Thread: Update: Hundreds of arrests predicted at Iowa ICE raid

[b]Now that hundreds of Agriprocessor employees have been taken into custody, “how can justice ever be served on these exploitation issues?â€

Interesting; Here is post from the google group ChicagoMayDay. This is where the organizers of Chicago’s MayDay march hang out. Betsy is from one of the Socialist groups that to part in the march.

(I think I am going to fax this to the Chicago ICE office)

Here are their comments on the raid today!
-------------------

From: Betsy Farley <betsyfar...@att.net>
Date: Mon, 12 May 2008 16:06:24 -0500
Local: Mon, May 12 2008 4:06 pm
Subject: Re: <ChicagoMayDay> Up to 700 arrests estimated in Postville raid

Hello all,
I think we should call a protest here in Chicago against this ICE
raid in Iowa, (not to mention the others around the country including
the courthouse construction workers in Richmond VA and the 89 in
Houston.) Here are links to the other articles: http://www.chron.com/
disp/story.mpl/front/5770244.html, http://www.inrich.com/cva/ric/
news.apx.-content-articles-RTD-2008-05-07-0229.html.

This is their response to May Day. It should be answered.
Betsy Farley

May 12, 2008


ICE notebook: Buses leave Postville plant

REGISTER STAFF

Buses, presumably full of detainees, have started to leave the Postville plant, headed toward Waterloo. Each bus has a state patrol squad car in front and behind.

ICE spokesman Harold Ort said the agency will be at the Postville plant "as long as it takes."

Dozens of ICE agents and state troopers have been blocking entrances to the plant.

Ort said he didn’t know the gender mix or nationalities of the people being taken. He said they’re trying to do it has humanely as possible.

"ICE is absolutely committed to treating people humanely and doing the right thing but we’re also committed to enforcing the letter of the law." — Tony Leys

Rumors fly about more raids

Rumors are flying in Waterloo, Storm Lake, Marshalltown and elsewhere that there will be more raids at local businesses – or that they’re already taking place.
All appeared to be unfounded.

The criminal and civil warrants were issued in Postville today, said Barbara Gonzalez, an ICE spokeswoman from Miami who is in Waterloo this week.

"The arrests are based on intelligence and investigative leads, so I think that dispels those rumors," she said.

Word flashed through the Waterloo immigrant community that businesses such as Tyson Food, Inc. or Kaiser Contract Cleaning were under raid today. Officials for both companies said that’s not true, and that they know of no pending raid.

Other false rumors kept people from going to local stores because they heard ICE would be there asking shoppers for identification.

"We don’t conduct random arrests," Gonzalez said.

Gonzalez said she is trying her best to soothe some of the fears.

"We’re trying to stop the rumors and communicate with the public what is true and what is not," she said. "Again, we were at Postville today."

ICE officials have spoken with Waterloo’s mayor, school superintendent and officials from nonprofit groups so that information gets out “in the appropriate way,â€

Keep it up Ice. You finally earned your paycheck for the week.

ICE finds 300 people doing jobs Americans won’t do in Iowa meatpacking plantposted at 5:50 pm on May 12, 2008 by Ed Morrissey
Send to a Friend | regular view ICE agents hauled hundreds of suspected illegal aliens out of an Iowa meatpacking plant today after two years of complaints. Agriprocessors will likely place a lot of ads in the Des Moines Register for open positions after losing most of its staff, assuming that its executives can keep themselves out of jail for violations of immigration laws. Agriprocessors is, or rather was, the largest employer in northern Iowa:
At least 300 people were arrested today at the Agriprocessors, Inc. meat packing plant, federal officials said.
The operation, which targeted people who illegally used other persons Social Security numbers and were in the U.S. illegally, was the largest of its kind in Iowa, said Claude Arnold, a special agent with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
The workers arrested so far were interviewed by agents with the U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Public Health Service. Public health officials were included to ensure that their humanitarian needs were being met, said U.S. District Attorney Matt M. Dummermuth. …
A total of 16 local, state and federal agencies, led by ICE, joined the investigation that began last October. Among them was the U.S. Marshals Service, the Iowa Department of Public Safety, the Federal Bureau of Investigations, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the federal Drug Enforcement Agency, the Waterloo Police Department and the Postville Police Department.
Agents with ICE have received information about immigration violations at the plant over the past two years, according to a federal search warrant made public today. Authorities said they will release more details at another press conference tomorrow morning in Cedar Rapids.
Agriprocessors has a web site in which it claims that it has applicants lined up around the block when growth demands expansion. They also claim that most of their new-hires come from the families of existing employees, which puts today’s raid into some perspective. Once they started hiring illegals, apparently they tapped into resources for cheap labor rather than hire Iowans looking for work.
That’s not all. On another page, Agriprocessors holds itself and the community of Postville as a “model for integration of its different nationalitiesâ€

From MyAmerica's post:

David Strudhoff, superintendent of Postville Community Schools, said Monday that school officials were served with a 21-point subpoena in early April from investigators with the Iowa Division of Labor Services seeking the records of Postville middle and high school students.

