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At
7:30 a.m. on Tuesday, Dec. 12, Federal immigration agents raided six
Swift meatpacking plants and arrested almost 1300 workers. The agents, from
the Immigration Control and Enforcement agency (ICE, part of the
Department of Homeland Security), claimed to be looking for practitioners
of "identity theft."
Plants raided were in Greeley, Col.
(Swift headquarters); Marshalltown, Iowa; Grand Island, Neb.; Cactus,
Texas; Worthington, Minn.; and Hyrum, Utah—all (except Hyrum) organized
by the United Food and Commercial Workers.
Workers were taken to ICE holding
facilities dozens or hundreds of miles away, often out of state—even as
far as Atlanta, Ga. ICE ignored an order by a U.S. district judge that
those detained in Greeley remain in his jurisdiction. ICE said detainees
could phone relatives—"as long as they pay for long distance."
Agents were met by mass resistance in
Greeley. As word of the raid spread, friends and family of the workers
gathered at the plant in numbers so large that ICE had trouble getting
buses with detainees out. The crowd pushed ICE agents behind a barrier,
and it took five hours to get all the buses out.
Mark Lauritsen, the head of the UFCW's
meatpacking division, told a congressional committee how agents in riot
gear marched into plants with military weapons terrorizing workers. He
said the allegations of identity theft were a "Trojan Horse to
effectuate an immigration raid." In fact, only 109 arrest warrants
had been issued while 1282 were detained.
A UFCW official pointed out that in
November, four workers from the Louisville, Ky., Swift plant were
arrested as part of this same investigation—yet no one else was detained.
Another UFCW official said agents took away workers'
green cards. When some of them were freed days later they had to pay for
their own bus tickets home (the UFCW also sent buses to pick some up).
Hundreds of children were left at school or with
relatives, friends, or babysitters. A woman held a sign reading,
"Goodbye to my Daddy," for her three-month-old grandson. Said
the baby's weeping mother: "I'm ashamed to be a U.S. citizen."
The loss of breadwinners left families
unable to pay for necessities. Lawyers and union officials spent the next
several days trying to locate detainees but ICE refused to give out any
information.
Parallels with practices of ICE's parent body, DHS,
are frightening. As at Guantanamo, ICE was in no rush to either charge or
release detainees. A spokeswoman said their duty was "to protect our
homeland," not provide "specific dates."
Prosecutors claimed that
"illegal" detainees had no constitutional rights, and Bush and
DHS head Michael Chertoff labeled all detainees, not just the few for
whom warrants had been issued, as using forged or stolen documents.
Clearly, the real goal of the raids was
intimidation, and the identity theft charge a red herring to conjure up
fears of thousands of dollars lost from stolen credit cards.
ICE didn't even bother to coordinate with
state authorities, prompting Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack to threaten to refuse
further cooperation with the Feds. Democratic Party Rep. Tom Harkin of
Iowa said a federal hotline for information for family members either went
unanswered or "provided no information of any use."
Grand Island's police chief refused to
help ICE, saying, "When this is all over, we're still here, and if
part of my population won't call us, that's not good for our community."
Many detainees were immediately deported,
pressured into waiving their rights without legal advice. In Hyrum,
workers were separated by skin color. In Marshalltown, agents ordered
workers to separate into citizens, legal residents, and
"mojados" (i.e., ”wetbacks”).
A worker who told an agent she needed to
get a coat for her niece was told, "Do you think it's going to be
cold in Mexico?'' One detainee told of being surrounded in jail by
mothers crying for their kids.
On Dec. 22 it was announced that about
100 detainees had been released to care for children or ailing relatives.
But this turned out to be just PR: most of them had been released the day
of the raids.
Swift sought a temporary restraining
order against the raids the week before, which was denied. Still, the Feds
did their boss friends a favor by delaying the raids for a day until a
management delegation from Japan that was touring Swift plants had
departed.
