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 News from Around the Americas | March 2007 
As Immigration Raids Rise, Human Toll Decried
 Yvonne Abraham - Boston Globe
| | Splitting backbones and final inspection - hogs ready for cooler, Swift & Co., Chicago. |
When Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents raided a meatpacking plant in Marshalltown, Iowa, on Dec. 16, arresting 99 workers who could not prove they were in the country legally, then-governor Tom Vilsack was livid.
Immigration officials "chose to pursue a solitary path that limited the operation's effectiveness, created undue hardship for many not at fault, and led to resentment and further mistrust of government," Vilsack wrote in a letter to Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff.
The ICE raid was part of the agency's largest-ever enforcement operation, hitting Swift & Co. slaughterhouses in six states and resulting in the arrests of 1,297 workers. As of March 1, 649 of those workers had been deported.
Like the March 6 raid on the Michael Bianco Inc. leather goods factory in New Bedford, in which more than 300 workers were arrested, the Swift operation left some children stranded for hours, and many others in the care of friends and relatives. ICE flew many detainees to an out-of-state federal detention facility before immigrants' advocates had a chance to speak with them about their children. Some detainees were not initially honest with ICE investigators about whether they had children, fearing they, too, would be taken into custody even though some of those children were US citizens.
And like the New Bedford raid, the Swift raids drew harsh criticism from the governor, who criticized ICE's limited cooperation with state officials, including its refusal to release information in a timely fashion on who was detained and where.
Immigration raids nationwide have increased in recent months. Scenes similar to those in New Bedford and Marshalltown have played out in cities like Worthington, Minn., and Stillmore, Ga., where a poultry plant was raided last Labor Day. In Santa Fe, 30 undocumented workers were arrested in a raid in February, and Mayor David Coss said he was outraged that "families are being torn apart, literally."
Arrests of undocumented immigrants have grown 750 percent between 2002 and 2006, going from 485 arrests to 3,667. That dramatic increase in scale and frequency has produced far more visible humanitarian consequences than ever before, an immigrants' advocate said .
"This is the hidden underbelly of immigration enforcement," said Christopher Nugent, a Washington-based immigration attorney. "This is nothing new. It happens all the time."
Nugent and others said families are separated and children left with friends or relatives every day in the course of normal ICE immigration detentions. But the welfare of children affected by immigration raids has become a bigger issue in recent months as the scope of the immigration raids has expanded.
The Bush administration has stepped up enforcement efforts to answer its critics and build a credible stance to push for comprehensive immigration reform that includes a guest worker program and paths to citizenship for some of the 12 million undocumented immigrants currently in the country.
"The Bush administration has calculated that it needs to appear tougher on enforcement in order to persuade a sufficient number of congressmen to vote for the amnesty the president wants," said Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, which favors stricter immigration controls and sees providing a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants as a blanket amnesty. "It's a policy ploy to shore up the president's credibility on the immigration issue."
"America is going to see more and more of this," said John Keller, a Minneapolis immigration attorney who represented some of the 239 Swift & Co. workers detained in Worthington. The raids are "a very blunt tool that is being applied to family situations."
Children can be separated from detained parents for months, while parents await bond hearings, or deportation. Parents who leave the United States face the choice of taking US citizen children with them, or being separated from them permanently in the hope of giving those children better opportunities here. Social service workers in other cities where raids took place told of scrambling to try to get passports for the US citizen children whose parents chose to take them back to the countries they left.
ICE is not obligated to provide for the children of undocumented workers they arrest, or to go easier on those with children, said Victor Cerda, a former ICE general counsel and a 10-year veteran of immigration enforcement.
But he said that agents, particularly in recent years, have tried to take children into account; parents who are sole caregivers are sometimes released from detention with orders to appear in court later. "It has been learned in the last few years that you do have children who are going to have parents taken into custody, and you can't just ignore them," Cerda said. "Now it is part of the practice to inquire about family."
In New Bedford, Bruce Foucart, the special agent in charge of the operation, said he contacted state officials before the raid took place, allowing them to put the Department of Social Services on notice that their help might be required to make sure that children affected by the raid were taken care of.
There has been hot debate over the last two weeks over how cooperative the federal agents were with state officials, and how much access to the detainees the state workers were promised. But both sides agree that at least some consultation took place.
That made the New Bedford raid unique, said ICE officials and immigrant advocates from other towns where hundreds of workers were detained.
"The Boston special agent in charge made unprecedented efforts to reach out and coordinate with his state counterparts, both at the Department of Public Safety and at the Department of Social Services," said ICE spokesman Marc Raimondi. "ICE took extraordinary steps in ensuring that this enforcement operation was carried out safely and professionally."
In Worthington and in Marshalltown, attorneys said they were aware of no similar communications before or after the raids. Keller said the level of cooperation in New Bedford was probably a response to the rancor that had greeted previous workplace raids in other states.
Critics of immigration enforcement policy argue that the agents could have allowed far more access to social workers, and that they accommodated them only after pressure from politicians and a US district court judge in the days following the raid. Immigrants' advocates say ICE can go much further to reduce the humanitarian fallout from workplace raids in general.
"There's legal obligation, and then there's the right thing to do," said Jeanne Butterfield, executive director of the American Immigration Lawyers Association. "ICE doesn't have to hold [parents] in custody. They can release them on their own recognizance and electronically monitor them."
Those who favor stricter immigration controls say it is undocumented immigrants who have chosen to put their children in vulnerable positions. |
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