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AMARILLO, Texas — Six more former workers arrested during a raid of the Swift & Co. meatpacking plant in Cactus pleaded guilty to federal charges this week and could go to prison. The six entered pleas in federal court in Amarillo on Tuesday, the U.S. Attorney's Office said in a news release issued Wednesday. Charges against them stem from a December immigration raid at the Swift plant in the Panhandle conducted as part of an investigation into the use of Social Security numbers by illegal immigrants to gain employment. Four of the defendants — Jesus Gutierrez-Ramos, Domingo Velasquez-Gutierrez, Manuel Castro-Pablo...

HYRUM - There are rumors whispered among the Swift plant workers here that immigration agents will return for a second raid - the night shift might be next. But employees rarely speak openly about the Dec. 12 roundup at the Swift & Co. meat processing plant, where 158 undocumented workers were arrested. The plant hasn't been the same since the raid, employees say. Some workers never returned after the roundup. And there's a lot of work, but many new people can't cut it. "They've been hiring right and left," said Maria, a Swift employee who asked that her last name...

BOSTON - Jane Swift, whom Mitt Romney stepped over in 2002 to become governor of Massachusetts, announced Wednesday she was endorsing Sen. John McCain in the 2008 presidential race. ”Senator John McCain is a principled leader whose unwavering determination to improve the lives of Americans is admirable,” Swift said of the Arizona Republican in a statement issued by his presidential exploratory committee.

Back in June 2006, the front page of the New York Times carried news of a highly secret CIA-Treasury department intelligence program to track al Qaeda financing that drew on data supplied by a European banking consortium based in Belgium known as SWIFT. President Bush denounced the newspaper’s disclosure of the classified counterterrorism operation as “disgraceful.” Prior to publication, administration officials had strenuously warned the newspaper not to run the story, arguing, among other things, that it would endanger national security by placing the SWIFT consortium under intense pressure to stop sharing information with U.S. intelligence. Bill Keller, his paper...

Greeley-based Swift & Co. says it will consider a sale, merger or IPO after unnamed suitors approached the giant meatpacker. Swift, at more than $9 billion in revenue, is one of the nation's biggest private companies. It was part of ConAgra until the Omaha-based agri-giant sold it in 2002 to a partnership between buyout firm HM Capital - formerly Hicks, Muse, Tate & Furst - and George Gillett's Booth Creek. Gillett serves as Swift's chairman. Over the five years of ownership, Swift has dealt with a Japanese beef ban that crimped sales and prompted layoffs, as well as a raid...

Attorneys representing foreign workers jailed in the recent crackdown at meatpacking plants accused immigration officials of violating a federal court order to hold bond hearings within 48 hours for the detainees. Today the attorneys asked U.S. District Court Judge John Kane for an emergency order to force the government to hold bond hearings for 61 Mayan workers from Guatemala who now are held without bond at a federal facility in El Paso, Texas. The order was for all of the roughly 260 detainees who have not had a bond hearing to receive one, attorneys said. A court filing by Jim...

DENVER - A federal judge demanded Friday that U.S. immigration officials disclose the whereabouts of 265 people arrested in a meatpacking raid last month in Colorado. U.S. District Judge John L. Kane gave Immigration and Customs Enforcement until Jan. 22 to submit a list accounting for all the detainees, including those who have been deported. "There are people in custody — there is an urgency to this," Kane said. Union attorneys are contesting the arrests at the Swift & Co. meat processing plant in Greeley, one of six Swift plants in six states that were raided Dec. 13. In all,...

One of the hoariest cliches in the immigration debate is that illegal aliens in the workforce "do the jobs Americans won't do" - hence the need for a general amnesty......Vicente Fox said it....President Bush has referred to "good, honorable, hardworking people here doing jobs Americans won't do" as he tried to drum up support for his "path to citizenship" ........ But is the conventional wisdom true? Last week, as part of a broader ID theft and illegal-document probe, ICE agents raided Swift & Co. plants in six states - rounding up hundreds of illegal workers. Yet the plants managed to...

Few would call it a dream job. But the position of slaughterer at the Swift & Co. plant in Greeley, Colo., was drawing some interest last week... The Rocky Mountain News observed that the line of applicants “was out the door” at the county employment office.... ...Meanwhile in Nebraska, union officials said Tuesday that 40 to 50 workers had been hired at the Grand Island plant, one of six Swift plants raided by the ICE in a sweep that led to nearly 1,300 arrests. And funny thing —they say Swift has been improving its wages, benefits and bonuses since before...

A spokesman for Swift & Co. says a lawsuit filed recently by eighteen former Swift & Co. employees is "completely without merit." The $23-million lawsuit alleges that the meat packing company conspired to manipulate and depress the labor market and wages by hiring illegal immigrants. The lawsuit, filed late Friday in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas, alleges that defendants including Swift and its owners, HM Capital Partners LLC in Dallas -- formerly Hicks, Muse, Tate & Furst -- engaged in an "enterprise that grossly affected commerce through a pattern of racketeering activity" in violation of...

