Fascist Immigration Raids and Kangaroo Trials in Iowa

From May 19 to May 22, nearly 300 immigrant
workers were railroaded through a makeshift federal criminal court set
up at the National Cattle Congress fairgrounds in Waterloo, Iowa-given
five-month prison sentences, after which they will be deported out of
the U.S. These immigrants were caught in a massive round-up on Monday,
May 12, when armed agents swooped down on the Agriprocessors meatpacking
plant in the town of Postville with arrest warrants for almost 700 out
of the 968 workers there. Officials said that the raid-involving Immigration
and Customs Enforcement (ICE, part of the Department of Homeland Security)
along with more than a dozen other federal, state, and local agencies-was
the largest immigration raid at a single workplace in U.S. history.

The agents took away 389 immigrant workers
from the meatpacking plant that day. This is part of the intensifying
fascist offensive targeting immigrants in this country-including raids
at workplaces and neighborhoods, mobilization of right-wing vigilantes,
draconian anti-immigrant laws passed by cities and states, building
of walls and other stepped-up military measures at the border, etc.
On May 23, ICE announced that their agents had made more than 900 arrests
in California in a three-week “sting” operation to catch people
under deportation orders. Last year alone, ICE deported 275,000 immigrants.

According to the government, the immigrants
arrested at Agriprocessors are “guilty” of fraud-of using fake
Social Security numbers and other documents. These workers-mostly
from Guatemala-are among the millions of people from Central America,
Mexico, and other parts of the world who could no longer feed themselves
and their families in their home countries where the economies and whole
societies have been devastated because of imperialist domination and
plunder. They traveled north, often risking their lives to cross the
deserts at the U.S./Mexico border, and came to work at the meatpacking
plant in rural Iowa, forced to endure extremely dangerous conditions
for low pay. In order to get these jobs, the immigrants had to get IDs
through whatever means available. And now they are branded as “criminals”
for this.

The huge raid at Agriprocessors-which
suddenly put more than 10 percent of Postville’s 2,500 residents in
prison-has devastated and terrorized the immigrants and the whole
town (and has sent tremors through immigrant communities across the
U.S.). The day after, half of the local school system’s 600 students
were absent because their parents were arrested or were in hiding. The
school superintendent said that the situation “is like a natural disaster-only
this one is manmade.” Hundreds of immigrants took refuge in a local
church. Dozens of local businesses shut down. One business owner told
the British paper Globe and Mail, “We got raped and we got
plundered and we got pillaged Monday. Everybody in this town ought to
be angry.” (“Hardening the line on illegal workers,” May 23, 2008)

Criminalizing Immigrant Workers

But the size of the raid is not the only
thing that is very alarming about what has been happening here. In the
past, immigrants caught without “proper documents” have usually
been brought before immigration hearings and charged with visa violation,
which is a civil law matter. But in an unprecedented move, the government
hit the hundreds of workers arrested in the Agriprocessors raid with
criminal charges-for simply working without “proper” legal
documents. This is a clear and dangerous escalation in the government’s
move to criminalize undocumented immigrants-and to drive them even
deeper into a caste-like status where they are brutally exploited with
the constant threat of jail and deportation over their heads. Juliet
Stumpf, an immigration law professor at Lewis & Clark Law School,
told the New York Times, “To my knowledge, the magnitude of
these indictments is completely unprecedented. It’s the reliance on
criminal process here as part of an immigration enforcement action that
takes this out of the ordinary, a startling intensification of the criminalization
of immigration law.” (“270 Illegal Immigrant Workers Sent to Prison
in Federal Push,” May 24, 2008)

For the four days of the mass trials
at the fairgrounds, the immigrant prisoners were held in a concentration
camp-like setup behind barbed wire fences patrolled by armed guards.
The immigrants-hands cuffed and with shackles on their legs-were
brought into the temporary courtrooms in groups to enter their plea,
and then moved to another room for sentencing.

According to the American Civil Liberties
Union and others, the federal prosecutors forced the immigrants
to accept plea bargains-by threatening that if the immigrants did
not plead guilty to a “lesser” charge and go along with this “deal,”
they would be hit with more serious criminal charges of identity theft.
The heavier charges would have carried a mandatory sentence of at
least 2 years, along with large fines.

