individual situation (to determine humanitarian concerns) and provide each individual with due process of the law. If we hurried through it, we would be criticized there too.”

Marie Thompson, director of the MPOWER Workers Center in Morton, Miss., notes that Howard seems an unusual site for an immigration raid, since they have typically occurred at slaughterhouses, poultry operations and other workplaces that employ a majority of immigrants. Howard, by contrast, employs many white people and African Americans along with Latino immigrants.

But Howard does share one trait with the factories in Postville, New Bedford and Butler County, Ohio, that also underwent major raids: Ongoing strife over working conditions, either in the form of union negotiations and organizing, or investigations into labor abuses.

Howard Industries is currently involved in contract negotiations with the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) Local 1317 union, which has represented workers since 2000. (Since Mississippi is a “right to work state,” workers decide individually whether to join the union.) The local was demanding better pay and benefits. The federal government also fined Howard $123,000 in June for health and safety violations at the plant.

“It is an interesting pattern: Four of the last major raids had a similar situation where union negotiations were going on or workers rights violations were being investigated,” says Kristin Kumpf, assistant director of organizing at the Chicago-based national group Interfaith Worker Justice (IWJ). “Of course, a lot of these companies pr

obably have workers rights violations being investigated at any given time, but from having had conversations with ICE officials about how they choose their priorities…I believe the correlation is real.”

Alvarez-Montgomery says the agency cannot disclose how it decides where to prioritize enforcement. He says the Howard Industries investigation was triggered by a call from a union member and other factors.

Workers claim there is much anti-immigrant sentiment at the plant. During the raid, African American workers were laughing, cheering and mocking them, Elena and Julia said.

“I felt like the most humiliated person in the world,” Elena says. “There are mostly good people here, but there are some who make sure we feel unwelcome.”

Julia says non-immigrants generally work shorter shifts and lighter jobs than the immigrants.

“There’s so much racism here,” she says. “It’s not just.”

Mississippi has a state law making working while undocumented a felony punishable by up to five years in prison. It is not clear if that law will be invoked in the case of the Howard workers. Regardless, hundreds of those workers are likely to be sent back to their home countries or to jail and prison.

In the meantime, Ana and Maria Ramirez don’t know what they will do. They are terrified of going back to work or even leaving the all-Latino apartment complex where they live. They are the only providers for the two kids back in Vera Cruz, so Maria may soon go back to Mexico. But she is still afraid of her husband, who twice beat her so badly she was hospitalized.

“I was fleeing him when I came here,” she says. “He hit me, abused me sexually, I was always in tears. He will still look for me, he thinks he owns me. I’m afraid of immigration (agents) here, and back in Mexico I’m afraid of him.”

The Howard plant sits in the midst of a rural area drawing workers from dispersed surrounding communities. Unlike other towns subjected to raids with tight-knit local communities and advocacy groups, Howard workers have had little in the way of a support system other than local churches hard-pressed to meet the ongoing needs. The Mississippi Immigrants Rights Alliance (MIRA) has arranged legal representation and other support for workers, but ots resources aren’t enough. Elena says MIRA is providing her a lawyer but she hadn’t talked to one yet. Julia had no lawyer, since she was told it would cost $1,500.

Thompson notes that the workers center and churches are scrambling for donations to help feed families and pay their utility bills. Many families have doubled and tripled up in houses, as they wait to learn the fates of their loved ones.

“No matter which side of the immigration issue you are on, we have a humanitarian emergency down here,” says Thompson. “There’s an entire state fearful of stepping out their doors.”


from In These Times

In Idaho:

One family with members who are U.S. citizens and legal permanent residents said they were terrified by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents who came to their home in the predawn hours accompanied by Blaine County sheriff's deputies. No one in their home was arrested.

"They pounded on my door so hard that my walls shook," Dana Ayala, a Wood River Valley resident and U.S. citizen, told the Idaho Community Action Network. "My 19-year-old son opened the door to see what was happening, and six agents armed with guns, Tasers and flashlights pushed their way into my home."

... "It is clear that ICE agents terrorized the community, including U.S. citizen children who were sleeping when the raid occurred," said Leo Morales, a community organizer for ICAN. "In several homes, children were left crying as ICE agents interrogated parents and hauled them away.

Testimonies gathered on Tuesday also indicated that in several instances ICE agents walked into the home looking for individuals not living there, then arrested the people in the home with no proof of immigration status.

In some instances, federal agents rushed into the house when a child opened the door."


Arlington Heights, Ill.:

On the morning of Feb. 27, ICE agents swept into the Cano Packaging Corporation in Arlington Heights, Ill., a mostly middle class, white suburb 25 miles from Chicago. The agents arrested the undocumented immigrants who had been hired by a temporary staffing agency to work at Cano. The nine men and eight women were then bused to a jail, which also serves as a regional immigration detention facility.

Maria de Carmen Santana says she was invasively strip-searched, and told the process was a search for hidden drugs. She was handcuffed so tightly that it left marks on her wrists, she says, and she was unable to get pain medication for severe tendonitis in her ankle.

“It was disgusting how we were treated,” Santana, 46, says in Spanish. “We aren’t murderers. We aren’t drug addicts. Our only crime is being here to work without papers.”

One woman alleges she was denied medical help while vomiting, and another when suffering an intense migraine. An ailing diabetic man was forced to do exercises as punishment for not making his bed. Detainees say the facility’s meal portions left them extremely hungry, and a guard threw out fruit that detainee Leonel Trujillo had stashed in his cell.


Arkadelphia, Ark.:

On Tuesday, July 26, between 30 and 35 children, some as young as three months old, were left stranded when federal agents arrested 119 immigrant workers at the Petit Jean Poultry plant in Arkadelphia, Arkansas. No provisions were made for these children as their parents were carted 70 miles away to a detention center to await deportation.

Many of these families, now forcibly torn apart, had lived and worked at the company for years. Of those detained, 115 were from Mexico, two were from Honduras and the other two were from El Salvador and Guatemala.

This surprise raid caught the town’s mayor, the Clark County sheriff, and the plant manager by surprise, and no provisions were made to care for the children or to alert relatives. The federal agents failed to even contact the Department of Human Services, the agency that is usually responsible for abandoned children.

“A lot of those families had kids in day care in different places, and they didn’t know why Mommy and Daddy didn’t come pick them up,” Arkadelphia Mayor Charles Hollingshead told the Associated Press.

An Immigration and Customs Enforcement spokesman claimed Friday that every one of the immigrants had lied to the agents, telling them they had no children. He later changed his story, admitting that the detainees did tell the agents that they had children left behind. Still, the agents did not allow the detainees to contact their families to make arrangements for their children.

Jose Luis Vidal told the Associated Press that his sister and brother-in-law left behind children aged ten, five and one when they were deported to Laredo, Mexico.


New Bedford, Mass.:

The heads of three state agencies appeared before the Joint Committee on Children, Families and Persons with Disabilities to discuss the impact of the March 6raid on New Bedford's children. ...

The raid on Michael Bianco Inc., in which 361 immigrants were arrested, had a huge ripple effect across the immigrant community, according to state officials. Eighty-four children in New Bedford were directly affected by the raid, losing one or both of their parents. Children were left in the care of aunts, uncles, baby-sitters and even landlords. One baby was hospitalized for dehydration after being separated from its nursing mother.

Gov. Deval Patrick has called the raid's impact on families a "humanitarian crisis."

And the trauma is continuing, according to Dennis Gauthier, head of the DSS office in New Bedford.

His agency discovered two days ago that a 16-year-old girl, "living in fear," had been cared for by a landlord for the past two weeks.

DSS has also placed three teenagers who were swept up in the raid in foster care, he said, because ICE would not allow them to be released to parents who are illegal immigrants.

DSS is still pressing ICE to release 10 parents to care for children, including the mother of a 4-year old boy who is not eating and is severely underweight.

"This child needs his mother back," said Mr. Spence, noting that the child is living with his father. "This child is not safe. This child is at risk. Release the mother with a monitoring bracelet, that's what we've asked."


Marshalltown, Iowa:

Like the March 6 raid on the Michael Bianco Inc. leather goods factory in New Bedford, in which more than 300 workers were arrested, the Swift operation left some children stranded for hours, and many others in the care of friends and relatives. ICE flew many detainees to an out-of-state federal detention facility before immigrants' advocates had a chance to speak with them about their children. Some detainees were not initially honest with ICE investigators about whether they had children, fearing they, too, would be taken into custody even though some of those children were US citizens.

And like the New Bedford raid, the Swift raids drew harsh criticism from the governor, who criticized ICE's limited cooperation with state officials, including its refusal to release information in a timely fashion on who was detained and where.

Immigration raids nationwide have increased in recent months. Scenes similar to those in New Bedford and Marshalltown have played out in cities like Worthington, Minn., and Stillmore, Ga., where a poultry plant was raided last Labor Day. In Santa Fe, 30 undocumented workers were arrested in a raid in February, and Mayor David Coss said he was outraged that "families are being torn apart, literally."


Richmond, Calif.:

In and around Richmond, Calif., 119 people were arrested in January in a series of raids by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE. Richmond Mayor Gail McLaughlin said that although authorities characterized those arrested as "criminals and gang bangers," only 18 had criminal convictions.

"I was shocked and disgusted," she said. "The overwhelming majority of their sweeps arrested hard-working men, mothers and school children."

Demographers say about half of working-age illegal immigrants in the United States have children, most of whom are U.S.-born and therefore citizens. Non-profit groups are helpin

g these families prepare for the worst.

