Reject War on Immigrants

Voice of Revolution denounces the war on immigrant workers that was escalated most recently in the massive December raid on Swift meatpacking plants in six states. Nearly 1,300 workers were profiled, shackled and humiliated, with many deported without the required hearings that same day. Most were sent out of state to military bases and kept from lawyers, union representatives and family. Workers were separated by skin color, shackled with hand and leg chains and paraded out, in an effort to impose the greatest humiliation and fear. Families lined the plant gates, denouncing the government and yelling their support to family, friends and fellow workers.

Mothers, pregnant women and men were rounded up and disappeared by the government. Their children and families, even now, weeks later, still do not know where they are. The government, in its brutality, has provided no assistance and continues to withhold full information about the workers that have disappeared.

At the time of the raids and since, the people have expressed their outrage and come forward to assist the families under attack. Teachers and neighbors organized to get children — left without their parents by the government raids — and ensure they were and continue to be provided for. Many people have taken in dozens of people who were afraid to go home for fear of more raids. Efforts were made to organize meetings and phone trees to ensure no one was left to fend for themselves in the situation.

This brutal government terrorism against immigrant workers was done in the name of identity theft, even though not a single charge of credit card fraud, or bank fraud has been made. Of the almost 1,300 people rounded up and interrogated, only 143 have been charged with using false social security numbers. And while the social security number enables people to work, the contributions they make to the social security fund are not returned to these workers, as they cannot file a claim at retirement. So the government is the one engaged in theft of billions of dollars, while the workers are being criminalized.

Outrage and support for the workers and their communities has been widespread, including hundreds of demonstrations, vigils, and union food drives. Whether these workers have been in the country for years and have children or spouses who are citizens, or only a few months, they have stood together and been joined by all sections of the people from the communities where they live and by people across the country. Demonstrations took place in Detroit, Omaha, Nebraska, and elsewhere.

The people are rejecting efforts by the government to pit immigrant and native workers against each other and to blame the workers for the failure of the government to provide an immigration policy that ends these massive raids and deportations and meets the just claims of all the workers. The broad demand of the people is to end the government raids, stop criminalization of the workers and to defend the rights of all. The immigration status of all should be regularized now — No One is Illegal!

December 12 Raids at Swift

On the day of the raids, Tuesday, December 12, more than one thousand heavily armed agents of the United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency (ICE) staged a coordinated assault on six Swift & Company meatpacking plants. The armed agents first “locked-down” the plants and then fanned out herding the thousands of workers on shift at the time into cafeterias where they were separated according to language and skin color. Those who spoke English fluently and had light skin color were given a blue bracelet and pushed to one side, while the rest were surrounded and interrogated. Gunshots were reported inside the Greeley, Colorado plant. The other besieged facilities are located in Cactus, Texas; Grand Island, Nebraska; Marshalltown, Iowa; and Worthington, Minnesota. The ICE agents handcuffed and chained a total of 1282 workers at the various plants and disappeared them to undisclosed locations, refusing to reveal any details.

Word of the armed assault spread quickly throughout the working class and immigrant communities, mainly via Spanish language radio. Families of meatpacking workers, union members, and leaders of trade unions, minority rights groups, churches and concerned residents quickly surrounded the plants and began discussing how to respond to the surprise attack and defend the rights of all. The people of the community organized to track down their disappeared members finding many of them in various county, state and federal prisons and military bases. Community people also saw to the well being of families of the disappeared, especially young children who had not been picked up from school or their babysitters, as well as youth left at high schools without a guardian.

The brutality of U.S. officials is such that family, community and union representatives were denied access to the disappeared workers or any information other than what ICE and top officials of Homeland Security would reveal. U.S. officials are still denying legal or union access to some of the disappeared and have refused to clarify what they considered the legal rights of those they were holding if any.

