Workers will serve sentences outside of Iowa
By CYNTHIA REYNAUD • creynaud@dmreg.com • May 22, 2008

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Waterloo, Ia. - The illegal immigrants who pleaded guilty to fraud-related charges this week as part of a deal with prosecutors will serve most of their 5-month prison sentences outside of Iowa, a federal law enforcement officer said Wednesday.

The workers, whose plea hearings continue through today, will return briefly to their current Iowa jails for an unknown amount of time before the federal penal system assigns them to other locations. There are no federal prisons in Iowa.


Tim Junker, a U.S. marshal for Iowa's northern judicial district, said the immigrants could remain in their current jails from two weeks to two months.

Federal agents last week detained 389 workers from the Agriprocessors Inc. meat-processing plant in Postville in what they later described as the largest single-site raid in U.S. history. More than 300 of the detainees were charged with fraud-related crimes, and have funneled through makeshift courtrooms over the past week. The others were released with supervision for humanitarian reasons or held for immigration status hearings.

Arrest warrants were issued for 697 people who worked at the plant.

The final group of workers with plea bargains heads to court today. More than 90 were scheduled for court hearings on Wednesday, raising the total number this week to more than 230.

Federal agents were still uncertain where the illegal immigrants would go after their transfer, but said the process could take several weeks or months. The immigrants will go into the custody of the Federal Bureau of Prisons.

The precise timeline for their removal will remain confidential, Junker said. The prisoners will receive credit for the time they have already spent in custody.

Prosecutors, in exchange for the plea bargains, dropped more serious identity-theft charges against many of the workers, which would have carried a mandatory 2-year minimum prison sentence.

False use of resident alien documents carries a maximum 10-year prison sentence, three years of supervised probation, a fine of up to $250,000 and a $100 court fee. Prosecutors agreed to waive all fines and surcharges as part of the deal.

Prosecutors also agreed to let the immigrants serve an additional three-year probation period in their home countries and without supervision as long as they stayed out of the United States.

"Many of these individuals, they feel guilty," said attorney Stephen Swift, one of 18 lawyers representing the detainees. "Most of the time, the attorneys, after reviewing the documents, think generally there's a good chance they could be proven guilty ... and the plea proposals were generally pretty favorable."

The hearings drew renewed criticism from advocates who contend that the federal government was rushing the immigrants through mass hearings. The setup suggests "that the government is more interested in getting people deported without hearings than in achieving justice," said Ben Stone, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Iowa.

Federal authorities have vigorously defended the proceedings as fair, and several defense attorneys in the criminal hearings have said the time they were given was adequate.








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