Critics tie scant new charges to wariness after Postville raid
By TONY LEYS • tleys@dmreg.com • August 28, 2008

Critics of the way suspected illegal immigrant workers were handled after last May's raid in Iowa noticed a change in government tactics after this week's raid in Mississippi.

Federal officials detained 595 workers at a Mississippi electric-transformer factory Monday but filed criminal charges against just eight of them.

That's in marked contrast to what happened after the raid at the Agriprocessors meatpacking plant in Postville, where prosecutors filed criminal identity-theft charges within days against 305 of the 389 workers who were arrested. Most of those people quickly pleaded guilty during mass hearings held at the National Cattle Congress grounds in Waterloo and now are serving five-month prison sentences.

Most of the workers arrested in Mississippi are being held on civil immigration charges, which generally lead to deportation.

A spokeswoman for the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency would not specify why so few of the Mississippi workers had been charged with crimes. She said more charges could still be added.

But one of the most prominent critics of the legal process used in Iowa said Wednesday that the government appears to be backing away from those tactics.

"I think Postville was a huge embarrassment because of the criminalization of workers," said Erik Camayd-Freixas, a veteran federal courts interpreter who participated in the Cattle Congress hearings.

Camayd-Freixas, who is a Spanish language professor at Florida International University, made national waves this summer by publicly complaining that the legal process used in Iowa was unfair to the defendants.

He said uneducated Guatemalans and Mexicans were pressured into pleading guilty to identity-theft charges, even though they didn't realize the Social Security cards they'd bought contained someone else's numbers. The vast majority had never been charged with other crimes, he said, and they had no intent to commit identity theft.

Camayd-Freixas said Wednesday that in his 20 years of working with the federal courts, he'd never seen mass, rushed hearings such as those held in Iowa. He noted that news reports from Mississippi indicated that the eight people who were charged with crimes after the raid there had been taken to a regular federal courthouse for standard hearings.

ICE spokeswoman Barbara Gonzalez said more criminal charges could be filed against people seized in the Mississippi raid.

She said that too often, Americans believe raids indicate the end of investigations.

"They don't," Gonzalez said. "In fact, the investigation continues."

Federal prosecutors did not respond to requests for comment.

The Mississippi raid surpassed the size of the one in Postville, which had been described as the biggest single-site immigration raid in U.S. history.

A national group calling for tougher immigration enforcement declined to speculate Wednesday on why the Mississippi raid hadn't brought more criminal charges.

The facts of individual cases could be much different, said Ira Mehlman, spokesman for the Federation for American Immigration Reform.

Among the Agriprocessors workers, he said, "there were a lot of things besides just working in the country illegally."

Drake University law Professor Bob Rigg said the process being used in Mississippi looks familiar. "That used to be the norm until Postville," said Rigg, who has criticized the prosecution methods used in Iowa.

He said it's hard to tell why the government hasn't filed mass charges in the latest case. But lawyers around the country are aware of the Iowa controversy, Rigg said. Among other things, it led to a critical New York Times editorial titled "The Shame of Postville."

"It could be the U.S. attorney in Mississippi decided, 'I'm not going to go through that,' " Rigg said.
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