The disappeared include workers originally from Guatemala, Mexico, Honduras, El Salvador, Peru, Laos, Sudan and Ethiopia, ICE said. Mexico’s Foreign Relations Department in a statement said 600 of the disappeared are Mexicans.

The United Food and Commercial Workers union, which represents 10,000 Swift & Company workers has gone to court to try and force the government to release the identities of the disappeared, their whereabouts and to allow legal and trade union representation. The union also filed a complaint to be served on the Department of Homeland Security and ICE contending that the federal government violated and continues to violate workers’ rights.

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Many Organizations Call for End to Immigration Raids

In the face of the government’s brutal raids on workers at the Swift factories in six states, as well as numerous other raids, many organizations are demanding an end to these massive raids by the Department of Homeland Security’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). The organizations, active in defending immigrant and civil rights as well as others, bring out that the raids are being done with complete impunity, commonly on the basis of racial profiling and with no regard to the rights of the workers and their families, including the children left stranded. The organizations also objected to the timing of the recent raids at Swift factories, which took place a major holiday for Mexican Americans, that of the Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe. Many activists rejected the clear effort by the U.S. to broadly humiliate all the workers, herding them together like the cattle and pigs slaughtered at the plants, profiling them, interrogating them, forcing people, including women, out of the plant in shackles, then disappearing many with no regard whatever for their children.

Many vigils and protests have occurred since the raids, not only in the cities where the raids occurred but also in many cities across the country, like Detroit and Omaha, Nebraska. Organizations across the country are demanding an immediate end to government raids and terrorism.

Those active on the legal front that of the more than 1200 workers rounded up and often shipped out of state to military camps, less then 5 percent were actually charged with a criminal offense. They brought out that workers were not allowed to speak to attorneys, that many were forced to sign papers for their own deportation without first going before an immigration judge, and other crimes by the government.

Teachers and neighbors in the towns impacted have played a significant role in assisting with children left abandoned by the government’s actions to detain and disappear their parents. Fellow workers are also denouncing the raids and organizing to ensure the union continues to defend the rights of all the workers. Together people are taking their stand — All for One and One for All!

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ICE Terrorizing Immigrant Workers Because of Failed U.S. Immigration Policy

UFCW, December 13, 2006

United Food and Commercial Workers Union (UFCW) members working in Swift and Company meatpacking plants are reporting that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents marched into plants Thursday morning with military weapons, herding, segregating, and terrorizing workers. Plants and plant gates were locked down.

“The display of force by ICE agents is totally outrageous,” said Mark Lauritsen, International Vice President and Director of the Food Processing, Packing, and Manufacturing division of the UFCW. “We believe they are victims of wholesale violations of worker rights. In effect, ICE is criminalizing people for going to work.”

Families have been ripped apart leaving traumatized children stranded at school waiting to be picked up. In some cases, their parents are being transported to detention centers in distant cities and denied the opportunity to call anyone to make arrangements for their children. Workers at the Swift plant in Grand Island, Nebraska, have been bussed to Camp Dodge, Iowa, six hours away from their families, with no guarantee of return transportation.

Workers at the Greeley, Colorado, plant reported that gunshots were fired. Representatives and attorneys with the UFCW, who have standing to represent these workers, have been denied access to the detained workers.

“The workers caught in this vice are victims of a failed immigration system. It’s time for the federal government to stop victimizing workers and reform our immigration system,” said Lauritsen. “The last do-nothing Congress failed to produce its promised immigration reform before recess. The result is that children have been orphaned, left to sleep in strange beds and uncertain about their holiday or their future. Worksite raids with armed agents are not the answer to the nationwide call for immigration reform. America deserves a humane, systematic and comprehensive immigration policy immediately.”

UFCW local unions are working tirelessly to contact family members to protect minor children. Union representatives have been denied access to the facilities to represent workers. UFCW local unions are putting in place a system to aid the families, contacting relatives of children, setting up aid funds to supply holiday gifts and whatever long-term assistance they may need.

