Thread: Feds give illegal workers prison time in major shift

May 24, 2008, 1:08AM
Feds give illegal workers prison time in major shift
Prosecutions of 297 in Iowa are seen as escalation of crackdown by the administration


By JULIA PRESTON
New York Times

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WATERLOO, IOWA — In temporary courtrooms at a fairgrounds here, nearly 300 illegal immigrants were sentenced this week to five months in prison for working at a meatpacking plant with false documents.

The prosecutions, which ended Friday, signal a sharp escalation in the Bush administration's crackdown on illegal workers, with prosecutors bringing tough federal criminal charges against most of the immigrants arrested in a May 12 raid. Previously, unauthorized workers have generally been detained by immigration officials for civil violations and rapidly deported from the country.

The convicted immigrants were among 389 workers detained at the Agriprocessors Inc. plant in nearby Postville, in a raid that federal officials called the largest criminal enforcement operation ever carried out by immigration authorities at a workplace.

Matt M. Dummermuth, the U.S. attorney for northern Iowa, who oversaw the prosecutions, called the operation an "astonishing success." Claude Arnold, a special agent in charge of investigations for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said it showed that federal officials were "committed to enforcing the nation's immigration laws in the workplace to maintain the integrity of the immigration system."


5 months, then deportation
The unusually swift proceedings, in which 297 immigrants pleaded guilty and were sentenced in four days, were criticized by criminal defense lawyers, who warned of violations of due process. The American Immigration Lawyers Association protested that the workers had been denied meetings with immigration lawyers and that their claims under immigration law had been swept aside in speedy plea agreements.

The illegal immigrants, most of them from Guatemala, filed into the courtrooms in groups of 10, their hands and feet shackled. One by one, they entered guilty pleas through a Spanish interpreter, admitting they had taken jobs using fraudulent Social Security cards or immigration documents.

The pleas were part of a deal worked out with prosecutors to avoid even harsher charges. The immigrants agreed to immediate deportation after they serve the five months in prison.

The hearings took place on the grounds of the National Cattle Congress in Waterloo, in mobile trailers and in a dance hall modified with black curtains, beginning at 8 a.m. and continuing several nights until 10. On Wednesday alone, 94 immigrants pleaded guilty and were sentenced, the most sentences in a single day in this northern Iowa district, according to Robert L. Phelps, the clerk of court.

Arnold, the immigration agent, said the criticism of the proceedings was "the usual spate of false allegations and baseless rumors."


Sending a message
The large number of criminal cases was remarkable because immigration violations generally fall under civil statutes. Previously, relatively few immigrants have been charged with federal crimes like identity theft or document fraud.

"To my knowledge, the magnitude of these indictments is completely unprecedented," said Juliet Stumpf, an immigration law professor at Lewis & Clark Law School in Portland, Ore., formerly a senior civil rights lawyer at the Justice Department. "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."

If the immigrants did not plead guilty, Dummermuth said he would try them on felony identity theft charges that carry a mandatory two-year minimum jail sentence. In many cases, court documents show, the immigrants were working under real Social Security numbers or immigration visas, known as green cards, that belonged to other people.

All but a handful of the workers here had no criminal record, court documents showed.

No charges have been brought against managers or owners at Agriprocessors, but there were indications that prosecutors were also preparing a case against the company.

Chaim Abrahams, a representative of Agriprocessors, said in a statement that he could not comment about specific allegations but that the company was cooperating with the government.

Christopher Clausen, a lawyer who represented 21 Guatemalans, said he was certain they all understood their rights.

"The government is not bashful about the fact that they are trying to send a message," he said.






http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/nation/5799316.html

About time

Added to Home PAge
http://www.alipac.us/article3218.html

ICE getting tougher with illegals; sending them to prison
By see-dubya • May 24, 2008 02:27 AM

The recent raid on the Agriprocessors plant in Waterloo, Iowa, led to the detention of 389 probable illegal aliens working there. But instead of a quick plane ride back to Mexico, 270 of the workers who were using fraudulent ID now face a little five-month stopover at the Gray Bar Hotel:

The unusually swift proceedings, in which 297 immigrants pleaded guilty and were sentenced in four days, were criticized by criminal defense lawyers, who warned of violations of due process. Twenty-seven immigrants received probation. The American Immigration Lawyers Association protested that the workers had been denied meetings with immigration lawyers and that their claims under immigration law had been swept aside in unusual and speedy plea agreements.