Perhaps the worst example of ICE's
cold-bloodedness was their separation of a breastfeeding mother from her
four-month-old.
A nun and a priest drove to Camp Dodge to
see the mother (in the face of ICE refusal to admit to her whereabouts),
while the baby was cared for by church staff.
The Des Moines Register reported that
"the child cried little, and stared at the different faces. ... Said
a church member, 'The baby doesn't want to eat. Another tried to
breastfeed, but she knew it wasn't her.'" It took three days for ICE
to let the mother go.
Those left behind were afraid of further
raids. The day after, 408 students were absent from Marshalltown schools.
Some families sought refuge in a church; others were afraid to leave
their homes. Unionists in Worthington brought food to families too scared
to leave home.
A union rep said he found four children
knocking on doors looking for their mother: "I took them by the hand
and started knocking on doors, looking for family members. I saw a little
girl on the street. I saw someone take her, but I don't know who that
was."
For ICE these situations were just fine:
"Children could be looked after by another family member." In
Worthington, Barb Kremer, a former nurse, got a call from immigrant
friends, which led to a night of travel around town picking up members of
several families, knocking on doors of darkened houses. In the end, she
brought 25 terrified people back to her house.
Said Kremer, "I was an ER nurse for
many years. I've seen a lot of crisis, but nothing like the fear in their
eyes. No one is to be treated like this. Not in America!"
A babysitter who finally found the mother
of a 13-month-old boy described the boy banging on the glass partition
separating him from his mother. Adding insult to injury was the fact that
the raids occurred on the feast day of the Virgin of Guadalupe, a major
religious holiday in many Latin American countries.
In Marshalltown, Concepción Mendoza told
reporters how agents confiscated cell phones, bound wrists, and locked
them in buses with darkened windows. As rumors spread that the government
was rounding up detainees' children, her daughter left school to get her
siblings.
Mendoza told reporters not only of the
fear and worry of their families, but also of the courage and humanity
shown by those left behind. Her son said their phone had 100 messages
offering help. Mendoza and other detainees weren't allowed to go to the
bathroom without an escort.
Agents said she had no rights and urged
her to sign a voluntary deportation order, but she refused. On Thursday a
lawyer told her that as a 14-year resident with no criminal record and three
U.S.-born children she could get "cancellation of deportation."
When she arrived home her kids dashed
outside to her, one telling a reporter, "We tried to take every
piece of her and not let her go." Mendoza held up the ID bracelets
on her wrists and asked her children to "get these things off me."
In the towns affected, unionists, clergy,
and Latino community groups worked to reunite families and to provide
material and legal aid. The Sunday after the raids, volunteers delivered
more than seven tons of food and other donations to the Worthington UFCW
office. There were also rallies in Des Moines and the Twin Cities.
Jennifer Christiansen,
secretary-treasurer of UFCW Local 789, said that all Americans have a
stake in this fight: "After they take the immigrants, it's the rest
of us."
The UFCW's Lauritsen drew a link between
the raids and the recent victory at Smithfield Packing in North Carolina,
where workers—who've been trying to gain UFCW representation—struck to
win back the jobs of workers fired over alleged Social Security
discrepancies. In fact, it's likely the Swift raids were carried out in
retaliation for the Smithfield victory.
The raid may also have been timed to
influence the coming congressional debate on immigration
"reform." After last spring's gigantic immigrant worker
upsurge, the bosses need the element of fear to secure passage of one of
the bipartisan bills creating a second-class status for immigrant
workers—including guest worker programs, which Lauritsen denounced.
We can be certain there will be more such
raids with similarly spurious pretexts if the labor and immigrant rights
movements don't mobilize to put an end to them. Protests so far have been
few and far between.
In their solidarity greetings to the Twin
Cities rally, the Campaign to Stop the Raids in Danbury (Connecticut),
put it best: "We have also been targeted for arrest. What happened
to you must be protested at the national level. To the entire country we
must make clear: An injury to one is an injury to all!"
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