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 News from Around the Americas | December 2006 
Raid Shakes U.S. Immigrants on Mexican Holy Day
 Reuters
| | One family of three children - aged between two and 12 years old - were left with no parent by the raid. |
Eyewitnesses told of anguish as police swooped on several meat packing plants in the United States' largest immigration raid on Tuesday, the day Mexicans honor their beloved national icon, the Virgin of Guadalupe.
The swoop by more than 1,000 Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers on Swift & Co. meat packing plants in six states from Utah to Texas, netted nearly 1,300 people, most of them undocumented immigrants from Mexico.
Rights worker Sylvia Martinez was attending a mass in Greeley, Colo. honoring the day of the Virgin's legendary appearance to an Indian peasant nearly 500 years ago, when several buses packed with ICE agents rumbled into the town shortly after dawn and headed up to the meatpacking plant.
As news of the raid spread among the congregation, people trickled out of the service into the streets, where ice and snow still lay in patches from falls a few days earlier.
"There was tremendous sorrow, horror and uncertainty, a lot of people just left the mass and went up to the plant," said Martinez, a spokeswoman for the Latinos Unidos activist group in the community of 80,000 people.
"The ICE agents walked into the plant with hard hats provided by the company, and we got phone calls from the inside saying people were being handcuffed and sat on the floor without being allowed to use the rest rooms," she added.
The raid came as ICE moves to step up workplace enforcement in raids on farms and factories nationwide, which target illegal immigrants using stolen social security numbers and documents bought on a thriving black market.
The scenes of confusion were repeated in Worthington, Minn., where immigration police targeted the first shift arriving at the Swift & Co. factory, directing workers to the cafeteria to investigate their immigration status.
"It swept up everybody in the plant and subjected the entire workforce, and by extension their families and the community, to this incredibly disruptive event," said lawyer Bruce Nestor, who witnessed the raid.
CHILDREN WITHOUT PARENTS
Most workers at the Swift plants work nine-hour shifts, making between $11 and $20 an hour, the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union said. It's not uncommon for mother-and-father teams to work at the same plant.
As the hours passed, Martinez said anxious relatives of workers on the day shift gathered in the chill morning air outside the plant, among them sobbing children fearing for the fate of a parent held inside.
"The children were horrified, and crying out for their parents," Martinez said. She was unable immediately to confirm if any of the children, all of whom she described as school age, had been taken into care.
In Worthington, a town of 11,000 people some 175 miles (282 km) from Minneapolis-Saint Paul, Nestor said an unknown number of young children had been left without their parents after the raid.
"It has had a devastating impact on the Latino community. Families have been split apart, people are still trying to locate family members ... and children have been left without parents," he said.
"At one church I visited last night, I saw children both of whose parents had been detained by immigration," Nestor told Reuters by telephone.
He said one family of three children - aged between two and 12 years old - were left with no parent by the raid.
"The 12-year-old came home and there was nobody there," he said. "It is an incredibly frightening situation for that child." |
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