Posted on 05/18/2008 2:45:11 AM PDT by BunnySlippers
POSTVILLE, Iowa -- Antonio Escobedo ran to get his wife Monday when he saw a helicopter circling overhead and immigration agents approaching the meatpacking plant where they both work. The couple hid for hours inside the plant before obtaining refuge in the pews and hall at St. Bridget's Catholic Church, where hundreds of other Guatemalan and Mexican families gathered, hoping to avoid arrest.
"I like my job. I like my work. I like it here in Iowa," said Escobedo, 38, an illegal immigrant from Yescas, Mexico, who has raised his three children for 11 years in Postville. "Are they mad because I'm working?"
Monday's raid on the Agriprocessors plant, in which 389 immigrants were arrested and many held at a cattle exhibit hall, was the Bush administration's largest crackdown on illegal workers at a single site. It has upended this tree-lined community, which calls itself "Hometown to the World." 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.
According to an affidavit filed by an ICE agent in conjunction with this week's arrests, 76 percent of the 968 employees on the company's payroll over the last three months of 2007 used false or suspect Social Security numbers. The affidavit cited unnamed sources who alleged that some company supervisors employed 15-year-olds, helped cash checks for workers with fake documents, and pressured workers without documents to purchase vehicles and register them in other names.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
Just call the ATF and the FBI and let them race to see who can "Waco" them out first!
Don't look now, but the mainstream Protestant churches are just as deeply involved in the "pro-illegal" business as the Catholics.
I thought that quote was fascinating. Hiding a meth lab in a big abbatoir? Who'd have thought to look for that?
On the other hand, one giveaway of a meth lab is the frequency of pungent chemical odors. A meat-packing plant with its ambient organic odors would tend to mask the meth-lab odors.
Wonder if this is a pattern?
In their own stupid way the WaPo does have a point. They should have had every manager at the plant doing the perp walk on national TV, that would give business owners something to think about. Instead they caught a few small fish that will be replaced with other small fish in a matter of days.
I wonder who’s social security number has he been using for those 11 years?
Agree !
Infestation versus anything even closely resembling immigration........
Follow the legal path or suffer the wrath !
Stay safe ya’ll !
They also uncovered a meth lab at the facility, but that is rarely mentioned in news accounts.
I wonder how much those 300 students (whose parents probably weren’t paying to support the school) was costing the school district...
According to one in the article workers made $60 a day. Wow!
This slaughter house really is a slaughter. Not too many Americans are going to work for that.
Shut them down!
>Maybe the Bush administration has no political iron in this fire except a general directive from the president< ....... for Israel to straighten out an fly right.
PM Olmert is holding up the establishment of a Palestinian state, Bush is ticked off. What better way to show it than to collapse the largest Orthodox meat packing plant in the US.
Agriprocessors plant is done for as the nation’s largest processor of glatt kosher beef. The Orthodox section of their clientele won’t tolerate this kind of nonsense because of their strict religious beliefs.
I read somewhere that the laws already exist that “anchor babies” must accompany their deported parents and not be allowed back till they turn eighteen or twenty-one.
The sanctuary law hasn’t existed since the 1680’s in England. It never existed here. Allowing illegals to take “sanctuary” in leftist churches is pure cowardice on the part of the authorities.
If ICE wanted to “put pressure” on the meatpackers they could simply have stationed a lone agent at the gate, checking ID’s, and kept him there for several months, after telling the company of their plans several weeks in advance.
The end result would have been the same—with a lot less expense for the taxpayers—and a lot less drama all around.
“The problem is, who is going to do the work?”
________________________________________________________________________________
No problem there, offer fair wages and decent working conditions and you’ll be amazed at how many american citizens will show up for the vacancies.
Yuck. It probably sounds elitist and spoiled but I wouldn’t want to work in meat production plant for any amount of money. My husband once worked in a butcher shop and also at a seafood processing plant, and my BIL worked at a poultry plant and they both say they wouldn’t go back no matter what the pay was. I’m also not wanting to go out and pick tomatoes in the fields all day either, regardless of pay.
Yuck. It probably sounds elitist and spoiled but I wouldn’t want to work in meat production plant for any amount of money. My husband once worked in a butcher shop and also at a seafood processing plant, and my BIL worked at a poultry plant and they both say they wouldn’t go back no matter what the pay was. I’m also not wanting to go out and pick tomatoes in the fields all day either, regardless of pay.
Believe it or not, from what I’ve read (including the WaPo comments for that article) until less that twenty years ago, meatpackers paid a decent wage with benefits and had a unionized workforce. Then, beginning after the “immigration reform” of 1986 they saw the opportunities and systematically turfed out their unionized workforce for docile illegals.
Assembly-line labor sucks all around, that’s why those UAW jobs paid so well, but as for things like tomato-picking, well, the prevalence of “cheap labor” prevents any further automation-type innovation.
Thomas Sowell has written on this in certain of his works. Down through the centuries, economies based on “cheap labor” whether outright chattel slavery, indenture, caste etc. tend to be stagnant and impoverished for the many.
Our own South is a prime example. For decades, first with slavery, then sharecropping and chain gangs, with blacks and poor whites kept in line through violence and selectively-written laws, our southern states were a malnourished backwater. Only gradually after WWII and then more swiftly after civil rights was “King Cotton” and the feudal system that supported it gradually banished to the third world and the “Sunbelt” economy free to take shape.
Good, I hope the ICE enforces that.
>>>The Orthodox section of their clientele won’t tolerate this kind of nonsense because of their strict religious beliefs.
Beg to differ. This place operated for years before the raid because the management and ownership could, and did “compartmentalize” - and used any means to their end.
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