Immigrant parents are signing forms designating who should get custody of their children if they're detained or deported. Often, that means a relative with legal status.


This is just a sampling, of course. Now try to imagine, if you will, these kinds of nightmares being amplified by a factor of a half-million or more.

... I know it's hard to imagine such a thing. Because we all know that as the push to search out all 12 million intensifies, so will the ugliness of the raids.

And let's not forget that rounding people up is only the beginning: There is, fortunately, such a thing as due process in America, even for non-citizens, which means that each one of these 10 to 12 million people will have to have their cases reviewed. In the meantime, they'll have to be placed in detention centers.

When you're talking about 100,000 people a day, you're talking numbers well beyond the capacity of any current holding facility or detention center operating in America. And because the need will be ostensibly short-term, that means we'll almost certainly once again be building temporary mass detention centers -- otherwise known as concentration camps.

http://dneiwert.blogspot.com/2007/12/huckabees-120-days.html

Postville Remembered

One year ago today, hundreds of ICE agents descended on the Agriprocessors meatpacking plant in Postville, Iowa, and arrested nearly 400 workers. The nearby Cattle Congress fairground was revamped to process migrants. The prosecutors and judge were already prepared, the plea bargains in place, one public defender for up to 17 defendants, little immigration representation to speak of was permitted--this was true assembly line justice. Under threat of two-year sentences for harsh aggravated identity theft charges, with indefinite detention for any who contested the charges, almost all the workers took the 5-month plea sentences they were offered and were then deported.

The most damning account of the Postville debacle is still Erik Camayd-Freixas's (pdf) inside view (http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2008/07/14/opinion/14ed-camayd.pdf)--as a federal interpreter during the proceedings, he could not keep silent after what he saw.

The legal theory behind the Postville prosecutions has been rejected by a unanimous Supreme Court. Some of us have wondered whether such dubious prosecutions should be rewarded with promotions.

The raids weren't very good for the citizens of Postville, either. Marcelo Ballvé recently took a close look at how the raids hit the town hard just before the worst recession in 70 years. Not long after the raids, I wrote about two people I heard speak who were involved in the aftermath.

And David Leopold publishes a letter from one family ripped apart by the raids, and shares some thoughts on what Postville means for America.

A Year Without a Mexican


Undocumented workers were the economic lifeblood of small towns like Postville, Iowa—until the immigration cops showed up.
—By Marcelo Ballvé

It all began with the whir and flicker of helicopters on May 12, 2008, an incongruous sound in a tiny Iowa town tucked amid cornfields. All over Postville, people craned their necks from orderly lawns, phones rang, and gossip flew. Reverend Stephen Brackett, the town's Lutheran pastor, was on his day off and didn't hear the helicopters at first, but when his church secretary called to tell him something unusual was happening, he at once suspected what it was. For years, there were rumors that the Agriprocessors meatpacking plant at the edge of town was under scrutiny by immigration authorities. Later that morning, Brackett's wife called with confirmation: She'd spotted two helicopters and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents in jackets and flak vests down by the slaughterhouse.

Brackett quickly drove to the hulking plant, which had been cordoned off by scores of ICE agents, state troopers, and sheriff's deputies. The authorities soon began to emerge from the building escorting workers, hundreds in all, and many in shackles. Mostly Guatemalan and Mexican immigrants, they were loaded onto white buses emblazoned with the Homeland Security logo, and taken away for detention and trial. Watching from the safety of his car, the bespectacled, redheaded pastor knew the day would mark a low point in Postville's history. "It's like saying we'll take the 15-plus years of progress that we've made trying to gel this community together," Brackett told me, "and overnight we'll throw that away."

Indeed, the 389 arrests eliminated more than one-third of the meatpacker's workforce and nearly one-fifth of the town's population. It also prompted an exodus of hundreds more Hispanic residents who were either afraid of being targeted or simply opted to escape the town's inevitable tailspin. Postville's businesses began to suffer almost immediately. Even the Wal-Mart in Decorah, a half-hour away, called Postville mayor Robert Penrod with concerns about the economic impact. Penrod, who stepped down as mayor this month, can recall an eerie calm settling over the town, as though it were part of some Twilight Zone episode. "Before, it was all hustle bustle, and you'd see people walking up and down the streets and driving and listening to music," he told me. "Then all of a sudden, boom! I mean nobody was walking the streets."

Harder to quantify, but no less real, was the damage to an unusual multicultural experiment in America's heartland. It had begun back in 1987 when ultra-Orthodox Jews came to Postville to turn the defunct Hygrade plant into the nation's largest kosher meatpacker, which promptly became a beacon for immigrant labor. Postville proudly dubbed itself "Hometown to the World," and despite the company's recent attempts to recruit legal replacement workers from as far away as Palau, the motto has acquired an ironic ring. Ten months after the raid, the meatpacker, having declared bankruptcy, was operating at half-steam with a ragtag assembly of workers, and the town's economy remains a shambles. Back in October, Mayor Penrod told CNN that Postville was living a "freaky nightmare." And it still isn't over.

Postville's troubles reflect the collateral damage wrought by an escalation in workplace sweeps over the past several years. As part of a comprehensive multiyear strategy to increase interior enforcement, ICE sought to eliminate the "jobs magnet" that attracts undocumented immigrants from across the border.

The agency reported 5,184 workplace arrests in fiscal 2008, more than seven times the 2004 figure. Its raids have included others on the scale of Postville—sweeps resulting in the dislocation of entire immigrant communities. Last October, ICE arrested 330 workers at the Columbia Farms poultry plant in Greenville, South Carolina. That came on the heels of a massive sweep of Howard Industries, an electronics maker in Laurel, Mississippi, where agents netted some 600 workers. The year before, 300 employees were picked up at a Massachusetts leather manufacturer, and raids in late 2006 on Swift meatpacking plants in Nebraska and five other states led to 1,300 arrests.

These high-profile busts, former Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff explained, were meant to remove incentives to illegal immigration. "What is the economic magnet that is bringing people into the country to work illegally? The answer is jobs," he said at a press briefing last February. The magnet metaphor was no accident. In the view of the immigration bureaucracy, these factories comprise a mosaic of magnets that lure the undocumented from poor countries. Because the raids inevitably get big play in Spanish-language media, ICE officials know their get-tough approach will reach its intended audience—on both sides of the border.

The tactic would seem to have little chance of surviving in the current presidency were there not some evidence that it has worked. Since 2005, according to an October report by the Pew Hispanic Center, the number of people entering the country illegally has declined to about 500,000 a year, on average, from about 800,000 during the four previous years. While the faltering US economy—particularly in housing and construction—has certainly contributed, politically powerful immigration foes credit the ICE raids for turning the tide.

To be sure, on the campaign trail, then-candidate Obama derided the workplace raids as publicity stunts. Speaking to an anchor from the Spanish-language Univision TV network, he said he would focus on targeting exploitative employers and promised to act on comprehensive immigration reform. But on February 24, one month after President Obama took office, ICE raided an engine factory in Bellingham, Washington, where agents arrested 28 undocumented workers.

Facing criticism from the left, new Homeland Security chief Janet Napolitano promised an investigation, insisting she hadn't known of the raid in advance. Whatever becomes of that probe, last month's raid underscores the difficulty of navigating between opponents of heavy-handed enforcement and immigration foes who agitate about undocumented foreigners taking American jobs—an old argument that could gain new appeal as hundreds of thousands of workers receive pink slips.

Supposing ICE's strategy is indeed effective; there's a separate question policymakers may want to ponder: How have these raids affected the communities involved? The woes of the arrested immigrants are well documented: families torn apart, workers caught in bureaucratic limbo or slapped with souped-up identity-theft charges. But less examined are the impacts on towns and cities that the workers and their families leave behind, and on the Americans whose lives and livelihoods were intertwined with those of the newcomers.

Like many Midwestern communities, Postville was historically at the mercy of the up-and-down agricultural economy. Locals here haven't forgotten the dark 1980s, when a farm crisis plunged families into debt and set the stage for a bloodletting of population from rural America. As Willie Nelson, Neil Young, and John Cougar Mellencamp tried to drum up support with the Farm Aid concerts beginning in 1985, places like Postville were dying. Adding insult to injury, big-box retailers were gnawing at Main Street business. Small cafés, sporting-goods stores, and meat lockers were going extinct, not to mention general stores—those Midwestern institutions with their pickle barrels, rough wooden floors, and pa

nned candy on the counter.

Pastor Brackett remembers visiting town in the 1980s with his wife, Susan—a Postville native—and seeing the same houses for sale year after year. "It seemed like every time we came to visit, either another mainstay of the business community had closed or there were rumors that they were going to close," he said.

Postville's revival began with the 1987 reopening of the old meatpacking plant, shuttered since the 1970s. Its new operators were members of a Hasidic Jewish sect known as Lubavitchers. Founder Aaron Rubashkin, a Brooklyn butcher, quickly built Agriprocessors—just "Agri" to the locals—into the nation's largest kosher meatpacker, origin of brands like Aaron's Best, Rubashkin's, and Supreme Kosher. At its peak, Agri controlled 60 percent of the kosher beef market and 40 percent of kosher chicken sales.

At first, the production lines were manned largely by undocumented Eastern European and Russian immigrants, writes Stephen Bloom, an Iowa journalist and author of a book called Postville: a Clash of Cultures in Heartland America. But as the Ukranians, Kazakhstanis, and Russians drifted away, Agri came to rely on a ready supply of Hispanic labor. Postville became a destination for villagers from rural Guatemalan and Mexican hamlets like El Barril, San Miguel Dueñas, and Aldea del Rosario, where word soon spread of job opportunities in an Iowa town with superficial similarities to their own tight-knit rural communities.