The UFCW represents approximately 10,000 workers at the five Swift and Company plants.It represents 1.4 million workers, 250,000 in the meatpacking and poultry industries. UFCW members also work in the health care, garment, chemical, distillery and retail industries.

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Justice Deported

David Bacon

In 1947, Woody Guthrie wrote a song about the crash of a plane carrying Mexican immigrant farm workers back to the border. In haunting lyrics he describes how it caught fire as it flew low over Los Gatos Canyon, near Coalinga at the edge of California’s San Joaquin Valley. Observers below saw people and belongings flung out of the aircraft before it hit the ground, falling like leaves, he wrote.

No record was kept of the workers’ identities. They were simply listed as “deportee,” and that became the name of the song. Far from being recognized as workers or even human beings, Guthrie lamented, the dead were treated as criminals. “They chase us like outlaws, like rustlers, like thieves.”

Some things haven’t changed much. When agents of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrested over a thousand workers in six Swift and Company meatpacking plants on Tuesday, they too were called criminals. In Greeley, Colorado, agents dressed in SWAT uniforms even carried a hundred handcuffs with them into the plant.

The workers, they said, were identity thieves. Barbara Gonzalez, an ICE spokesperson, told reporters outside the slaughterhouse “We have been investigating a large identity theft scheme that has victimized many U.S. citizens and lawful residents.” ICE head Julie Myers told other reporters in Washington, D.C. that “Those who steal identities of U.S. citizens will not escape enforcement.”

Not everyone fell into the ICE chorus.

In Grand Island, Nebraska, site of another Swift plant, police chief Steve Lamken refused to help agents drag workers from the slaughterhouse. “When this is all over, we’re still here,” he told the local paper, “and if I have a significant part of my population that’s fearful and won’t call us, then that’s not good for our community.” In Greeley, hundreds of people, accompanied by the local priest, lined the street as their family members were brought out, shouting that they’d been guilty of nothing more than hard work.

ICE rhetoric would have you believe these deportees had been planning to apply for credit cards and charge expensive stereos or trips to the spa. The reality is that these meatpacking laborers had done what millions of people in this country do every year. They gave a Social Security number to their employer that either did not belong to them, or that did not exist. And they did it for a simple reason: to get a job in one of the dirtiest, hardest, most dangerous workplaces in America. Mostly, these borrowed numbers probably belong to other immigrants who’ve managed to get green cards. But regardless of who they are, the real owners of the Social Security numbers will benefit, not suffer.

Swift paid thousands of extra dollars into their Social Security accounts. The undocumented immigrants using the numbers will never be able to collect a dime in retirement pay for all their years of work on the killing floor. If anyone was cheated here, they were. But ICE agents are calling the victims criminals in order to make their immigration raid sound like an action on behalf of upright citizens.

ICE has not, of course, accused the immigrant workers of the real crime for which they were arrested. That’s the crime of working.

Since passage of the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, hiring an undocumented worker has been a violation of federal law. Don’t expect Swift executives to go to jail, however, or even to pay a fine. The real targets of this law are workers themselves, who become violators the minute they take a job.

Arresting people for holding a job, however, sounds a little inconsistent with the traditional values of hard work supported so strongly by the Bush administration. It makes better PR to accuse workers of a crime that sends shivers down the spines of middle-class newspaper readers, already maxing out their credit cards in the holiday rush.

The real motivation for these immigration raids is more cynical. The Swift action follows months of ICE pressuring employers to fire workers whose Social Security numbers don’t match the agency’s database. These no-match actions have been concentrated in workplaces where immigrants are organizing unions or standing up for their rights.

At the Cintas laundry chain, over 400 workers were terminated in November alone, as a result of no-match letters. Cintas is the target of the national organizing drive by UNITE HERE, the hotel and garment workers union.

