Agriprocessors supervisors want trial moved
ASSOCIATED PRESS • August 15, 2008

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The two highest ranking employees arrested in the aftermath of a massive immigration raid at a Postville meatpacking plant argue their trials should be moved because of outsized media attention.

In a separate filing, one of the employees, Martin de la Rosa-Loera, a former floor supervisor at Agriprocessors, also asks that the judge assigned to the case recuse herself because she is not impartial.

Attorneys for Rosa-Loera and Juan Carlos Guerrero-Espinoza filed the claims this week in federal court. Both were supervisors at Agriprocessors, the nation's largest kosher meatpacking plant and the site of a May 12 immigration raid that resulted in the arrest of nearly 400 workers.


U.S. Attorney's Office spokesman Bob Teig said his office cannot comment on pending motions, but added that a response would be filed in court soon.

In the motion to change venue from a federal court in Cedar Rapids, lawyers for Guerrero-Espinoza write that news media outlets in Iowa saw the events in Postville as "unprecedented" and "significant" and seized on them with particular vigor after covering record flooding during the summer.

"Particularly for the newspapers published in communities ravaged by floods and burdened with constant stories of personal loss, the media seemingly looked on the Postville raids ... as an opportunity to focus on an example of something happening in Iowa that would produce benefit for Iowans," according to the motion.

The motion also cites a handful of negative comments from newspaper Web sites and lists dozens of media mentions of the plant in area newspapers.

The request by Rosa-Loera's lawyers to remove the judge assigned to the case, Linda R. Reade, is based on Reade's role in a series of quickly completed trials for workers arrested during the raid.

After the raid, trials were held about 70 miles away at a fairgrounds in Waterloo, where 297 of the 38 9 people arrested pleaded guilty within a week.

According to the filing, "this Court's involvement in preparing for the proceedings, coupled with the swift and carefully choreographed nature of the guilty plea hearings, created the appearance that the Court was acting closely in concert with the government."

A phone message left with Reade's office was not immediately returned.

Both Guerrero-Espinoza and Rosa-Loera have been charged with encouraging illegal immigrants to reside in the United States and with aiding and abetting the possession and use of fraudulent identification. Guerrero-Espinoza has also been charged with aiding and abetting aggravated identity theft.

According to court filings, unnamed sources inside the Agriprocessors plant told federal officials that Guerrero-Espinoza worked in the human resource department and would bring them resident alien cards for new job applicants who were to be hired in the beef kill department, one of the areas he supervised.

The complaint against De La Rosa-Loera cites a number of unnamed sources who said he told them they needed new documents to work at the plant. According to the filing, when the sources got the new documents they reported that De La Rosa-Loera handed them back but allowed them to continue working at the plant.

Both Guerrero-Espinoza and De La Rosa-Loera reported to two plant operations managers, according to the filings.

http://www.desmoinesregister.com/apps/p ... /1001/NEWS