The illegal immigrants, most from Guatemala, filed into the courtrooms in groups of 10, their hands and feet shackled. One by one, they entered guilty pleas through a Spanish interpreter, admitting they had taken jobs using fraudulent Social Security cards or immigration documents. Moments later, they moved to another courtroom for sentencing.

The article suggests a federal case is being built against Agriprocessors as well for employing (and exploiting shamefully ) so many illegals. The judge sounds tough but fair:

Judge Bennett appeared moved by Mr. Nadler’s remarks. “I don’t doubt for a moment that you are good, hard-working people who have done what you did to help your families,â€

270 Illegal Immigrants Sent to Prison in Federal Push
Matthew Putney/Waterloo Courier, via Associated Pres
Immigration officials lined up illegal immigrants on Thursday at the National Cattle Congress grounds in Waterloo, Iowa.


By JULIA PRESTON
Published: May 24, 2008
WATERLOO, Iowa — In temporary courtrooms at a fairgrounds here, 270 illegal immigrants were sentenced this week to five months in prison for working at a meatpacking plant with false documents.

The prosecutions, which ended Friday, signal a sharp escalation in the Bush administration’s crackdown on illegal workers, with prosecutors bringing tough federal criminal charges against most of the immigrants arrested in a May 12 raid. Until now, unauthorized workers have generally been detained by immigration officials for civil violations and rapidly deported.

The convicted immigrants were among 389 workers detained at the Agriprocessors Inc. plant in nearby Postville in a raid that federal officials called the largest criminal enforcement operation ever carried out by immigration authorities at a workplace.

Matt M. Dummermuth, the United States attorney for northern Iowa, who oversaw the prosecutions, called the operation an “astonishing success.â€

Where the hell is the prison time for all the Lubavitch Owners ?

I find this story very interesting..Hopefully employers will ultimately also get prosecuted and pay some hefty fines.

May 23, 2008

Exclusive: Slaughterhouse Immigration Raid Reveals Serious Fraud Issues
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Michael Cutler


There is further news on the raid at a meatpacking plant in Iowa last week and the fraudulent means by which Agriprocessors obtained their employees:

Agriprocessors, you see, has two lucrative and pernicious schemes going. One scheme involves driving wages down to bare subsistence by hiring desperately poor illegal immigrants to work in its slaughterhouse - the criminal enterprise that made the news last week. The other involves fraudulently claiming that the United States has run out of native-born meat-cutters and then, with the help of American Immigration Lawyers Association member Christopher Teras, securing work visas for foreigners worth $30,000 each on the street in Guangzhou.

You can read more ofthe shocking details here.

Immigration fraud is often overlooked by politicians.I cannot think of a single candidate for the presidency who is willing to discuss immigration fraud. Indeed, there are precious few members of the United States Senate or the House of Representatives who are willing to discuss immigration fraud.

Fraud is not a difficult topic to understand. Think of fraud as being a lie put on paper to provide the individual who commits this crime with a benefit that he or she would not be entitled to if all of the relevant facts wereknown.

Many people feed at the immigration fraud trough.Among those who are benefiting the most are immigration lawyers who only make a profit when they can secure employment for aliens, thereby costing United States citizens their jobs.The guild that represents computer programmers posted a covert video made of a duplicitous lawyer who was conducting a seminar for other immigration attorneys, teaching them how to make certain that no American who applied for a posted job, as the Labor Department requires, would be qualified for the job in question.You can watch this outrageous video here.

Jack Abramoff, the infamous lobbyist who is now cooling his heels in the federal prison system got his start in the 1990s by lobbying for more H1B visas for computer programmers for a law firm that Bill Gates' dad was a partner in.There are, in fact, those in the computer industry who refer to this type of visa as the "Abramoff Visa."

But more than American jobs are at stake (although this alone should infuriate every American).