The meatpacker expanded, and by the time of the raid boasted nearly 1,000 employees. Rabbis supervised the slaughter and Lubavitch managers oversaw the business end, while white Iowans found jobs as administrative staffers or floor-level supervisors. But the bulk of the bloody work was done by Guatemalans and Mexicans who processed tens of thousands of chickens, thousands of turkeys, and hundreds of cattle daily. (The Agri arrest figures would have been far higher, in fact, had night-shift workers been present for the raid.)

Before long, the Hispanic influx was revitalizing Postville. By 2001, Reverend Paul Ouderkirk over at St. Bridget's Catholic Church was celebrating a Saturday mass in Spanish and had created a Hispanic ministry to cater to immigrants' spiritual needs. Several Protestant evangelical congregations also sprouted up to accommodate the workers, meeting in halls lent by the Presbyterians or Lutherans.

Still more conspicuous were the changes downtown. A Mexican grocery and restaurant called Sabor Latino opened at Postville's main intersection. A Guatemalan restaurant opened up just a few doors down from a kosher deli, while across the street, El Vaquero stocked everything from Spanish-language movies and music to cowboy boots, soccer jerseys, prayer candles, and Vero Elotes—Mexican corncob lollipops sprinkled with chili powder.

The workers also brought new energy to the school district, which created bilingual programs and built new facilities even as schools in surrounding towns were consolidating due to shrinking enrollment. Local landlords began charging $450 to $750 for homes and apartments, rates unheard of in Northeast Iowa. A few new apartment complexes sprung up, expanding the town's footprint, and property values soared.

There were growing pains, too. The first wave of workers was mainly single men, given to drunken binges on weekends. That led to brawls at the local bar, Club 51, hit-and-runs, DUIs, and rumors of gang activity. But as solo men were joined by women and children from home, things quieted down. By the time of the raid, whole extended family clans had relocated to Postville. "God knows, all we did here was work," said 32-year-old Veronica Cumez, who came here from Guatemala in 2005 with her eldest daughter, joining five brothers-in-law and a nephew working at the plant. "We were grateful for the opportunity."

As a rule, the immigrants' priorities—family, work, religion—dovetailed with those of the townspeople, who were thankful for Postville's return to normalcy. A sense of stability, even moderate prosperity, began to envelop the town. The immigrants, and the money they spent, brought "a taste of the good life," said Jeff Abbas, the bearded, Marlboro-smoking operations manager at local public radio station KPVL. "Small towns in the Midwest, especially this part of the Midwest, don't do well economically. They hang on, but that's about it. Postville was doing pretty well."

Then ICE came, and everything changed. When I arrived in Postville a few weeks after the raid, local businesses were already hurting, particularly those catering to the immigrants. El Vaquero, six years in operation, was on the edge; three months later, it was boarded up. The Guatemalan restaurant remained open, but was mostly empty, even at lunchtime; to make ends meet, its owner had a side business shuttling panicked immigrants to Chicago, where they could catch direct flights to Guatemala City.

At a clothing store called Lily's, owner Tomás Hernández watched Spanish-language television to stave off boredom as he waited for customers who were few and far between. When business was good, Hernández said, he was doing $1,000 a week, but sales were down at least 85 percent since the raid. "I'm going to see what happens, but if there's no change in three or four months, I'll have no choice but to close," he told me.

Landlords, meanwhile, had to reckon with suddenly empty units. Many were collecting their remaining tenants' rent checks from Sister Mary McCauley, a Catholic nun and treasurer of a multidenominational fundraising effort to help families whose breadwinners had been arrested. The money was also supporting some 40 arrestees, mostly women, whom ICE had released with ankle-bracelet monitors so they could care for their children while awaiting court dates. The women could neither work nor leave the state, and they had no way to pay their bills.

Agri's managers were scrambling to maintain even a single shift. To avoid a production collapse, the company temporarily brought in Native American workers from its Nebraska plant, and contracted with staffing firms to trawl far and wide for legal workers. Prospective hires were bussed in from as far away as Texas, where many had been recruited at homeless shelters. Among them was Diana Morris, who accepted a three-day Greyhound bus trip to Postville, but balked after being told she'd have to live in a house with 10 male workers, lacking running water or electricity. She went on KPVL to plead publicly for help in covering the cost of a ticket back to Texas.

The desperate company even reached out to Palau, a Pacific island nation whose 21,000 residents can work legally in the United States due to Palau's former status as a US protectorate. The first Palauans arrived in September 2008, and before long there were as many as 170 Micronesian islanders in Postville. KPVL's Abbas was so blown away by this surreal prospect that he rewrote lyrics to the Gilligan's Island theme: Who wants to live on a tropical isle / Just like our predecessors / When we can go to Postville Land / And work for Agriprocessors? / We do have one small question, though / And it deals with a matter of fact / If we want to leave our position there / How the hell will we get back?

It was a modest attempt to squeeze humor from a situation that has longtime residents fuming. Their anger is directed not just at Agri's management—which seems content merely to get warm bodies into the plant, impact on the town be damned—but also toward the feds, who spent millions on the raid and then left the town holding the ball.

By the time I returned to Postville last September, things were worse than ever. Agri was facing state and federal investigations related to immigration violations, safety issues, and child labor, a situation that ha

d even caught Obama's attention the previous month. "They have kids in there wielding buzz saws and cleavers," he said during an Iowa campaign stop. "It's ridiculous." Embarrassed by the scandal, orthodox Jewish organizations cited Agri as an example of why kosher certification needed to account for workplace conditions.

The empty storefronts of the 1980s, meanwhile, had returned to downtown in earnest. El Vaquero and the Guatemalan restaurant were history. And Elmer Herrera, the 48-year-old owner of the town's Hispanic bakery, told me he planned to sell; the raids cut his business in half, he said. Herrera, fortunately, had a side gig working at a hog farm outside town, and also hosted a Latin music show on KPVL. In many ways, he exemplifies the way some newcomers have fully integrated into Postville's social fabric. A dozen years ago, Herrera arrived here from Guatemala to work for Agri. Now he was a business owner with a second job, a radio gig, a Midwestern wife, and the intent to spend the rest of his life in Iowa.

But Herrera was also among those who believed Agriprocessors' days were numbered. "All the symptoms are there," he told me, sitting in KPVL's control room during a break. "The owners are just getting what they can out of the plant while they can, and soon they'll sell or declare bankruptcy and get out of town."

In a conversation the previous month, New York-based Agriprocessors spokesman Menachem Lubinsky had denied this possibility but admitted to me that the embattled company was having trouble replacing its stable Hispanic workforce. Some of the employees brought in to replace those arrested "did not work out," he said.

In addition to the Palauans, the company recruited Somalis—mostly from Minneapolis—who can also work legally due to their refugee status. One Friday afternoon during my visit, groups of Somalis walked about Postville's downtown, mingling with black Americans recruited from the South and Midwest and Mexican Americans from Texas. The plant was closed for the Sabbath, and the inebriated payday scene felt more Bourbon Street than Main Street. One worker, spotting his supervisor pulling into the bank in his pickup, yelled drunkenly down the block and managed to cajole a $10 advance through the driver's window.

Over at Club 51, workers crowded elbow-to-elbow at the long bar under a sign reading "Hunters Welcome." Outside, bumming cigarettes in the rain, 39-year-old Marcus Valdez pondered his first three weeks in Postville. He'd come here from Belmont, Texas, with his wife and two kids, and he spoke in a thick drawl. As a kid, Valdez told me, he had slaughtered hogs on his father's farm, so he felt suited to the work trimming turkey carcasses. "I feel proud when the supervisors walk by and see me cutting right," he said.

On the face of it, he's just the sort of worker Agri might have hung a recovery on, but Valdez was already disgruntled. So far he'd seen no money; the company had deducted his $475-a-month rent and security deposit from his first few paychecks. Agri also shorted him a buck on the hourly wage promised by recruiters in Amarillo—plant managers told him the probationary wage would be $9.35, not the $10 to $11 he expected. Given his skills, Valdez didn't think that was fair.

As we talked, it grew louder and rowdier inside the bar. Later, while waiting for the commode, I saw a fistfight nearly break out among three men, one of whom had been peddling baggies of marijuana. Postville's police chief, Michael Halse, has complained publicly about higher crime since the raid—including a double stabbing last July involving three former Agri employees. Halse hired three new part-time officers—every weekend, squad cars linger outside Club 51, awaiting the inevitable brawl.

This rough-and-tumble crowd frightens the townspeople. Even some of Agri's former workers are cowed. María Laura Gómez, a Guatemalan detained in the raid, tells me she'll leave Postville if she can swing a deal to escape deportation by cooperating with federal investigators looking into Agri. "It's gotten ugly," she says. "I don't like living here anymore."

On November 4, true to Herrera's prediction, Agriprocessors filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. The week before that, top Agri officials, including Sholom Rubashkin—the founder's son and one-time chief operating officer—were charged with federal immigration violations and fraud. And now the meatpacker is on the block; an Israeli suitor balked on its $40 million bid in February, leaving Agri with a mountain of unpaid debts, so the court scheduled an auction for March 23. Postville residents fear that the plant will be bought and pillaged for usable assets, leaving the town, once again, without a lifeline. (Likewise, locals of Laurel, Mississippi, fret over rumors that Howard Industries, their town's top employer, may outsource manufacturing to China or Mexico—a potential development that many view as an economic death sentence.)

