Postville raid interpreter speaks to law students

BY NINA EARNEST | MARCH 04, 2011 7:20 AM


Rosanna Mejia is Guatemalan, but her daughter is an American citizen.

Mejia was one of the nearly 400 workers arrested at a meatpacking plant in Postville, Iowa, in 2008.

She and her then-2-year-old lived under house arrest for three months before they were deported to Guatemala.

Now, the mother fights off her little girl’s hunger pains with watered-down coffee.

Erik Camayd-Freixas, a professor at Florida International University who served as an interpreter during the raid, told the story to a crowd in the Levitt Auditorium of the University of Iowa’s Boyd Law Building. He was the keynote speaker for the College of Law’s Journal of Gender, Race & Justice, as part of its “War On: The Fallout of Declaring War on Social Issues.â€