Thread: IA-Postville, immigrants inching toward closure

Postville, immigrants inching toward closure
By GRANT SCHULTE • gschulte@dmreg.com • December 6, 2009

Comments (9)

Postville, Ia. - Forty-year-old Juventino Lopez Pichia wants to bring his wife and children to Iowa.

But he knows that likely will never happen.

Instead Pichia and about 29 other immigrants arrested in the massive 2008 raid of Agriprocessors Inc. face deportation, probably sometime before the end of the year. The 30 or so immigrants were given temporary work visas so they could remain in Iowa and be available to testify in Sholom Rubashkin's second federal trial.



However, those charges were dropped against the former Agriprocessors vice president.

"If I could bring my wife and children here, I would," said Pichia, who cut chicken breasts at the plant for $7.25 an hour. "This is a country of opportunities. But since that can't happen, I'm going to work hard here until I go back."

Pichia shares a home in Decorah with six other men involved with the raid and commutes with them to their jobs in Postville. All are originally from Guatemala. In their free time, they alternate chores cooking and cleaning the home, rented from a local family.

Javier Lopez Sache, 19, said he had hoped to help support his five brothers and five sisters back at home. Sache said he worked in a refrigerated area of the plant, in a cold comparable to the outdoor temperature in the teens.

Work at the plant remains hectic, "but the pace is better now," Sache said. "Before, all the supervisors were very demanding."

Many of the men attend services at local churches. Pichia, who said he doesn't drink or smoke because of his Christian faith, said he now calls his family once a day.

Advocates for the immigrants who were supposed to testify against Rubashkin say they are outraged that a federal jury will never hear about past abuses at the plant.

"What is their future?" asked the Rev. Paul Ouderkirk, retired pastor of St. Bridget's Catholic Church in Postville. "What will the government do with them? Will any recognition be made that they sacrificed two years of their lives?"

Some immigrants suffered so greatly from their post-raid experiences that the Catholic Archdiocese of Dubuque, which encompasses Postville, hired bilingual psychiatric counselors to help them with depression and other mental illnesses, Ouderkirk said.

"The raid isn't over," he said. "There's no closure, no matter how hard the people want there to be."

Agriprocessors was the site of a May 2008 federal raid that caught 389 illegal-immigrant workers. About 300 were charged with aggravated identity theft or possession of false documents and sent to prison for five months.

Among them was Victor Hugo Sis Tepaz, 44, a Guatemalan who worked a 4 p.m. to 3:30 a.m. shift at the plant before the raid. Tepaz was arrested, pleaded guilty to an identity theft charge for using an Ohio Social Security number, and served a five-month prison sentence in Florida and Oklahoma.

Federal agents returned Tepaz and other former workers to Postville in November 2008 so they could testify against Rubashkin in his 72-count immigration trial.

But those charges were dropped in November, after a South Dakota jury convicted Rubashkin of 86 counts of financial fraud. The decision hinged, in part, on the likely cost and inconvenience to witnesses. Prosecutors also argued that jurors had effectively declared Rubashkin's guilt on some immigration charges when they found him guilty of lying to the plant's lender about the work force. Defense lawyers dispute the assertion.

When the immigration charges were dropped, prosecutors no longer needed the immigrant witnesses, who now face deportation.

The immigrants were given temporary work visas while they waited to testify in the trial, and eventually returned to Agriprocessors.

Rubashkin, along with his father and several former human resource employees, still faces thousands of child labor charges levied by the Iowa attorney general's office. All have pleaded not guilty, and a trial is slated to begin at a not-yet-set date next year.

Tepaz said conditions at the kosher meat plant have improved. The supervisors before "were very strict" and always pushed employees to work faster, he said through a Spanish translator. "Now, they're friendly," he said.

He said he now makes $9.25 per hour, up from the $7.50 hourly wage he collected when he first started. He works 50 to 60 hours per week.

Workers have alleged that they were illegally underpaid, overworked and threatened with job termination if they complained. One girl, who was 15 when she was hired, told state investigators of repeated sexual harassment from some low-level supervisors.

A sense of caution still hovers in Postville about Agri Star, the plant's new name under new ownership. Hershey Friedman, a Canadian businessman, bought the plant out of bankruptcy and reopened it with promises to restart the now-dormant beef kill line.

Becky Monroe, a stylist at the Headquarters hair salon in Postville, said she has noticed smaller crowds outside the Postville church pantry, which used to attract lines that stretched well down Greene Street.

"It's going to take a long time to recover," she said. " ... I think that the community's perspective on Agri Star is going to be: Sit back and wait with caution."

Other business owners said an Oct. 17 fire at a downtown bakery, a popular local business, had overshadowed immediate concerns about the raid.

The fire destroyed the 126-year-old building and displaced more than 10 people who lived in the apartments upstairs. The blaze also damaged the Wishing Well, a gift and flower shop and one of the few remaining retail businesses in town.

Some residents express hope that, as the raid's aftermath nears an end, their northeast Iowa town might start to recover.

"Everyone predicted this town would dry up and blow away," said Gary DeVilbiss, who runs an insurance firm downtown. "But we knew we were going to survive."

DeVilbiss said the Rubashkin verdict inched the town toward a sense of closure. "You could feel the weight come off the town's shoulders," he said. "It wasn't that he got convicted. It was just the sense that it was over."


http://www.desmoinesregister.com/articl ... 0343/1001/

Pichia shares a home in Decorah with six other men involved with the raid

Now if this was a college town there would probably be a law against this to prevent Fraternity Houses.

"What is their future?" asked the Rev. Paul Ouderkirk, retired pastor of St. Bridget's Catholic Church in Postville. "What will the government do with them? Will any recognition be made that they sacrificed two years of their lives?"

"Sacrifice"? What "sacrifice"? LOL They worked and earned more money, which no doubt went back to their families back home. How is that a sacrifice? The government better deport them Padre, they don't belong here.