Critics of ICE's hardball tactics, while grateful that the raid exposed serious labor abuses at Agriprocessors, accuse the immigration authorities of badly mismanaging the aftermath. To be sure, ICE has neutralized Swift and Agri and Howard Industries as illegal-immigrant magnets, but so, too, has it neutered the economies that came to depend on them. And even fans of this tough-guy strategy tend to agree that without systemic reform, there will be no end to our illegal-immigration issues.

In the meantime, dozens of ex-workers still walk around Postville in ankle bracelets, unable to earn a living, making the town something of an open-air prison. Some of them are witnesses in state and federal cases against Agri. Why, residents ask themselves over and over, should local institutions bear all the financial and social costs? "It's outrageous," said Sol Varisco, who works with refugees and immigrants for Catholic Charities at the Des Moines diocese. "Is this how we enforce the law? Leave the churches and nonprofits to pick up the pieces?"

A Tale of Two Speakers

By David Bennion

Last week I had the opportunity to attend the Catholic National Migration Conference in Washington, D.C. As has been my experience with previous conferences for immigration legal service providers, there is always more information on offer than time to absorb it. It is at once an exhausting and rejuvenating experience—meeting new colleagues from other parts of the country, reconnecting with old ones, fine-tuning your practice, commiserating with others whose clients are also facing impossible situations.

There were many fine speakers at the conference, including Haitian-American author Edwidge Danticat and genocide survivor Immaculee Ilibagiza. But the stark contrast between two of the speakers in particular was impossible for me to ignore.

At the Tuesday morning plenary session, we heard from Julie Myers, head of Immigration Customs and Enforcement (ICE), the enforcement wing of DHS. I’ve expressed concerns about her leadership of the agency in this space before.

Setting those issues aside for now, her presentation was notable for the near-complete misalignment between the issues she talked about and the issues of primary concern to those of us listening. As a speaker, you have to know your audience, and she didn’t seem to. She talked about her recent experience sitting in on a citizenship swearing in ceremony, and the happiness she felt at being able to witness this moment of such importance for those who reach that point. Left unanswered was the question that must have immediately presented itself to most of the audience, as it did to me: Why, then, does ICE make it so difficult for migrants to attain citizenship?

Why, if the agency values the benefits to society and to immigrants themselves that naturalization brings, do it and the other DHS agencies throw up obstacles to citizenship at every turn? Why is ICE trying so hard to lock up and deport longtime lawful permanent residents (LPRs), who’ve lived here for decades, on the basis of minor crimes committed in their youth? Why is CBP going out of its way to charge returning LPRs with abandonment of their permanent residence? Why are naturalization officers hassling applicants for inane and sometimes incomprehensible reasons at their citizenship interviews?

Ms. Myers talked about ICE’s welcome initiative to release nursing mothers on monitored supervision after a raid so that the lives of their infants aren’t placed at risk. She didn’t mention that those mothers will still be deported and those families may still be torn apart.

She talked about a recent initiative to encourage “fugitive aliens”—DHS’s term for people with an outstanding order of removal (or, in some cases, longtime LPRs with old criminal convictions) to contact ICE in order to self-deport. There would be no benefit to the migrant to this action except for being able to depart the country in an orderly manner. This was framed as a concession on the part of ICE—I still don’t see what was conceded or why anyone would ever do this. Again, complete failure to connect to her audience.

As the head of the agency trying to lock up and deport many, if not most, of our clients, it was never going to be an easy pitch. But the session was clearly designed as a PR exercise and not a particularly effective one. In fact, it achieved the opposite effect. Better not to have come at all, though I imagine she was invited by the Bishops.

On Wednesday night at the awards ceremony, one tireless migrant rights worker was honored. When Sister Mary McCauley of St. Bridgett’s Church in Postville, Iowa came to the stage, she received a standing ovation from the audience. A diminutive woman who I would guess is in her seventies, she is not an imposing figure. She spoke carefully and precisely. Though it must have been difficult to recount the events she described, her voice never wavered and her eyes were clear.

She spoke of the early warnings of the raid, as if of an impending hurricane or wildfire, of the difficulties in organizing a response in the face of language barriers and a paucity of people on the ground. She described the helicopters overhead and how she traveled to the Agriprocessors plant the morning of the raid to see what she could do, but all she saw was a sea of agents in blue. She talked about the trickle of children of workers who came to the church, a trickle which soon became a flood. She spoke of a young child expressing his sadness that his mother would not be coming home. She catalogued the difficulties of helping families survive when their sole breadwinners had been sent to prison: how to pay for rent, utilities, food, transportation, limited medical expenses, phones, legal costs. All of this having to come out of whatever donations had come in to the parish for this purpose after the raid. She described the stigma borne by women in the community who had been temporarily released but wore ankle bracelets—people labeled criminals by our government because they had tried to provide for their families.

She talked of parents who needed to put food in front of their children and weren’t able to do it in Mexico or Guatemala. They didn’t have the option of waiting 10 or 15 years to come across with papers (this assuming that they had family members in the U.S. who could file petitions for them—most probably didn’t). They had come here with dreams of a better life. Those dreams had been shattered, she said.

The thing is that both Julie Myers and Sister Mary believe they are doing what is right for their community, for their country. They both believe their actions are consistent with their faith. Both believe they are on the right side of a thorny moral issue.

So how can this be? It should be obvious to the reader who I side with. But I have met ICE officers and attorneys I know are good people—I can see it so clearly in my interactions with them. I know they, like most of the participants at the conference, have made sacrifices to commit to a difficult occupation because they believe they are acting in service of something greater than themselves.

Over and over again in the immigration debate, we run into the problem of seemingly intractable moral claims on each side. On the one hand, a sovereign country that values rule of law should be able to regulate and monitor the people who enter and exit its territory. On the other hand, this is a nation built through immigrant labor since its inception. Furthermore, many economic problems that lead to emigration from poor countries have their roots in the international economic and political system that keeps rich countries rich and poor countries poor. And seems unjust to uproot people who’ve spent years—even decades—in this country paying taxes, contributing to their communities, and building their families.

It should be obvious which argument I find more compelling.

But until we can break out of this narrative we are currently locked in, we will never resolve this issue. I find very few on the pro-migrant side who disagree with the “enforcement/sovereignty” principle—among politicians and the wider public, that number drops into insignificance.

But let me repeat: until we transcend this narrative, the immigration debate will never be resolved. It might be postponed, it might be delayed. It might explode. But it will not be resolved.

I and my co-bloggers at Citizen Orange have laid out, in draft formulation, some ways to think about this impasse (always building on or referencing the works of other

s). Others who read and post here agree and disagree to varying degrees. But we need to have this discussion openly, or we’ll find ourselves in the same place or worse in another twenty years. Putting off the conversation out of political expediency until comprehensive reform gets passed, yelling about “illegalz” until everyone is locked up or self-deports—these plans all but guarantee failure.

The immigration debate is not going away. The days are over of wide bipartisan acquiescence on overly strict legislation trumpeted to the restrictionists followed by lenient enforcement with a wink and a nudge to business. And deporting 12 million people and their 8 million immediate family members now here in lawful status is a fantasy, one perhaps achievable by a Stalin or a Milosevic, but not in this country. So let’s talk about fundamentals. Let’s have this conversation now.

Donations to the St. Bridget's Postville relief effort can be sent to:

St. Bridget's Hispanic Ministry Fund
c/o Sister Mary McCauley
PO Box 369
Postville, Iowa 52162

A line was crossed at Postville

Interpreting after the Largest ICE Raid in US History:
A Personal Account

Erik Camayd-Freixas, Ph.D
.

Florida International University

June 13, 2008

On Monday, May 12, 2008, at 10:00 a.m., in an operation involving some 900 agents, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) executed a raid of Agriprocessors Inc, the nation's largest kosher slaughterhouse and meat packing plant located in the town of Postville, Iowa. The raid - officials boasted - was "the largest single-site operation of its kind in American history." At that same hour, 26 federally certified interpreters from all over the country were en route to the small neighboring city of Waterloo, Iowa, having no idea what their mission was about. The investigation had started more than a year earlier. Raid preparations had begun in December. The Clerk's Office of the U.S. District Court had contracted the interpreters a month ahead, but was not at liberty to tell us the whole truth, lest the impending raid be compromised. The operation was led by ICE, which belongs to the executive branch, whereas the U.S. District Court, belonging to the judicial branch, had to formulate its own official reason for participating. Accordingly, the Court had to move for two weeks to a remote location as part of a "Continuity of Operation Exercise" in case they were ever disrupted by an emergency, which in Iowa is likely to be a tornado or flood. That is what we were told, but, frankly, I was not prepared for a disaster of such a different kind, one which was entirely man-made.

I arrived late that Monday night and missed the 8pm interpreters briefing. I was instructed by phone to meet at 7am in the hotel lobby and carpool to the National Cattle Congress (NCC) where we would begin our work. We arrived at the heavily guarded compound, went through security, and gathered inside the retro "Electric Park Ballroom" where a makeshift court had been set up. The Clerk of Court, who coordinated the interpreters, said: "Have you seen the news? There was an immigration raid yesterday at 10am. They have some 400 detainees here. We'll be working late conducting initial appearances for the next few days." He then gave us a cursory tour of the compound. The NCC is a 60-acre cattle fairground that had been transformed into a sort of concentration camp or detention center. Fenced in behind the ballroom / courtroom were 23 trailers from federal authorities, including two set up as sentencing courts; various Homeland Security buses and an "incident response" truck; scores of ICE agents and U.S. Marshals; and in the background two large buildings: a pavilion where agents and prosecutors had established a command center; and a gymnasium filled with tight rows of cots where some 300 male detainees were kept, the women being housed in county jails. Later the NCC board complained to the local newspaper that they had been "misled" by the government when they leased the grounds purportedly for Homeland Security training.

