Religious Leaders Protest Postville Raid

Why did Catholics and Jews join forces in Postville, Iowa, on Sunday, July 27? Why did upwards of 1,000 people protest in this rural town of only 2,200? Why is Postville all over the Orthodox Jewish press and in the emails of court interpreters?

Postville, roughly 200 miles northeast of Des Moines, is home to Agriprocessors, Inc, the nation's largest kosher slaughterhouse and meatpacking plant. No one knows definitively how the company's workers (not to speak of the animals) have been treated over the years, but the firm's public relations problems began in 2004 when People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) released a video showing animals in distress being slaughtered at the Postville plant. Two years later, the issues facing the workers became a concern in the Jewish community. On May 26, 2006, The Jewish Daily Forward published a scathing editorial:

The company's workers tell a grim tale of long hours, low pay, humiliating treatment by capricious supervisors, dangerous conditions and insufficient safety measures. The workers, many of them undocumented immigrants, spoke to the Forward on condition of anonymity, fearing dismissal or deportation if they were identified. But their stories were backed up with on-the-record testimony and documentation from a host of clergy and community leaders, Iowa academics and union officials. The story they tell is consistent, and shocking.

How AgriProcessors and its owners treat their employees is a matter for federal and Iowa state authorities to judge. We hope someone takes a good, hard look at conditions in Postville. Given the current state of American labor law, it's not likely that much will change dramatically for the better. Still, stricter enforcement of existing labor laws will improve some lives.

Purchasers of AgriProcessors' Kosher meats began switching to alternatives in response to the questions raised about its 'kosher' treatment of workers. But then things got worse.

On May 12 of this year, 900 Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) staff descended upon the town of Postville to conduct the nation's largest single workplace raid in history, detaining 389 workers. Most of the detained workers were Guatemalan immigrants who had come to the U.S. seeking work to feed their families and did not have legal papers authorizing them to work. Nonetheless, Agriprocessors, Inc. hired the workers, claiming the company did not know the workers were not authorized to work. Most of the immigrants and their families were members of St. Bridget's Catholic Church, the primary Catholic parish in Postville, although some were members of other Protestant churches in town.

The 300 men arrested were put into a gym filled with cots. The women were placed in county jails. According to Erik Camayd-Freixas, a certified interpreter imported to translate for the hearings:

Driven single-file in groups of 10, shackled at the wrists, waist and ankles, chains dragging as they shuffled through, the slaughterhouse workers were brought in for arraignment, sat and listened through headsets to the interpreted initial appearance, before marching out again to be bused to different county jails, only to make room for the next row of 10.

They appeared to be uniformly no more than 5 ft. tall, mostly illiterate Guatemalan peasants with Mayan last names. They had all waived their right to be indicted by a grand jury and accepted instead an information or simple charging document by the U.S. Attorney, hoping to be quickly deported since they had families to support back home. But it was not to be. They were criminally charged with aggravated identity theft and Social Security fraud; charges they did not understand, and, frankly, neither could I.

The ICE Search Warrant Application claimed that 75 percent of Agriprocessors' 968 employees were illegal immigrants. ICE had 697 arrest warrants, but only arrested 389 workers initially (or 390, depending upon the account), 314 men and 76 women. Most were Guatemalan, but some were Mexican, Ukrainian and Israeli. Some arrested were released on humanitarian grounds, mostly women responsible for children, but 306 workers were held for prosecution. Only 5 workers had any prior criminal record. Normally, court interpreters maintain neutrality about proceedings, but Professor Camayd-Freixas was so appalled by what he witnessed that he felt compelled to break his silence. "A line was crossed at Postville," he wrote in a moving personal account of what he observed. (Read the entire account here.)