In November, hundreds walked out of the huge Smithfield pork processing plant in Tarheel, North Carolina, after the company fired 60 workers for Social Security discrepancies. That non-union plant is not just the national organizing target for the United Food and Commercial Workers Union. Smithfield has also been found guilty repeatedly of firing its employees for union activity, and threatening to use their immigration status against them. When workers at Emeryville, California’s Woodfin Suites tried to enforce the city’s new living wage law, Measure C, they too were suddenly hit with a no-match check.

It’s no accident that workers belong to unions in five of the six Swift meatpacking plants where this week’s raids took place. ICE’s pressure campaign recalls the history of immigration enforcement during previous periods when anti-immigration bills were debated the U.S. Congress, as they were this year.

Before 1986, the then Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) conducted months of high-profile workplace raids, called Operation Jobs. INS used the raids to produce public support for the employer sanctions provision later written into the 1986 immigration law.

In 1998, the INS mounted a huge enforcement action in Nebraska, also targeting meatpacking workers, called Operation Vanguard. Mark Reed, then INS District Director in Dallas, was open about its purpose — to get industry and Congress to support new bracero-type contract labor programs. “That’s where we’re going,” he said in an interview at the time. “We depend on foreign labor. If we don’t have illegal immigration anymore, we’ll have the political support for guest workers.”

Today, ICE and the Bush administration also have an immigration program they want Congress to approve. Once again they want new guest-worker schemes, along with increased enforcement of employer sanctions.

This fall, appealing to right-wing Republicans, the administration proposed new regulations to require employers to fire workers listed in a no-match letter, who can’t resolve the discrepancy in their Social Security numbers. Employers like Cintas and Smithfield now claim anti-union firings are simply an effort to comply with Bush’s new regulation, although it hasn’t yet been issued.

At Swift, the administration is sending a message to employers, and especially to unions: Support its program for immigration reform, or face a new wave of raids. “The significance is that we’re serious about work site enforcement,” threatened ICE chief Myers.

After six years in office, ICE’s choice of this moment to begin their campaign is more than suspect. It is designed to force the new Democratic congressional majority to make a choice. The administration is confident that Democrats will endorse workplace raids in order to appear “tough on illegal immigration” in preparation for the 2008 presidential elections. In doing so, they will have to attack two of the major groups who produced the votes that changed Congress in November — labor and Latinos.

Since 1999, however, the AFL-CIO has called for the repeal of employer sanctions, along with the legalization of the 12 million people living in the United States without documents. One reason is that sanctions are used to punish workers for speaking out for better wages and conditions. Unions serious about organizing immigrants (and that’s a lot of unions nowadays) have seen sanctions used repeatedly to smash their campaigns.

But unions today also include many immigrant members. They want the organizations to which they pay their dues to stand up and fight when government agents bring handcuffs into the plant.

The United Food and Commercial Workers, which represents workers at Swift, did go into court on the day of the raid, asking for an injunction to stop the deportations and to guarantee workers their rights to habeas corpus and legal representation.

But labor will need to do more than that. Unions and immigrants both need a bill that would mandate what they’ve advocated since 1999 — the repeal of employer-sanctions. Workers without visas would still be subject to deportation, but enforcement wouldn’t take place in the workplace, where sanctions deny basic labor rights to millions.

The administration and Republicans in Congress wouldn’t like that, nor would conservative Democrats. Representatives Rahm Emmanuel and Silvestre Reyes, even want sanctions beefed up. But Democrats and labor must make a choice. They can defend the workers, unions and immigrant families who gave them victory in November (voting Democratic 7 out of 10.) Or Democrats can, as they have so often done, turn their back in another triangulation sacrificing their base.

They can join the government’s chorus calling these workers criminals. Or they can recognize them as the human beings they are.

David Bacon is a California photojournalist. His latest book, Communities Without Borders (Cornell University Press, 2006) documents indigenous immigrant communities, including those of meatpacking workers employed in the Swift plant in Omaha.