"When I saw what it was really about, my heart sank..."

Echoing what I think was the general feeling, one of my fellow interpreters would later exclaim: "When I saw what it was really about, my heart sank..." Then began the saddest procession I have ever witnessed, which the public would never see, because cameras were not allowed past the perimeter of the compound (only a few journalists came to court the following days, notepad in hand). Driven single-file in groups of 10, shackled at the wrists, waist and ankles, chains dragging as they shuffled through, the slaughterhouse workers were brought in for arraignment, sat and listened through headsets to the interpreted initial appearance, before marching out again to be bused to different county jails, only to make room for the next row of 10. They appeared to be uniformly no more than 5 ft. tall, mostly illiterate Guatemalan peasants with Mayan last names, some being relatives (various Tajtaj, Xicay, Sajche, Sologui...), some in tears; others with faces of worry, fear, and embarrassment. They all spoke Spanish, a few rather laboriously. It dawned on me that, aside from their Guatemalan or Mexican nationality, which was imposed on their people after Independence, they too were Native Americans, in shackles. They stood out in stark racial contrast with the rest of us as they started their slow penguin march across the makeshift court. "Sad spectacle" I heard a colleague say, reading my mind. They had all waived their right to be indicted by a grand jury and accepted instead an information or simple charging document by the U.S. Attorney, hoping to be quickly deported since they had families to support back home. But it was not to be. They were criminally charged with "aggravated identity theft" and "Social Security fraud" - charges they did not understand... and, frankly, neither could I. Everyone wondered how it would all play out.

We got off to a slow start that first day, because ICE's barcode booking system malfunctioned, and the documents had to be manually sorted and processed with the help of the U.S. Attorney's Office. Consequently, less than a third of the detainees were ready for arraignment that Tuesday. There were more than enough interpreters at that point, so we rotated in shifts of three interpreters per hearing. Court adjourned shortly after 4pm. However, the prosecution worked overnight, planning on a 7am to midnight court marathon the next day. I was eager to get back to my hotel room to find out more about the case, since the day's repetitive hearings afforded little information, and everyone there was mostly refraining from comment. There was frequent but sketchy news on local TV. A colleague had suggested The Des Moines Register. So I went to DesMoinesRegister.com and started reading all the 20+ articles, as they appeared each day, and the 57-page ICE Search Warrant Application. These were the vital statistics. Of Agriprocessors' 968 current employees, about 75% were illegal immigrants. There were 697 arrest warrants, but late-shift workers had not arrived, so "only" 390 were arrested: 314 men and 76 women; 290 Guatemalans, 93 Mexicans, four Ukrainians, and three Israelis who were not seen in court. Some were released on humanitarian grounds: 56 mostly mothers with unattended children, a few with medical reasons, and 12 juveniles were temporarily released with ankle monitors or directly turned over for deportation. In all, 306 were held for prosecution.

Only five of the 390 originally arrested had any kind of prior criminal record. There remained 307 outstanding warrants.

This was the immediate collateral damage. Postville, Iowa (pop. 2,273), where nearly half the people worked at Agriprocessors, had lost 1/3 of its population by Tuesday morning. Businesses were empty, amid looming concerns that if the plant closed it would become a ghost town. Beside those arrested, many had fled the town in fear. Several families had taken refuge at St. Bridget's Catholic Church, terrified, sleeping on pews and refusing to leave for days. Volunteers from the community served food and organized activities for the children. At the local high school, only three of the 15 Latino students came back on Tuesday, while at the elementary and middle school, 120 of the 363 children were absent. In the following days the principal went around town on the school bus and gathered 70 students after convincing the parents to let them come back to school; 50 remained unaccounted for. Some American parents complained that their children were traumatized by the sudden disappearance of so many of their school friends. The principal reported t

he same reaction in the classrooms, saying that for the children it was as if ten of their classmates had suddenly died. Counselors were brought in. American children were having nightmares that their parents too were being taken away. The superintendant said the school district's future was unclear: "This literally blew our town away." In some cases both parents were picked up and small children were left behind for up to 72 hours. Typically, the mother would be released "on humanitarian grounds" with an ankle GPS monitor, pending prosecution and deportation, while the husband took first turn in serving his prison sentence. Meanwhile the mother would have no income and could not work to provide for her children. Some of the children were born in the U.S. and are American citizens. Sometimes one parent was a deportable alien while the other was not. "Hundreds of families were torn apart by this raid," said a Catholic nun. "The humanitarian impact of this raid is obvious to anyone in Postville. The economic impact will soon be evident."

But this was only the surface damage. Alongside the many courageous actions and expressions of humanitarian concern in the true American spirit, the news blogs were filled with snide remarks of racial prejudice and bigotry, poorly disguised beneath an empty rhetoric of misguided patriotism, not to mention the insults to anyone who publicly showed compassion, safely hurled from behind a cowardly online nickname. One could feel the moral fabric of society coming apart beneath it all.

The more I found out, the more I felt blindsided into an assignment of which I wanted no part. Even though I understood the rationale for all the secrecy, I also knew that a contract interpreter has the right to refuse a job which conflicts with his moral intuitions. But I had been deprived of that opportunity. Now I was already there, far from home, and holding a half-spent $1,800 plane ticket. So I faced a frustrating dilemma. I seriously considered withdrawing from the assignment for the first time in my 23 years as a federally certified interpreter, citing conflict of interest. In fact, I have both an ethical and contractual obligation to withdraw if a conflict of interest exists which compromises my neutrality. Appended to my contract are the Standards for Performance and Professional Responsibility for Contract Court Interpreters in the Federal Courts, where it states: "Interpreters shall disclose any real or perceived conflict of interest... and shall not serve in any matter in which they have a conflict of interest." The question was did I have one. Well, at that point there was not enough evidence to make that determination. After all, these are illegal aliens and should be deported - no argument there, and hence no conflict. But should they be criminalized and imprisoned? Well, if they committed a crime and were fairly adjudicated... But all that remained to be seen. In any case, none of it would shake my impartiality or prevent me from faithfully discharging my duties. In all my years as a court interpreter, I have taken front row seat in countless criminal cases ranging from rape, capital murder and mayhem, to terrorism, narcotics and human trafficking. I am not the impressionable kind.

"Nothing could have prepared me for the prospect of helping our government put hundreds of innocent people in jail."

Moreover, as a professor of interpreting, I have confronted my students with every possible conflict scenario, or so I thought. The truth is that nothing could have prepared me for the prospect of helping our government put hundreds of innocent people in jail. In my ignorance and disbelief, I reluctantly decided to stay the course and see what happened next.

Wednesday, May 14, our second day in court, was to be a long one. The interpreters were divided into two shifts, 8am to 3pm and 3pm to 10pm. I chose the latter. Through the day, the procession continued, ten by ten, hour after hour, the same charges, the same recitation from the magistrates, the same faces, chains and shackles, on the defendants. There was little to remind us that they were actually 306 individuals, except that occasionally, as though to break the monotony, one would dare to speak for the others and beg to be deported quickly so that they could feed their families back home. One who turned out to be a minor was bound over for deportation. The rest would be prosecuted. Later in the day three groups of women were brought, shackled in the same manner. One of them, whose husband was also arrested, was released to care for her children, ages two and five, uncertain of their whereabouts. Several men and women were weeping, but two women were particularly grief stricken. One of them was sobbing and would repeatedly struggle to bring a sleeve to her nose, but her wrists shackled around her waist simply would not reach; so she just dripped until she was taken away with the rest. The other one, a Ukrainian woman, was held and arraigned separately when a Russian telephonic interpreter came on. She spoke softly into a cellular phone, while the interpreter told her story in English over the speakerphone. Her young daughter, gravely ill, had lost her hair and was too weak to walk. She had taken her to Moscow and Kiev but to no avail. She was told her child needed an operation or would soon die. She had come to America to work and raise the money to save her daughter back in Ukraine. In every instance, detainees who cried did so for their children, never for themselves.

The next day we started early, at 6:45 am. We were told that we had to finish the hearings by 10 am. Thus far the work had oddly resembled a judicial assembly line where the meat packers were mass processed. But things were about to get a lot more personal as we prepared to interpret for individual attorney-client conferences. In those first three days, interpreters had been pairing up with defense attorneys to help interview their clients. Each of the 18 court appointed attorneys represented 17 defendants on average. By now, the clients had been sent to several state and county prisons throughout eastern Iowa, so we had to interview them in jail. The attorney with whom I was working had clients in Des Moines and wanted to be there first thing in the morning. So a colleague and I drove the 2.5 hours that evening and stayed overnight in a hotel outside the city. We met the attorney in jail Friday morning, but the clients had not been accepted there and had been sent instead to a state penitentiary in Newton, another 45-minute drive. While we waited to be admitted, the attorney pointed out the reason why the prosecution wanted to finish arraignments by 10am Thursday: according to the writ of habeas corpus they had 72 hours from Monday's raid to charge the prisoners or release them for deportation (only a handful would be so lucky). The right of habeas corpus, but of course! It dawned on me that we were paid overtime, adding hours to the day, in a mad rush to abridge habeas corpus, only to help put more workers in jail. Now I really felt bad. But it would soon get worse. I was about to bear the brunt of my conflict of interest.