They came to tell the stories they say aren't being told. In the wake of last Tuesday's raids at Swift & Co. meatpacking plants in Worthington, Minn., and five other states, a group of about 200 people gathered Monday afternoon outside the St. Paul offices of U.S. Sen. Norm Coleman to condemn the federal action and demand immigration reform. After a 40-minute rally, a smaller group walked into the Republican senator's office and read stories about families affected by the Minnesota roundup of more than 200 workers on alleged immigration violations. "One woman is pregnant and is terrified to leave...

A federal grand jury in Minneapolis indicted 15 people on identity-theft charges and four more on other identity-related counts, all stemming from last week's raid on the Swift & Co. pork processing plant in Worthington, Minn. The immigration raids on Swift plants in six states led to the arrests of nearly 1,300 people, including 230 in Worthington, in what was described as a crackdown on illegal immigrants using stolen identities to get jobs.

DALLAS (AP) - Former employees are suing Swift & Co. for $23 million, alleging the meatpacking company conspired to keep wages down by hiring illegal immigrants. The 18 former employees are legal residents who worked at a plant in Cactus, Texas, north of Amarillo. The plant was one of six facilities raided in a multistate federal sweep that led to the arrests of nearly 1,300 employees and temporarily halted Swift's operations. "These plaintiffs are ... victims in a long-standing scheme by Swift to depress and artificially lower the wages of its workers by knowingly hiring illegal workers," said attorney, Angel...

For nearly two weeks, Swift & Co. officials fought to block an impending immigration raid they knew was coming. According to newly unsealed federal-court records filed in Amarillo, Texas, on Dec. 4, the company sought an injunction to stop U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement from raiding six of its plants across the nation. On Dec. 7, the company's request was denied. And on Tuesday, the raid went forward. While waging the sealed court fight, Swift scrutinized its workers' employment documents. Nearly 400 workers nationally "simply disappeared" because of that review, said Don Wiseman, the company's general counsel. "We never fired...

Man's ID theft linked to raidsWorkers used his information in 3 different states By Mike Baird Caller Times December 16, 2006 A former Landry's busboy is bucking Uncle Sam, who wants a cut of $75,790 earned by employees at three national meat processing companies using Steven De Leon Aumada's identification. Aumada, 21, says he feels "skinned and filleted" after realizing he might be trapped in the web of worker deceit that led immigration officials to raid six Swift & Co. meat processing plants Tuesday in six states, according to officials. The Internal Revenue Service notified Aumada in July that he...

Not all of the suspected illegal immigrants detained in the raid are in Iowa some are back in Grand Island. In cases where married couples with children both worked at Swift and were detained, the mother has been allowed to return to her kids. One of the alleged illegal immigrants is back at home, but her husband is still with authorities somewhere in Iowa. The 261 suspected illegal immigrants detained in Tuesday's Swift raid were made up of both men and women, some of whom were married to each other. If they had kids, the mom could go home. Thursday...

We should throw them a parade. The Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents and investigators who did that nationwide raid at Swift packing plants the other day. We should throw them a parade. We should treat them like the national heroes they are. We should let them -- and the rest of the country -- know that most of us don't agree with this hand-wringing going on in the media. We don't think the raid was a bad thing, we don't think it was unfair or un-American. We think that it was a federal agency for once doing its job. Here's...

......"But as Catholics, we also need to vigorously question the timing, manner and focus of these latest arrests. Staged on the Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe and barely two weeks before Christmas, these raids have disrupted hundreds of families in the immigrant community and frightened many thousands more. And while public officials have explained the reason for these raids as criminal identity theft, most of the real criminals – the people who steal and sell the false identities so that undocumented immigrants can find work – were not among those arrested. Click here to find out more! Dramatic, get-tough...

The immigration raids on meatpacking plants in six states were the largest sweep of their kind against a single company and resulted in the arrests of 1,282 suspected illegal immigrants, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said yesterday. The raids early Tuesday of facilities owned by meatpacking giant Swift & Co., based in Greeley, Colo., were followed by immigration charges against 18 percent of the 7,250 workers scheduled to work the morning shift, Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials said. More than 100 people were charged with crimes that included identity theft, Chertoff said, and that number is expected to grow. Federal...

First it was the chaos. Then it was the confusion as to who was arrested and where they would be taken. Now, the Spanish-speaking residents of Cactus, Dumas and other neighboring communities who escaped Tuesday's raid because they either are here legally or do not work at the Swift meat plant, face an even bigger problem: what is going to happen to the more than 100 children whose parents were rounded up and arrested? "Right now the children are being taken care of by relatives or friends of those who were deported," said Orlando Gajardo, spokesman for the St. Peter...