The subpoena compelled the school district to turn over names of all current students and students at the school between 2005 and 2007, their ages, addresses, dates of birth, telephone numbers and social security numbers. It also, compelled the school district to turn over proof of age, pictures for yearbook photos, passenger lists for all buses, truancy/nonattendance records for the same group and a list of non-graduates from 2005 to 2008.
The subpoena also compelled the school district to turn over a list of all full or part-time bus drivers from 2005 to 2008 and complete school records for 35 students identified only by last name.
In addition, the subpoena compelled the school district to turn over all current work permits for current students and those enrolled between 2005 and 2007. It also sought the employment contracts of Strudhoff and Guidance Counselor Ron Wahl.

Finally, the subpoena compelled the school district to turn over the names of all children working for Wahl at his two apartment buildings which were sold to Agriprocessor CEO, Sholom Rubashkin and all records on Wahl’s school computer or at Postville Community School District that relate to the students and former students of Postville Community Schools and Mr. Wahl’s work with and for Agriprocessor’s Rubashkin and any other entities associated with Agriprocessor’s and Sholom Rubashkin.
http://www.desmoinesregister.com/apps/p ... S/80512042

Well, well. GREAT news! Could the Dept. of Labor and ICE possibly be planning to work together on this one, too? Very interesting. Could this be a sign of good things to come?

This is awesome news

YOU GO ICE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Last update - 23:30 04/05/2008


Animal rights activists reveal their own (kosher) identity

By Marissa Brostoff, The Forward

Tags: PETA, animal rights, kosher

When AgriProcessors, America's largest kosher slaughterhouse, was caught on tape conducting what a federal agency later called "acts of inhumane slaughter," officials at the plant knew they had been infiltrated by undercover investigators. What the company didn't know was that two of those infiltrators were a married couple who keep kosher themselves.

Meet Hannah and Philip Schein, undercover investigators for the animal rights group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. Now, for the first time, they are going public with their identities.

Since 2002, the Scheins have taken on about 20 undercover cases, as well as others they have conducted publicly. The targets of their stings have run the gamut from an egg farm managed by Trappist monks, to a Canadian bear-baiting operation that has supplied fur to the British Royal Guards, to songstress Beyoncé Knowles, once an enthusiastic wearer of fur.
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But thanks to their background and their knowledge of the laws of kashrut, Hannah, 33, and Philip, 43, have come to specialize in investigating kosher slaughterhouses. Indeed, PETA had not investigated kosher operations until the Scheins came on board; since then, the group has been involved in about eight such cases. Philip in particular has been credited with becoming an expert on kosher slaughter.

"If it weren't for Philip and his interest and pursuit of this issue, I'm not sure that we would have been able to do those investigations," said Daphna Nachminovitch, PETA's vice president of cruelty investigations. "They were Philip's brainchild."

The Scheins' - and PETA's - first investigation of a kosher slaughterhouse took place in 2004, when the organization obtained footage of cows walking around with their throats cut at AgriProcessors' plant in Postville, Iowa. Hannah had trained the investigators who went undercover for the exposé, and Philip analyzed the video footage that PETA subsequently received.

Under pressure from rabbis as well as animal rights groups and government agencies, the company promised to change its slaughtering procedures, though AgriProcessors has been the subject of several more of the Scheins' investigations.

An AgriProcessors representative declined to comment for this article. But Norman Schlaff, the owner of the Musicon Farm in Gosha, N.Y., was willing to discuss his experience with the Scheins, who paid an undercover visit to his kosher deer slaughterhouse last year.

Schlaff said that two young people who appeared to be a Modern Orthodox couple toured the farm and, like many of his visitors who wish to ensure that their meat is kosher, took videos and photographs of the slaughtering process.

"The next day, PETA called and said, 'Go on the Internet,'" Schlaff said.