It came with my first jail interview. The purpose was for the attorney to explain the uniform Plea Agreement that the government was offering. The explanation, which we repeated over and over to each client, went like this. There are three possibilities. If you plead guilty to the charge of "knowingly using a false Social Security number," the government will withdraw the heavier charge of "aggravated identity theft," and you will serve 5 months in jail, be deported without a hearing, and placed on supervised release for 3 years. If you plead not guilty, you could wait in jail 6 to 8 months for a trial (without right of bail since you are on an immigration detainer). Even if you win at trial, you will still be deported, and could end up waiting longer in jail than i

f you just pled guilty. You would also risk losing at trial and receiving a 2-year minimum sentence, before being deported. Some clients understood their "options" better than others.

"The Good Lord knows I was just working and not doing anyone any harm."

That first interview, though, took three hours. The client, a Guatemalan peasant afraid for his family, spent most of that time weeping at our table, in a corner of the crowded jailhouse visiting room. How did he come here from Guatemala? "I walked." What? "I walked for a month and ten days until I crossed the river." We understood immediately how desperate his family's situation was. He crossed alone, met other immigrants, and hitched a truck ride to Dallas, then Postville, where he heard there was sure work. He slept in an apartment hallway with other immigrants until employed. He had scarcely been working a couple of months when he was arrested. Maybe he was lucky: another man who began that Monday had only been working for 20 minutes. "I just wanted to work a year or two, save, and then go back to my family, but it was not to be." His case and that of a million others could simply be solved by a temporary work permit as part of our much overdue immigration reform. "The Good Lord knows I was just working and not doing anyone any harm." This man, like many others, was in fact not guilty. "Knowingly" and "intent" are necessary elements of the charges, but most of the clients we interviewed did not even know what a Social Security number was or what purpose it served.

This worker simply had the papers filled out for him at the plant, since he could not read or write Spanish, let alone English. But the lawyer still had to advise him that pleading guilty was in his best interest. He was unable to make a decision. "You all do and undo," he said. "So you can do whatever you want with me." To him we were part of the system keeping him from being deported back to his country, where his children, wife, mother, and sister depended on him. He was their sole support and did not know how they were going to make it with him in jail for 5 months. None of the "options" really mattered to him. Caught between despair and hopelessness, he just wept. He had failed his family, and was devastated. I went for some napkins, but he refused them. I offered him a cup of soda, which he superstitiously declined, saying it could be "poisoned." His Native American spirit was broken and he could no longer think. He stared for a while at the signature page pretending to read it, although I knew he was actually praying for guidance and protection. Before he signed with a scribble, he said: "God knows you are just doing your job to support your families, and that job is to keep me from supporting mine." There was my conflict of interest, well put by a weeping, illiterate man.

"We will never know how many had legitimate asylum claims for fear of persecution."

We worked that day for as long as our emotional fortitude allowed, and we had to come back to a full day on Sunday to interview the rest of the clients. Many of the Guatemalans had the same predicament. One of them, a 19-year-old, worried that his parents were too old to work, and that he was the only support for his family back home. We will never know how many of the 290 Guatemalans had legitimate asylum claims for fear of persecution, back in a country stigmatized by the worst human rights situation in the hemisphere, a by-product of the US backed Contra wars in Central America under the old domino theory of the 1980s. For three decades, anti-insurgent government death squads have ravaged the countryside, killing tens of thousands and displacing almost two million peasants. Even as we proceeded with the hearings during those two weeks in May, news coming out of Guatemala reported farm workers being assassinated for complaining publicly about their working conditions. Not only have we ignored the many root causes of illegal immigration, we also will never know which of these deportations will turn out to be a death sentence, or how many of these displaced workers are last survivors with no family or village to return to.

Another client, a young Mexican, had an altogether different case. He had worked at the plant for ten years and had two American born daughters, a 2-year-old and a newborn. He had a good case with Immigration for an adjustment of status which would allow him to stay. But if he took the Plea Agreement, he would lose that chance and face deportation as a felon convicted of a crime of "moral turpitude." On the other hand, if he pled "not guilty" he had to wait several months in jail for trial, and risk getting a 2-year sentence. After an agonizing decision, he concluded that he had to take the 5-month deal and deportation, because as he put it, "I cannot be away from my children for so long." His case was complicated; it needed research in immigration law, a change in the Plea Agreement, and, above all, more time. There were other similar cases in court that week. I remember reading that immigration lawyers were alarmed that the detainees were being rushed into a plea without adequate consultation on the immigration consequences. Even the criminal defense attorneys had limited opportunity to meet with clients: in jail there were limited visiting hours and days; at the compound there was little time before and after hearings, and little privacy due to the constant presence of agents. There were 17 cases for each attorney, and the Plea offer was only good for 7 days. In addition, criminal attorneys are not familiar with immigration work and vice versa, but had to make do since immigration lawyers were denied access to these "criminal" proceedings.

"Their Plea Agreement was coerced."

In addition, the prosecutors would not accept any changes to the Plea Agreement. In fact, some lawyers, seeing that many of their clients were not guilty, requested an Alford plea, whereby defendants can plead guilty in order to accept the prosecution's offer, but without having to lie under oath and admit to something they did not do. That would not change the 5- month sentence, but at least it preserves the person's integrity and dignity. The proposal was rejected. Of course, if they allowed Alford pleas to go on public record, the incongruence of the charges would be exposed and find its way into the media. Officially, the ICE prosecutors said the Plea Agreement was directed from the Department of Justice in Washington, D.C., that they were not authorized to change it locally, and that the DOJ would not make any case by case exceptions when a large number of defendants are being "fast-tracked." Presumably if you gave different terms to one individual, the others will want the same. This position, however, laid bare one of the critical problems with this new practice of "fast-tracking." Even real criminals have the right of severance: when co-defendants have different degrees of responsibility, there is an inherent conflict of interest, and they can ask to be prosecuted separately as different cases, each with a different attorney. In fast-tracking, however, the right of severance is circumvented because each defendant already has a different case number on paper, only that they are processed together, 10 cases at a time. At this point, it is worth remembering also that even real criminals have an 8th Amendment right to reasonable bail, but not illegal workers, because their immigration detainer makes bail a moot issue. We had already circumvented habeas corpus by doubling the court's business hours. What about the 6th Amendment right to a "speedy trial"? In many states "speedy" means 90 days, but in

federal law it is vaguely defined, potentially exceeding the recommended sentence, given the backlog of real cases. This served as another loophole to force a guilty plea. Many of these workers were sole earners begging to be deported, desperate to feed their families, for whom every day counted. "If you want to see your children or don't want your family to starve, sign here" -that is what their deal amounted to. Their Plea Agreement was coerced.

We began week two Monday, May 19th. Those interpreters who left after the first week were spared the sentencing hearings that went on through Thursday. Those who came in fresh the second week were spared the jail visits over the weekend. Those of us who stayed both weeks came back from the different jails burdened by a close personal contact that judges and prosecutors do not get to experience: each individual tragedy multiplied by 306 cases. One of my colleagues began the day by saying "I feel a tremendous solidarity with these people." Had we lost our impartiality? Not at all: that was our impartial and probably unanimous judgment. We had seen attorneys hold back tears and weep alongside their clients. We would see judges, prosecutors, clerks, and marshals do their duty, sometimes with a heavy heart, sometimes at least with mixed feelings, but always with a particular solemnity not accorded to the common criminals we all are used to encountering in the judicial system. Everyone was extremely professional and outwardly appreciative of the interpreters. We developed among ourselves and with the clerks, with whom we worked closely, a camaraderie and good humor that kept us going. Still, that Monday morning I felt downtrodden by the sheer magnitude of the events. Unexpectedly, a sentencing hearing lifted my spirits.

I decided to do sentences on Trailer 2 with a judge I knew from real criminal trials in Iowa. The defendants were brought in 5 at a time, because there was not enough room for 10. The judge verified that they still wanted to plead guilty, and asked counsel to confirm their Plea Agreement. The defense attorney said that he had expected a much lower sentence, but that he was forced to accept the agreement in the best interest of his clients. For us who knew the background of the matter, that vague objection, which was all that the attorney could put on record, spoke volumes. After accepting the Plea Agreement and before imposing sentence, the judge gave the defendants the right of allocution. Most of them chose not to say anything, but one who was the more articulate said humbly: "Your honor, you know that we are here because of the need of our families. I beg that you find it in your heart to send us home before too long, because we have a responsibility to our children, to give them an education, clothing, shelter, and food." The good judge explained that unfortunately he was not free to depart from the sentence provided for by their Plea Agreement. Technically, what he meant was that this was a binding 11(C)(1)(c) Plea Agreement: he had to accept it or reject it as a whole. But if he rejected it, he would be exposing the defendants to a trial against their will. His hands were tied, but in closing he said onto them very deliberately: "I appreciate the fact that you are very hard working people, who have come here to do no harm. And I thank you for coming to this country to work hard.