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Rounding Up the Usual Immigrants

Roberto Lovato, TomPaine.com

Last week’s controversial immigration raids at Swift & Company meatpacking plants in six states, which federal officials have characterized as the largest sweep of its kind in U.S. history, should send waves of fear among citizens and non-citizens alike. The very high profile arrest and detention of almost 1,300 workers marks a major move to further erode all of our rights.

Merely viewing “Operation Wagon Train” as another in the lengthening line of dehumanizing and brutal attacks on immigrant and labor rights — as most analysts do — falls short. That’s because in the so-called War on Terror immigration and immigrants have become the justification of choice in the ongoing erosion of labor, privacy and other rights under the Bush administration.

For example, a statement about the status of the Swift workers by John Bowen, the attorney representing the workers on behalf of the United Food and Commercial Workers Local 7, was indistinguishable from those of attorneys representing detainees in Guantanamo or in secret CIA facilities. “We don’t know where they are and we don’t know what’s happening,” he said. “We don’t know if they are being pressured to do something or not. We can’t provide them or their families with information until we know where they are.”

One of the distinguishing characteristics of the recent raid is the effort by Department of Homeland Security head Michael Chertoff and Immigration and Citizenship Enforcement chief Julie Myers to frame it as a crackdown on “identity theft.”

When I called to find out more about the raids, ICE public affairs officer Richard Rocha was anxious to talk about how the need to protect “victims of identity theft” prompted the Swift & Company raid. The investigation “began as an identity theft investigation and we only later learned about the illegal workers at the plants,” he said.

“OK, sure. You discovered that there were undocumented workers after the fact,” I thought. Having covered privacy and electronic surveillance issues a few years ago, I asked Rocha what sorts of traditional identity theft practices ICE found. Rocha only cited the case of a man who was stopped because his driver’s license had violations that he was later found not to have committed.

“Are there any instances of credit card scams?” I asked. “Not that I know of” he responded. “Bank fraud?” I asked. “I have no specifics,” he answered. “Terrorism links?” I asked. “We have not been told of any links to terrorism regarding the identity theft cases tied to Swift employees,” he said.

At a press conference, Myers used the increasingly militarized language of immigration policy to describe the Swift & Company raid:

This investigation has uncovered a disturbing front in the war against illegal immigration. We believe that the genuine identities of possibly hundreds of U.S. citizens are being stolen or hijacked by criminal organizations and sold to illegal aliens in order to gain unlawful employment in this country. Combating this burgeoning problem is one of ICE’s highest priorities.

“Hundreds of U.S. citizens” refers to alleged and potential cases. Of the nearly 1,300 grabbed and detained without legal recourse (including U.S. citizens) only 65 were charged “identity theft” and ICE representative Rocha could only provide one concrete case after repeated requests for other examples besides the drivers license case he cited. Victims of identity theft are people who generally have some personal identity document — Social Security number, credit card number, bank account — stolen or lost and then used for fraud, deception or economic gain.

Chertoff also used the discussion of the Swift raid to highlight the guest worker program and a national ID card, a high Bush administration priority. The best way to deal with the issues raised in the raid, Chertoff said, “would be a program that would allow businesses that need foreign workers — because they can’t otherwise satisfy their labor needs — to be able to get those workers in a regulated program that gives us visibility into who is coming in, has a secure form of identification and makes sure that the federal government is able to collect and promptly allocate all the necessary taxes.”

Some activists are calling for a boycott of Swift, including its pork products, for collaborating with the government in the recent raids. But for too long, Democrats and Republicans have gone to the trough of “illegal immigration” for votes and for fresh contracts benefiting their backers in the multibillion-dollar, immigration-industrial complex growing in our midst. It is as important and urgent to pressure Democrats to boycott the pork politics of immigration reform that make vilifying, jailing and surveillance of immigrants “natural” — and profitable.

