Swift raid largest in American history

Washington, D.C. — The arrest of workers at meatpacking giant Swift & Co. — the largest such raid in U.S. history — shows that the government is serious about cracking down on illegal immigration, officials say.

This time, federal agents were armed with criminal charges, accusing some workers of identification theft and forgery, and disrupted not just one work site but an entire company. Arrested were 1,282 Swift workers, about 9 percent of the work force at six plants.

The detainees included 90 people arrested at Swift’s pork processing facility at Marshalltown, where officials said the investigation began earlier this year.
“This happened to Swift. It could easily happen elsewhere,” Homeland Security Secretary Mike Chertoff said Wednesday. “We’re going to try to make it inhospitable to break the law here.”

An Iowan with knowledge about immigration practices said the government was “changing the rules” with this week’s raids.

Sixty-five of the arrested workers, including two in Marshalltown, were detained on criminal charges involving ID theft. The rest were accused of being in the country illegally, the basis for most immigration raids, and were expected to eventually be deported.

Officials said they were still working to break up the document rings that provided the stolen IDs, including Social Security numbers and birth certificates, used to get jobs at Swift.

Other employers and immigrant workers will take note of the raids on Swift, said Mark Grey, director of the Iowa Center for Immigrant Leadership and Integration at the University of Northern Iowa. Grey said the government was “changing the rules” by using ID theft charges to target workers.

“What this does is that everybody tends to run for cover when something like this happens,” he said. “But the way this economy works, that will not last long.”

Raid began at plant in Marshalltown

The government’s investigation started with a series of jailhouse interviews of workers arrested at the Swift plant in Marshalltown, said officials with the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency.

The agency obtained employment eligibility forms, known as I-9s, for 2,000 to 2,100 workers at the plant, and decided that 30 percent of those were suspect and merited further investigation, according to government and company officials. The probe widened to the entire company. More recently, the government uncovered an identity-theft ring that had provided birth certificates to people in Worthington, Minn.

About 400 workers were fired or left the plants voluntarily in the fall after Swift demanded interviews of workers it suspected of being in the country illegally. Immigration officials criticized Swift for not notifying the government that the employees had left. The agency has been unable to find them.

Swift cited a letter, dated Oct. 25, in which the immigration agency said the company was not barred from taking action against any workers it determined were ineligible for jobs. Sean McHugh, the company spokesman, said the immigration agency did not ask to be notified if workers left or were fired. Swift has not been accused of wrongdoing.

The United Food and Commercial Workers filed grievances over the company’s interviews, although after the workers left, the Marshalltown plant raised its starting wage from $9.55 to $11.50 in an attempt to fill the vacancies, said Jim Olesen, the union’s local president.

Federal agents missed later shift

Swift had unsuccessfully gone to court to block the government from raiding all six plants at once. The company wanted the plants targeted one at a time. A federal judge in Amarillo, Texas, ruled last Thursday that the company was certain to be harmed, but she agreed with the government that the companywide action was necessary to catch people involved in ID theft.

The raids missed nearly half the work force at the plants, McHugh said. Four plants, including the Marshalltown facility, have two shifts, but the raids affected only the early shift.

A spokesman for the immigration agency, Mark Raimondi, said he could not explain why workers on the afternoon shifts were left alone.

There may have been a motive to the raids other than sending a message to employers and illegal immigrants: Immigration officials disclosed during the court hearing on Swift’s attempt to block the raids that they were originally planned to take place in late October, before the November congressional elections, McHugh said.

“The motivation behind when we went in,” said Raimondi, “was when the investigation was at the right stage and our investigators felt it would be most appropriate.”

Chertoff said that there would inevitably be a “ripple effect” from enforcing immigration laws. “If we enforce the law, as we are absolutely determined to do, there are going to be cases where people further down the distribution chain will have a consequence.”

He said the raids pointed to the need for a guest worker program and improvements in the system that verifies the eligibility of job applicants.

The system can verify that a name and Social Security number go together but cannot indicate whether the number has been stolen.

Patrick Boyle, president of the American Meat Institute, said packers are caught in the middle.

“If an employer accepts documents as legitimate that turn out to be fraudulent, they may face federal penalties. If an employer questions documents that are legitimate, the employer can face civil rights charges,” he said.

From the Des Moines Register

Months of long letters, expensive phone calls and court hearings ended this week with Robert Braun making a 1,700-mile drive to El Paso, Texas.

He lost his fight to keep his fiancee in America. He's moving to the border to be with her until they can return together to the Midwest.

"It's going to be a big change, but you have to go, and adapt to what you need, to be with those you love," he said.

Braun's fiancee, Dulce Hernandez Vazquez, 33, was among the 99 undocumented immigrants netted in the Dec. 12 raids at the Swift & Co. meatpacking plant in Marshalltown. She has spent the last few months in a rural Alabama jail awaiting an immigration hearing before a judge in Atlanta.

Hernandez appeared in court May 3, but a paperwork mix-up resulted in her not getting to plead her case to stay in the United States. She was left with two choices: Sit in jail waiting for another court date, or agree to a one-way ticket to Mexico. She's scheduled to board a plane this morning.