Unfortunately, you broke a law in the process, and now I have the obligation to give you this sentence. But I hope that the U.S. government has at least treated you kindly and with respect, and that this time goes by quickly for you, so that soon you may be reunited with your family and friends." The defendants thanked him, and I saw their faces change from shame to admiration, their dignity restored. I think we were all vindicated at that moment. Before the judge left that afternoon, I had occasion to talk to him and bring to his attention my concern over what I had learned in the jail interviews. At that point I realized how precious the interpreter's impartiality truly is, and what a privileged perspective it affords. In our common law adversarial system, only the judge, the jury, and the interpreter are presumed impartial. But the judge is immersed in the framework of the legal system, whereas the interpreter is a layperson, an outsider, a true representative of the common citizen, much like "a jury of his peers." Yet, contrary to the jury, who only knows the evidence on record and is generally unfamiliar with the workings of the law, the interpreter is an informed layperson. Moreover, the interpreter is the only one who gets to see both sides of the coin up close, precisely because he is the only participant who is not a decision maker, and is even precluded, by his oath of impartiality and neutrality, from ever influencing the decisions of others. That is why judges in particular appreciate the interpreter's perspective as an impartial and informed layperson, for it provides a rare glimpse at how the innards of the legal system look from the outside. I was no longer sorry to have participated in my capacity as an interpreter. I realized that I had been privileged to bear witness to historic events from such a unique vantage point and that because of its uniqueness I now had a civic duty to make it known. Such is the spirit that inspired this essay.

"Your honor, I am concerned from my attorney-client interviews that many of these people are clearly not guilty, and yet they have no choice but to plead out."

That is also what prompted my brief conversation with the judge: "Your honor, I am concerned from my attorney-client interviews that many of these people are clearly not guilty, and yet they have no choice but to plead out." He understood immediately and, not surprisingly, the seasoned U.S. District Court Judge spoke as someone who had already wrestled with all the angles. He said: "You know, I don't agree with any of this or with the way it is being done. In fact, I ruled in a previous case that to charge somebody with identity theft, the person had to at least know of the real owner of the Social Security number. But I was reverted in another district and yet upheld in a third." I understood that the issue was a matter of judicial contention. The charge of identity theft seemed from the beginning incongruous to me as an informed, impartial layperson, but now a U.S. District Court Judge agreed. As we bid each other farewell, I kept thinking of what he said. I soon realized that he had indeed hit the nail on the head; he had given me, as it were, the last piece of the puzzle.

It works like this. By handing down the inflated charge of "aggravated identity theft," which carries a mandatory minimum sentence of 2 years in prison, the government forced the defendants into pleading guilty to the lesser charge and accepting 5 months in jail. Clearly, without the inflated charge, the government had no bargaining leverage, because the lesser charge by itself, using a false Social Security number, carries only a discretionary sentence of 0- 6 months. The judges would be free to impose sentence within those guidelines, depending on the circumstances of each case and any prior record. Virtually all the defendants would have received only probation and been immediately deported. In fact, the government's offer at the higher end of the guidelines (one month shy of the maximum sentence) was indeed no bargain. What is worse, the inflated charge, via the binding 11(C)(1)(c) Plea Agreement, reduced the judges to mere bureaucrats, pronouncing the same litany over and over for the record in order to legalize the proceedings, but having absolutely no discretion or decision-making power. As a citizen, I want our judges to administer justice, not a federal agency. When the executive branch forces the hand of the judiciary, the result is abuse of power and arbitrariness, unworthy of a democracy

founded upon the constitutional principle of checks and balances.

"The charge was clearly unfounded; and the raid, a fishing expedition."

To an impartial and informed layperson, the process resembled a lottery of justice: if the Social Security number belonged to someone else, you were charged with identity theft and went to jail; if by luck it was a vacant number, you would get only Social Security fraud and were released for deportation. In this manner, out of 297 who were charged on time, 270 went to jail. Bothered by the arbitrariness of that heavier charge, I went back to the ICE Search Warrant Application (pp. 35-36), and what I found was astonishing. On February 20, 2008, ICE agents received social security "no match" information for 737 employees, including 147 using numbers confirmed by the SSA as invalid (never issued to a person) and 590 using valid SSNs, "however the numbers did not match the name of the employee reported by Agriprocessors..." "This analysis would not account for the possibility that a person may have falsely used the identity of an actual person's name and SSN." "In my training and expertise, I know it is not uncommon for aliens to purchase identity documents which include SSNs that match the name assigned to the number." Yet, ICE agents checked Accurint, the powerful identity database used by law enforcement, and found that 983 employees that year had non-matching SSNs. Then they conducted a search of the FTC Consumer Sentinel Network for reporting incidents of identity theft. "The search revealed that a person who was assigned one of the social security numbers used by an employee of Agriprocessors has reported his/her identity being stolen." That is, out of 983 only 1 number (0.1%) happened to coincide by chance with a reported identity theft. The charge was clearly unfounded; and the raid, a fishing expedition. "On April 16, 2008, the US filed criminal complaints against 697 employees, charging them with unlawfully using SSNs in violation of Title 42 USC 408(a)(7)(B); aggravated identity theft in violation of 18 USC 1028A(a)(1); and/or possession or use of false identity documents for purposes of employment in violation of 18 USC 1546."

"No way would a grand jury find probable cause of identity theft here."

Created by Congress in an Act of 1998, the new federal offense of identity theft, as described by the DOJ (http://www.usdoj.gov/criminal/fraud/websites/idtheft.html), bears no relation to the Postville cases. It specifically states: "knowingly uses a means of identification of another person with the intent to commit any unlawful activity or felony" [18 USC 1028(a)]. The offense clearly refers to harmful, felonious acts, such as obtaining credit under another person's identity. Obtaining work, however, is not an "unlawful activity." No way would a grand jury find probable cause of identity theft here. But with the promise of faster deportation, their ignorance of the legal system, and the limited opportunity to consult with counsel before arraignment, all the workers, without exception, were led to waive their 5th Amendment right to grand jury indictment on felony charges. Waiting for a grand jury meant months in jail on an immigration detainer, without the possibility of bail. So the attorneys could not recommend it as a defense strategy. Similarly, defendants have the right to a status hearing before a judge, to determine probable cause, within ten days of arraignment, but their Plea Agreement offer from the government was only good for... seven days. Passing it up, meant risking 2 years in jail. As a result, the frivolous charge of identity theft was assured never to undergo the judicial test of probable cause. Not only were defendants and judges bound to accept the Plea Agreement, there was also absolutely no defense strategy available to counsel. Once the inflated charge was handed down, all the pieces fell into place like a row of dominoes. Even the court was banking on it when it agreed to participate, because if a good number of defendants asked for a grand jury or trial, the system would be overwhelmed. In short, "fast-tracking" had worked like a dream.

It is no secret that the Postville ICE raid was a pilot operation, to be replicated elsewhere, with kinks ironed out after lessons learned. Next time, "fast-tracking" will be even more relentless. Never before has illegal immigration been criminalized in this fashion. It is no longer enough to deport them: we first have to put them in chains. At first sight it may seem absurd to take productive workers and keep them in jail at taxpayers' expense. But the economics and politics of the matter are quite different from such rational assumptions. A quick look at the ICE Fiscal Year 2007 Annual Report (www.ice.gov) shows an agency that has grown to 16,500 employees and a $5 billion annual budget, since it was formed under Homeland Security in March 2003, "as a law enforcement agency for the post-9/11 era, to integrate enforcement authorities against criminal and terrorist activities, including the fights against human trafficking and smuggling, violent transnational gangs and sexual predators who prey on children" (17). No doubt, ICE fulfills an extremely important and noble duty. The question is why tarnish its stellar reputation by targeting harmless illegal workers. The answer is economics and politics. After 9/11 we had to create a massive force with readiness "to prevent, prepare for and respond to a wide range of catastrophic incidents, including terrorist attacks, natural disasters, pandemics and other such significant events that require large-scale government and law enforcement response" (23). The problem is that disasters, criminality, and terrorism do not provide enough daily business to maintain the readiness and muscle tone of this expensive force. For example, "In FY07, ICE human trafficking investigations resulted in 164 arrests and 91 convictions" (17).

Terrorism related arrests were not any more substantial. The real numbers are in immigration: "In FY07, ICE removed 276,912 illegal aliens" (4). ICE is under enormous pressure to turn out statistical figures that might justify a fair utilization of its capabilities, resources, and ballooning budget. For example, the Report boasts 102,777 cases "eliminated" from the fugitive alien population in FY07, "quadrupling" the previous year's number, only to admit a page later that 73,284 were "resolved" by simply "taking those cases off the books" after determining that they "no longer met the definition of an ICE fugitive" (4-5).

"Why focus on illegal workers who pose no threat? Elementary: they are easy pickings."

De facto, the rationale is: we have the excess capability; we are already paying for it; ergo, use it we must. And using it we are: since FY06 "ICE has introduced an aggressive and effective campaign to enforce immigration law within the nation's interior, with a top-level focus on criminal aliens, fugitive aliens and those who pose a threat to the safety of the American public and the stability of American communities" (6). Yet, as of October 1, 2007, the "case backlog consisted of 594,756 ICE fugitive aliens" (5). So again, why focus on illegal workers who pose no threat? Elementary: they are easy pickings. True criminal and fugitive aliens have to be picked up one at a time, whereas raiding a slaughterhouse is like hitting a small jackpot: it beefs up the numbers. "In FY07, ICE enacted a multi-year strategy: ...worksite enforcement initiatives that target employers who defy immigration law and the "jobs magnet" that draws illegal workers across the border" (iii). Yet, as

the saying goes, corporations don't go to jail.