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This Time They Came for the Immigrants

Mary Turck, CommonDreams.org

When they came for the meatpackers, what did we do? When the armed agents descended on the brown-skinned residents of our town, our state, our nation, did we speak up? What did we do when the children came home to empty houses and cried for their parents?

“In Germany they came first for the Communists, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Communist. Then they came for the Jews, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Jew.” — Pastor Martin Niemoller

Last week they came for the immigrants, taking them from meatpacking plants to distant jails, wrenching apart families and communities, safeguarding national security by deporting people whose greatest crime was to work and pay taxes.

Last month they came for the imams, removing them from the plane, refusing to allow them to explain that they were only attending a conference, that they had already informed local police — in advance — that they would be visiting Minneapolis and that they were not dangerous.

Before that, they dropped bombs on Iraq. They tortured prisoners at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib. They arrested a U.S. citizen employee of a contractor in Iraq — a U.S. citizen who had blown the whistle on corruption and illegal activities — and held him in Iraq, incommunicado for weeks, confined to a small cell with bright lights and blaring music and frequent interrogation — for three months. They say that international rules against torture do not apply, and that only some of the Geneva Conventions on warfare apply.

Who are “they”? We buy the uniforms they wear. Our tax dollars pay their salaries. They serve in our military, police forces, immigration service. They direct our State Department and in the Pentagon and in the Department of Homeland Security. They follow orders from our President and our Congress. They act in our name.

“Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a trade unionist.”

On December 12, they came for the immigrants. They came for the brown-skinned workers, for the workers with “Hispanic surnames,” for the immigrants suspected of the crime of working in America to feed their children. Hundreds of armed officers from the Department of Homeland Security descended on Swift meatpacking plants in Worthington, Minnesota — and in Nebraska, Colorado, Texas, Utah and Iowa. They closed down operations, shut out union representatives and lawyers and confined workers for interrogation. Not all the workers, of course. Only those suspected of the crime of Working While Brown.

The brown-skinned workers were held until they could prove their right to work in the United States. Mexican-Americans have to prove their right to live here, over and over again. When is the last time that a German-American or Norwegian-American or Irish-American worker had to prove that right?

More than 220 Minnesotans were arrested, more than 1200 workers across the country. In five out of the six plants, the workers were members of the United Food and Commercial Workers. Immigration (ICE) authorities said the operation was a crackdown on identity theft.

“Identity theft” conjures up visions of criminals running up credit card bills and ruining the victims’ credit rating. Not these “identity thieves” — they used the Social Security numbers to get jobs. Hard, dangerous, dirty jobs in the meatpacking industry. They worked and they paid taxes on their earnings. The money that they, and other undocumented workers, pay into the Social Security system alone adds up to a whopping seven billion dollars each year. And that’s a pure contribution, because they will never be able to collect a dime in Social Security benefits.

“Then they came for the Catholics, and I didn’t speak up because I was a Protestant. Then they came for me, and by that time no one was left to speak up.”

On December 12, the ICE police came for the mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers. The ICE police held them incommunicado, refused to let lawyers talk to them, refused to tell family members whether their sister/brother/mother/father/aunt/uncle was in custody, where they were held, where they would be taken.

“They’re coming to our homes, they’re taking us from our homes.” An anguished Guatemalan father called his German-American friend. And she went, in her pick-up truck with a topper on the back, to rescue her friends from the ICE that chilled this December day.

The immigrants who cut up carcasses for Christmas hams cannot go home for Christmas. They will spend Christmas separated from their loved ones, shipped to out-of-state jails or deported. The families left behind will cry and their friends will call ICE’s designated number over and over to find out where their loved ones are — and will continue to get no answer.

When our neighbors locked their doors and pulled down the shades on their windows and hid in fear from the knock on the door, what did we do? When our government targeted Latinos or Muslims or Arabs, what did we say?

This is the time to stand up. This is the time to speak.

Mary Turck is a writer and activist in St. Paul, Minnesota

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