They were all acquitted by the jury.
not only that, they were not wal mart employees at all. They were CONTRACTORS. The stupid and silly idea that I am responsible for CONTRACT labor, whom I do not supervise, direct, or exercise control over (that is the definition of CONTRACTOR for some of the brainiacs who reside on these threads) is utter nonsense.
This was a way for ICE to show some muscle. Wal Mart should have told them to go to hell and fought it, but when you fight the fed in court, they have unlimited resources, so Wal Mart just paid a fine and said "yassah, massah" so that the labor whores could talk about how they backed the scab labor down. It was mindless posturing from the very get go.
No. They agreed to pay an 11 million dollar fine. And now they are fighting a lawsuit filed by the people they hired:
"Plaintiffs lawyers in a federal class-action suit in Newark, N.J., challenging the labor practices of the world's biggest corporation, Wal-Mart, think they've got a fighting chance, now that they hold the fruits of a federal criminal probe.
"Affidavit testimony from an immigration investigation of Wal-Mart, they say, shows that two senior executives knew the company's cleaning contractors employed illegal aliens across the country -- the very scienter the plaintiffs need to prove their case.
"This document demonstrates very clearly that Wal-Mart executives knew of the operations of these subcontractors and were very, very much in agreement with the situation," says Gilberto Garcia, of Garcia & Kricko in Englewood Cliffs, N.J., one of the plaintiffs' lawyers in Zavala v. Wal-Mart, 03-5309.
"The suit charges that the contractors routinely hired illegal immigrants from Mexico and Eastern Europe to work seven days a week, housed them in squalid quarters, paid them less than minimum wage and even locked them in Wal-Mart stores at night."