He found a page on the group's Web site that accused slaughterers at the farm of sitting on the deer to hold them down while their throats are slit, an allegation that Schlaff denies. "It was really very disturbing," Schlaff said of the unwelcome attention he received after the PETA article. "I got thousands of e-mails, including some death threats from people saying, 'We're going to do to you what you do to the deer.'"

The Scheins maintain that they want only for kosher slaughter to live up to what they consider its original purpose: to minimize the suffering of the animals. Orthodox Jewish standards of kashrut have "gotten so focused on the letter of the law that they've lost sight of the fact that [kashrut] is about reducing suffering," Hannah said.

But according to Rabbi Menachem Genack, head of the Orthodox Union's kashrut division, liberal Jews such as the Scheins are using the term "kosher" as a "generic phrase" to denote practices they consider morally acceptable, thus missing the "fundamental issue" of kashrut: obedience to Jewish law.

Hannah and Philip are currently working (openly) on a project to reform what they say are animal abuses committed in ultra-Orthodox neighborhoods in the course of observing the pre-Yom Kippur absolution ritual known as kapparot.

The kapparot crackdown may cause a stir in such Orthodox enclaves as Brooklyn's Boro Park, but it probably will not get as much attention on celebrity gossip blogs as Hannah's encounter last year with Beyoncé. After PETA won a dinner with the singer in an auction, Hannah and a second PETA employee, armed with a hidden camera, sat down with her and accused the star of being complicit in the abuse of animals by using fur in her wardrobe and in her clothing line, House of Dereon.

"I can't tell you how quickly they escorted us out of there,? Hannah said. She added that Beyonce has not been seen in fur since.

Though a glimpse at the Scheins' career makes them sound like Erin Brockovich-style crusaders, their partnership started out far more innocuously. Hannah and Philip met at a 1998 orientation for new professionals in the Jewish campus organization Hillel. They married a year later in New Jersey, right after Hillel's 1999 conference ended.

In 2002, Hannah took a job in PETA's investigations department, and the Scheins moved from upstate New York, where both had been working on graduate degrees, to a town near Norfolk, Virginia, where PETA is headquartered. Shortly thereafter, Philip, a longtime vegan and animal rights advocate, joined Hannah at the organization.

The Scheins have decided to go public as part of a publicity bid for PETA. Despite the sensitive nature of their undercover work, they say they are not worried about the media attention.

Their confidence in their ability to carry on undercover investigations - and to have carried out so many in the first place appears to be rooted in the techniques they use when they go undercover, which they will not divulge.

"We're still active investigators, so we don't really share our methods," Hannah said.

But she added, "Everything we do is legal."



http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/980547.html

Update: Detainees arrive in Waterloo
By NIGEL DUARA, WILLIAM PETROSKI and GRANT SCHULTE • REGISTER STAFF WRITERS • May 12, 2008

Postville, Ia. – Buses have begun arriving at the Cattle Congress grounds in Waterloo after hundreds were detained in an immigration raid on a Postville meatpacking plant today. Officials are not allowing media or others near the entrance. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials have declined to say how many buses are being used in the raid on the Agriprocessors Inc. plant. At least 300 people were arrested during the operation, the largest of its kind in Iowa, said Claude Arnold, a special agent with ICE. The raid targeted people who illegally used other people's Social Security numbers and were in the U.S. illegally. According to an affidavit, “Based on information thus far developed in the investigation, it appears, [b]based on 2007 fourth quarter payroll reports, that approximately 76 percent of the 968 employees of Agriprocessors were using false or fraudulent social security numbers in connection with their employment.â€

Update: Crowd greets detainees at Waterloo
By NIGEL DUARA, WILLIAM PETROSKI and GRANT SCHULTE • REGISTER STAFF WRITERS • May 12, 2008

Excerpt:

The scene in Waterloo
...........Crowds outside the Cattle Congress complex in Waterloo continued to grow Monday evening. When the chained gates opened to admit a bus full of detainees at 8:15 p.m., the crowd of about 200 people screamed their support.

Waterloo Police Department Lieutenant M.W. McNamee told protesters that they had to move across the street to the sidewalk directly in front of the Cattle Congress grounds. “Unfortunately there’s not a lot of area where you can be. This is not conducive to have a vigil," McNamee said.

Mario Basurto, project coordinator of El Centro Latinoamericano, said the protest was spontaneous and would last until 10 p.m................

http://www.desmoinesregister.com/apps/p ... 12012/1001