The terrorists who attacked our nation both on February 23, 1993 and again onSeptember 11, 2001 knew that an important component of their strategy to enter and embed themselves in our country would be tocommit visa and immigration benefit fraud.In an additional terrorist attack conducted against the CIA by a citizen of Pakistan, Amir Kansi committed immigration fraud to obtain political asylum through deception. He repaid our nation's generosity by opening fire with an AK-47 outside the headquarters of the CIA on January 25,1993. He killedtwo employees of the CIA and wounded threeothers.

On September 1, 2006 I was called upon to testify before the House Judiciary Committee hearing that was conducted inDubuque, Iowa. I cited thefollowing example of immigration:

...Mahmud Abouhalima, a citizen of Egypt...entered the United States on a tourist visa, overstayed his authorized period of admission and then applied for amnesty under the agricultural worker provisions of IRCA. He succeeded in obtaining resident alien status through this process. During a five year period he drove a cab and had his license suspended numerous times for violations, and ultimately demonstrated his appreciation for our nation's generosity by participating in the first attack on the World Trade Center in 1993 that left six people dead, hundreds of people injured, and an estimated one half billion dollars damage...

My concerns about the lack of integrity within the immigration system prompted me to write a commentary for the Washington Times in June of 2007 entitled, "Immigration bill a ‘No go,'" where I stated that the "Comprehensive Immigration Reform Bill" that the Senate was about to vote on should have more accurately been named the "Terrorist Assistance and Facilitation Act of 2007."The bill would have required USCIS (United States Citizenship and Immigration Services) to process the applications of some 100,000 illegal and undocumented aliens each and every day for amnesty, even though these illegal aliens had no official documentation to attest to their identities ortheir nationalities.There would be no reliable or authentic means of determining when, where or how they entered the United States. Nor could we determine if they had criminal histories or affiliations with criminal or terrorist organizations.They would have been provided with identity documents, (potentially in false names and nationalities) that would enable them to immediately obtain Social Security cards, driver's licenses and other such documents in false names and enable them to embed themselves in communities around our nation.Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama, in fact, saw fit to quote from portions of my commentary on three separate occasions during the floor debate conducted on the floor of the United States Senate in the days leading up to the vote last summer.

Incredibly, even though that bill and other like it were defeated by members of the Senate, the United States Senate is, even now, attempting to ram a new amnesty program for an estimated 3 million illegal alien agriculturalworkers and their families through the Senate by attaching this insane measure to the appropriations bill for our military operations in Iraq.

President Clinton is famously remembered for questioning the meaning of the word "is." I believe that the Senators who are seeking to ram this wrong-headed bill down the throats of their colleagues in the Senate, and consequently of the American people are having a problem understanding the definition of the word "NO!"

As you read the outrageousreport (linked at the beginning of this article) on the fraud committed by those connected to the raid of the slaughterhouse in Iowa, I want you tounderstand that this corrupt and dysfunctional system is supposed to protect our jobs and our nation's security.

If you find this story makes it difficult for you to sleep tonight, you are not alone.This madness often keeps me awake at night as well.

HOME TERRORISM CHALLENGES HOMELAND GLOBAL PRODUCTS RESOURCES

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/pu ... detail.asp

5 months, then deportation

The illegal immigrants, most of them from Guatemala, filed into the courtrooms in groups of 10, their hands and feet shackled. One by one, they entered guilty pleas through a Spanish interpreter, admitting they had taken jobs using fraudulent Social Security cards or immigration documents.

This is all the prison time they get? What would be the minimum sentence if an American citizen used a stolen Social Security card? Well, at least they will get deported.

I remember hearing on Lou Dobbs about a month ago that America has a population of about 300 million people, and the number of Social Security cards issued and in use is about 450 million. I thought this was odd.

This enforcement is election year politics by the Boosh administration. These will come very few and far between. Considering the mess he's allowed this country to get into with his globalist agenda policies on the border, this is like shoveling sand against the tide. If they would become truly serious about enforcement of our immigration laws and the protection of our nation, borders and people, we would hear about this kind of enforcement daily on a wide scale and the criminal employers would also get prison time. This is just buying time until after the election when Jorge figures he can pass the amnesty agenda off for the next traitor who enters the Whitehouse to get passed.

Do I seem skeptical of the gubmints' motives?? Go figure. However at this point, every victory for the patriot movement counts and maybe a message will be recognized by more and more traitors and invaders.

You go Jorge!!