Braun, 31, quit his job with the U.S. Department of Agriculture in Ames last week and over the weekend visited his family in Wetonka, S.D., about 25 miles northwest of Aberdeen.

He headed south Monday in a 1980s Cadillac that he borrowed from his parents. He has $3,000 in cash, credit cards and the name of a friend-of-a-friend who might help him find a job and a place to rent.

He's moving to El Paso, but he plans to spend every night across the border in Juarez, a city of about 2 million in the Mexican state of Chihuahua.

U.S. officials say Braun can come and go as he pleases. But Hernandez isn't welcome, and it's unclear when, if ever, she'll be allowed to return - even to visit her two children, a son, 13, and a daughter, 8.

Under the rules of her departure, she could be banned from the United States for at least 10 years.



No statistics exist on the number of people who move to border towns to be near loved ones or relatives living in a neighboring Mexican city. Local and national immigrant advocates say Braun's efforts sound a bit unusual.

"It's very romantic in a depressing sort of way," said Flavia Jimenez, immigration policy analyst with the National Council of La Raza, a Latino advocacy group in Washington, D.C.

After someone is deported, most relatives and loved ones end up staying behind in the community, especially if they have children and a network of support, she said.

Sister Christine Feagan, director of Hispanic Ministry at St. Mary's Church in Marshalltown, said some immigrants in the community - including some with U.S.-born children who are unable to read or write in Spanish - returned to Mexico because of the raids. Some are still waiting for loved ones to go to trial.

"It's definitely splitting up families, and some families will be split up permanently," Feagan said.

Jose L. Cuevas, consul at the Mexican consulate in Omaha, which helped families affected by the Swift raids in Marshalltown and Grand Island, Neb., said he wasn't aware of anyone who has moved to the border.

But at least 37 people - a mix of legal and illegal residents - went to Mexico to join relatives or loved ones who were sent back, he said. Nationally, almost half of the 1,297 detained have left the country, officials say.



Hernandez sneaked across the border as a teenager in 1992. Her parents had died and she planned to seek out her sister in New Jersey.

She lived for about 11 years in Chicago, where she gave birth to Oscar and Jazmine. The children now live in Marshalltown with their father, who says he is a legal resident. Hernandez and the children's father never married.

In 2004, she got a job cooking and cleaning in the cafeteria at the Swift plant in Marshalltown. That's where she met Braun, who worked as an animal health technician for the USDA.

In January, she accepted Braun's proposal over the phone while she was in a jail in Georgia. The two plan on marrying in Juarez, Braun said.

Hernandez hugged her children for the first time in almost five months when they showed up at the courtroom in Georgia earlier this month. Braun took them down with him, hoping they would see her set free.

"When we drove by the jail for the first time, it kind of brought tears to my eyes," he said.



For reasons that are unclear, the judge handling Hernandez's case never received an application for what's called a "cancellation of removal." The applications are sometimes granted to undocumented immigrants who have been in the United States for at least 10 years, are of "good moral character," and whose departure would subject a lawful permanent resident or U.S. citizen, who is an immediate family member, to unusual or extreme hardship.

Waiting for another court date would have meant several more months in the Gadsden, Ala., jail. Hernandez chose to leave.

Braun said court officials told him that if he paid for Hernandez's plane ticket back to Mexico, she could opt for "voluntary departure" instead of deportation.



The judge gave her 10 minutes to hug and kiss her children before officers took her back to Gadsden.

"It was hard with her seeing me, seeing the kids and then having to go," Braun said. "There was a lot of crying."

Braun said the judge told him afterward that Hernandez's chances of remaining in America were slim without intervention from a member of Congress. Braun and his mother in South Dakota said they tried contacting some of their U.S. congressmen, but none was interested.

Hernandez's former counsel, Des Moines immigration attorney Ta-Yu Yang, said she might be better off accepting voluntary departure instead of deportation, but she's still subject to a 10-year ban.

Once the couple is married, Braun can file a waiver asking for her return, saying the separation is causing a hardship for him and for her children.

In the meantime, Braun is preparing for his reunion. He plans to fly from El Paso to Mexico City today, where he will meet Hernandez and then fly to Juarez.

"It's been 14 years since she's been to Mexico. Other than the fact she speaks Spanish, it's new for both of us," he said.



Braun said moving from his parents' farm in South Dakota to Marshalltown was a shock. He has no idea what's in store in a city of 580,000 people, of which about 70 percent speak primarily Spanish.

He said he would like to continue working for the federal government, but his fiancee's situation could make it harder for him to find work. He's applied for a number of positions, including one in customs and border patrol with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

He also would welcome working for the USDA, National Park Service or the Food and Drug Administration in or near El Paso.

His family, friends and former co-workers support him, but he knows a lot of people are probably happy that his fiancee landed back in Mexico.

What she did was illegal. He argues that Hernandez should have a chance to make amends and change her status.

After they get married, they are going back to concentrate on getting Hernandez back on a legal path across the border.

"As long as there's hope, I won't do anything illegal," Braun said. "If Dulce would have been banned for longer, we might do something different. But now that there's hope, we will follow the rules."

Reporter Paula Lavigne can be reached at (515) 745-3428 or plavigne@dmreg.com