Very few individuals on the employer side have ever been prosecuted. In the case of Agriprocessors, the Search Warrant Application cites only vague allegations by alien informers against plant supervisors (middle and upper management are insulated). Moreover, these allegations pertain mostly to petty state crimes and labor infringements. Union and congressional leaders contend that the federal raid actually interfered with an ongoing state investigation of child labor and wage violations, designed to improve conditions. Meanwhile, the underlying charge of "knowingly possessing or using false employment documents with intent to deceive" places the blame on the workers and holds corporate individuals harmless. It is clear from the scope of the warrant that the thrust of the case against the employer is strictly monetary: to redress part of the cost of the multimillion dollar raid. This objective is fully in keeping with the target stated in the Annual Report: "In FY07, ICE dramatically increased penalties against employers whose hiring processes violated the law, securing fines and judgments of more than $30 million" (iv).

Much of the case against Agriprocessors, in the Search Warrant Application, is based upon "No-Match" letters sent by the Social Security Administration to the employer. In August 2007, DHS issued a Final Rule declaring "No-Match" letters sufficient notice of possible alien harboring. But current litigation (AFL-CIO v. Chertoff) secured a federal injunction against the Rule, arguing that such error-prone method would unduly hurt both legal workers and employers. As a result the "No-Match" letters may not be considered sufficient evidence of harboring. The lawsuit also charges that DHS overstepped its authority and assumed the role of Congress in an attempt to turn the SSA into an immigration law enforcement agency.

Significantly, in referring to the Final Rule, the Annual Report states that ICE "enacted" a strategy to target employers (iii); thereby using a word ("enacted") that implies lawmaking authority. The effort was part of ICE's "Document and Benefit Fraud Task Forces," an initiative targeting employees, not employers, and implying that illegal workers may use false SSNs to access benefits that belong to legal residents. This false contention serves to obscure an opposite and long-ignored statistics: the value of Social Security and Medicare contributions by illegal workers. People often wonder where those funds go, but have no idea how much they amount to. Well, they go into the SSA's "Earnings Suspense File," which tracks payroll tax deductions from payers with mismatched SSNs. By October 2006, the Earnings Suspense File had accumulated $586 billion, up from just $8 billion in 1991. The money itself, which currently surpasses $600 billion, is credited to, and comingled with, the general SSA Trust Fund. SSA actuaries now calculate that illegal workers are currently subsidizing the retirement of legal residents at a rate of $8.9 billion per year, for which the illegal (no-match) workers will never receive benefits.

Again, the big numbers are not on the employers' side. The best way to stack the stats is to go after the high concentrations of illegal workers: food processing plants, factory sweatshops, construction sites, janitorial services-the easy pickings. September 1, 2006, ICE raid crippled a rural Georgia town: 120 arrested. Dec. 12, 2006, ICE agents executed warrants at Swift & Co. meat processing facilities in six states: 1,297 arrested, 274 "charged with identity theft and other crimes." .March 6, 2007 -The Boston Globe reports- 300 ICE agents raided a sweatshop in New Bedford: 361 mostly Guatemalan workers arrested, many flown to Texas for deportation, dozens of children stranded. As the Annual Report graph shows, worksite raids escalated after FY06, signaling the arrival of "a New Era in immigration enforcement" (1). Since 2002, administrative arrests increased tenfold, while criminal arrests skyrocketed thirty-fivefold, from 25 to 863. Still, in FY07, only 17% of detainees were criminally arrested, whereas in Postville it was 100% -a "success" made possible by "fast-tracking"- with felony charges rendering workers indistinguishable on paper from real "criminal aliens." Simply put, the criminalization of illegal workers is just a cheap way of boosting ICE "criminal alien" arrest statistics. But after Postville, it is no longer a matter of clever paperwork and creative accounting: this time around 130 man-years of prison time were handed down pursuant to a bogus charge. The double whammy consists in beefing up an additional and meatier statistics showcased in the Report: "These incarcerated aliens have been involved in dangerous criminal activity such as murder, predatory sexual offenses, narcotics trafficking, alien smuggling and a host of other crimes" (6). Never mind the character assassination: next year when we read the FY08 report, we can all revel in the splendid job the agency is doing, keeping us safe, and blindly beef up its budget another billion. After all, they have already arrested 1,755 of these "criminals" in this May's raids alone.

The agency is now poised to deliver on the New Era. In FY07, ICE grew by 10 percent, hiring 1,600 employees, including over 450 new deportation officers, 700 immigration enforcement agents, and 180 new attorneys. At least 85% of the new hires are directly allocated to immigration enforcement. "These additional personnel move ICE closer to target staffing levels"(35). Moreover, the agency is now diverting to this offensive resources earmarked for other purposes such as disaster relief. Wondering where the 23 trailers came from that were used in the Iowa "fast-tracking" operation? "In FY07, one of ICE's key accomplishments was the Mobile Continuity of Operations Emergency Response Pilot Project, which entails the deployment of a fleet of trailers outfitted with emergency supplies, pre-positioned at ICE locations nationwide for ready deployment in the event of a nearby emergency situation" (23). Too late for New Orleans, but there was always Postville... Hopefully the next time my fellow interpreters hear the buzzwords "Continuity of Operations" they will at least know what they are getting into.

This massive buildup for the New Era is the outward manifestation of an internal shift in the operational imperatives of the Long War, away from the "war on terror" (which has yielded lean statistics) and onto another front where we can claim success: the escalating undeclared war on illegal immigration. "Had this effort been in place prior to 9/11, all of the hijackers who failed to maintain status would have been investigated months before the attack" (9). According to its new paradigm, the agency fancies that it can conflate the diverse aspects of its operations and pretend that immigration enforcement is really part and parcel of the "war on terror." This way, statistics in the former translate as evidence of success in the latter. Thus, the Postville charges- document fraud and identity theft-treat every illegal alien as a potential terrorist, and with the same rigor. At sentencing, as I interpreted, there was one condition of probation that was entirely new to me: "You shall not be in possession of an explosive artifact." The Guatemalan peasants in shackles looked at each other, perplexed.

When the executive responded to post-9/11 criticism by integrating law enforcement operations and security intelligence, ICE was created as "the largest investigative arm of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS)" with "broad law enforcement powers and authorities for enforcing more than 400 federal statutes" (1). A foreseeable effect of such broadness and

integration was the concentration of authority in the executive branch, to the detriment of the constitutional separation of powers. Nowhere is this more evident than in Postville, where the expansive agency's authority can be seen to impinge upon the judicial and legislative powers. "ICE's team of attorneys constitutes the largest legal program in DHS, with more than 750 attorneys to support the ICE mission in the administrative and federal courts. ICE attorneys have also participated in temporary assignments to the Department of Justice as Special Assistant U.S. Attorneys spearheading criminal prosecutions of individuals. These assignments bring much needed support to taxed U.S. Attorneys' offices"(33). English translation: under the guise of interagency cooperation, ICE prosecutors have infiltrated the judicial branch. Now we know who the architects were that spearheaded such a well crafted "fast-tracking" scheme, bogus charge and all, which had us all, down to the very judges, fall in line behind the shackled penguin march. Furthermore, by virtue of its magnitude and methods, ICE's New War is unabashedly the aggressive deployment of its own brand of immigration reform, without congressional approval.

"It is an undemocratic doctrine of expediency, at the core of a police agency, whose power hinges on its ability to capitalize on public fear."

"In FY07, as the debate over comprehensive immigration reform moved to the forefront of the national stage, ICE expanded upon the ongoing effort to re-invent immigration enforcement for the 21st century" (3). In recent years, DHS has repeatedly been accused of overstepping its authority. The reply is always the same: if we limit what DHS/ICE can do, we have to accept a greater risk of terrorism. Thus, by painting the war on immigration as inseparable from the war on terror, the same expediency would supposedly apply to both. Yet, only for ICE are these agendas codependent: the war on immigration depends politically on the war on terror, which, as we saw earlier, depends economically on the war on immigration. This type of no-exit circular thinking is commonly known as a "doctrine." In this case, it is an undemocratic doctrine of expediency, at the core of a police agency, whose power hinges on its ability to capitalize on public fear. Opportunistically raised by DHS, the sad specter of 9/11 has come back to haunt illegal workers and their local communities across the USA.

A line was crossed at Postville. The day after in Des Moines, there was a citizens' protest featured in the evening news. With quiet anguish, a mature all-American woman, a mother, said something striking, as only the plain truth can be. "This is not humane," she said. "There has to be a better way."

Obama Administration Conducts First Immigration Raid in Bellingham
By Nina Shapiro in Economy, Politics
Wednesday, Feb. 25 2009

Immigrant advocates are holding a press conference this morning about yesterday's raid on a Bellingham manufacturing plant—the first nationally under the Obama administration, according to the immigration rights group OneAmerica. Does the raid portend continuation of the Bush policy cracking down on employers using illegal immigrants? Maybe, especially if Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) starts putting such raids, as it did yesterday, in context of the scary economy. "That's 28 jobs that are being taken away from U.S. citizens or immigrants who are legally in this country," local ICE spokesperson Lori Dankers told The Seattle Times. If the national mood leaned toward resentment against illegal immigrants before the recession hit, it's bound to get worse, and Obama may be tempted to go with the flow.

According to a OneAmerica press release, 75 agents entered Yamato Engine Specialists in riot gear "with buckets of handcuffs and ankle chains while a helicopter hovered above." Twenty-eight workers were arrested, and three were later released on humanitarian grounds.

http://blogs.seattleweekly.com/dailyweekly/2009/02/obama_administration_conducts.php

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No worries, they're just 'illegals'......

First they came for the immigrants, but I was not an immigrant.....