And the immigrants were blatantly stripped
of their rights to legal counsel and due process of law-which supposedly
apply to anyone in this country, regardless of their status. A May 21
ACLU statement described the totally unjust proceedings that have been
taking place in Iowa: “Groups of more than 20 meatpacking workers
are typically represented by a single defense lawyer who for each group
must decide complex immigration issues, assess criminal liability and
counsel clients who do not speak English. The lawyers, who do not specialize
in immigration law, must complete this task under the pressure of the
U.S. Attorney’s Office’s arbitrary plea bargain deadline of seven
days. Within this deadline every lawyer and client must make a potentially
irrevocable decision to plead guilty and go to jail and lose any immigration
rights or fight the criminal charges and face up to two or more years
in prison for allegedly engaging in “identity theft” in order to
work.

“The groups of immigrants are rushed
through mass hearings that last only minutes and during the hearings
are required to waive their right to an immigration hearing in exchange
for better criminal plea agreements. Workers with legitimate claims
to remain in the country legally-including immigrants with family
members who are U.S. citizens or with legitimate claims of asylum or
political persecution-are ostensibly barred from pursuing those claims
under the criminal plea agreements.”

In a May 22 letter to Homeland Security
Secretary Michael Chertoff and U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey,
the American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA) expressed “grave
concern” for “the apparent disregard of the rights to meaningful
assistance of counsel and due process” for those caught up in the
Agriprocessors raid. The AILA pointed out what they called a “most
striking” point: The U.S. District Court for the Northern District
of Iowa issued a press release on May 12-the very day of the
raid at Agriprocessors-announcing the temporary assignment of federal
judges and court personnel to Waterloo “in response to the”prosecution
of numerous illegal aliens”” As the AILA notes, this press release
was issued “before any of those arrested and charged had been found
to be an “illegal alien.””

In other words, the U.S. government has
been openly operating in this case on the outrageous principle that
the immigrants are presumed guilty of what they are charged with
even before any kind of trial.

The Fascist Clampdown-And the Need  
for Resistance

Agriprocessors-the biggest kosher meatpacking
plant in this country-opened on the edge of Postville in 1987. At
first, the company hired mostly workers from the former Soviet bloc
countries of Eastern Europe. The Globe & Mail noted, “As
Stephen Bloom, the author of Postville: A Clash of Cultures in Heartland
America, puts it, the Eastern Europeans didn’t work at Agriprocessors
a day longer than was absolutely necessary. As soon as they were established,
they moved on to better paying, less dangerous jobs.”

Through the 1990s, the workforce at Agriprocessors
became mainly Latino-first from Mexico, and then later mainly from
Guatemala. A 2006 exposé in the Jewish Daily Forward revealed
the kind of conditions that the workers face at the plant: “One of
those workers-a woman who agreed to be identified by the pseudonym
Juana-came to this rural corner of Iowa a year ago from Guatemala.
Since then, she has worked 10-to-12-hour night shifts, six nights a
week. Her cutting hand is swollen and deformed, but she has no health
insurance to have it checked. She works for wages, starting at $6.25
an hour and stopping at $7, that several industry experts described
as the lowest of any slaughterhouse in the nation. Juana and other employees
at Agriprocessors”receive virtually no safety training. This is an
anomaly in an industry in which the tools are designed to cut and grind
through flesh and bones. In just one month last summer, two young men
required amputations; workers say there have been others since. The
chickens and cattle fly by at a steady clip on metal hooks, and employees
said they are berated for not working fast enough.”

Juana said, “Being here, you see a
lot of injustice. But it’s a small town. It’s the only factory here.
We have no choice.” (“In Iowa Meat Plant, Kosher “Jungle” Breeds
Fear, Injury, Short Pay,” May 26, 2006)

Such super-exploitation has made undocumented
immigrant workers indispensable to the capitalist rulers. They need
these immigrants to keep the U.S. economy profitable-and the money
that the workers send back home has also helped to maintain stability
in those countries in the interests of imperialism. But at the same
time, there is an intense contradiction for the rulers, who face the
necessity of strengthening the whole “cohering glue” of society-to
“keep it all together” from the standpoint of their interests.
In this light, the presence of millions of people in this country who
are living “outside the law” presents serious problems for the rulers,
and they are moving viciously to terrorize and clamp down on immigrants,
as well as those who come to their aid. And the kind of blatant violation
of basic rights going on through this-as seen in the mass trials of
the Agriprocessors workers-is part of the overall ramping up of repression
and fascistic “norms” in this country.

What is happening to immigrants in this
country today is like the rounding up of Jews and others in Nazi Germany.
The urgent question is: Will these horrors be allowed to go on, with
only a few voices raised by people of conscience”or will there be
a huge uproar and determined resistance throughout society to bring
these crimes to a stop? 

This article first appeared in Revolution
newspaper