Thread: ICE raids plant in Laurel, Mississippi

Please...

Cry me a river.

Of course the people in the article are sympathetic to the illegals, they PROFITED from them DUH! From the old man who rented 10 houses to them - to the guy who bought his trailer with the profits he made from selling phone cards to the illegals.

They came illegally, they know they did, they got caught, they need to take RESPONSIBILITY for their criminal actions and get out! I don't have any sympathy for sniveling, whining criminals - get out!

January 17, 2009 << Previous Next >> Post a Comment
Iowa: New indictment names ex-CEO of Agriprocessors
Rubashkin charged with money laundering and violating order
By The Associated Press


Photo by: Arturo Fernandez
XMIT: IADES201
DES MOINES (AP) -- Former Iowa kosher slaughterhouse manager Sholom Rubashkin has been named in a new 99-count federal indictment.

Rubashkin already is being held on federal charges of bank fraud, harboring illegal immigrants, document fraud and identity theft. The new indictment adds charges of money laundering and violating an order from the U.S. secretary of agriculture.

The indictment, filed late Thursday in U.S. District Court in Cedar Rapids, also names Rubashkin's company, Agriprocessors, and three co-defendants -- Brent Beebe, Hosam Amara and Zeev Levi -- who worked at the plant in Postville.

Rubashkin's attorney, Guy Cook, of Des Moines, said Friday that Rubashkin denies all charges contained in the indictment.

Charges against Rubashkin and others have followed a May 12 immigration raid at the plant that resulted in the arrest of 389 people. In addition to the federal charges against Rubashkin, Agriprocessors and top managers have been accused of violating state and federal laws dealing with child labor, wage requirements and safety rules. The Advertisement

company filed for bankruptcy protection and has been appointed a third-party overseer.

The indictment filed Thursday alleges that Rubashkin and the others conspired to hire illegal immigrants to work at the plant and helped them obtain false identification to hide their illegal work status.

Rubashkin and the others also are accused paying undocumented workers off the books and in cash to conceal their work at Agriprocessors. And in some cases, they were charged with placing workers on the payroll of a separate company, identified in court records as "H.E.," to hide the fact the workers were employed at Agriprocessors.

Rubashkin separately with the company is charged with 14 counts of bank fraud and 41 counts of false statements and reports to a bank.

He also was charged with 10 counts of money laundering, in which he is accused of conducting financial transactions involving proceeds from unlawful activity, knowing that the transactions were designed to conceal the source of the proceeds.

http://www.thonline.com/article.cfm?id=229952

The charges allege the children were handling dangerous equipment and exposed to toxic chemicals.

While I feel bad for the under-aged illegals in servitude, what toxic chemicals? Are these approved or ignored by the FDA and other agencies with the responsibility of making sure we are not poisoned by simply going to the grocery store?
The sustenance of life of everyone in this country, legal or illegal, has been undermined by the bowing to the greed for profit by corporations.

Former slaughterhouse CEO granted new bail hearing
By NIGEL DUARA
Jan. 18, 2009, 6:57PM
IOWA CITY, Iowa — The former chief executive officer of the nation's largest kosher meatpacking plant was granted a new hearing over whether he should remained jail as he awaits a trial on charges stemming from a large immigration raid.

Chief U.S. District Court judge Linda Reade said in an order last week she will hear testimony and consider written evidence at the new bail hearing Thursday for former Agriprocessors CEO Sholom Rubashkin.

He originally faced 12 counts of bank fraud, harboring illegal immigrants, document fraud and identity theft. He and three other men were named in a 99-count indictment last Thursday that added charges of money laundering and violating orders from the U.S. agriculture secretary.

The Postville plant was raided May 12 by immigration officials, leading to the arrests of 389 people.

Rubashkin has pleaded not guilty and is being held at the Dubuque County Jail. An earlier request to be released was rejected our of fears that he might flee to Israel.

Prosecutors also have alleged Rubashkin tried to tamper with evidence after earlier being released from jail on Oct. 30. He was returned to jail after being arrested on bank fraud allegations.

U.S. Attorney's Office spokesman Bob Teig said the order for the new bail hearing was "not unexpected," but declined to comment further.

Rubashkin attorney Guy Cook said Saturday in an e-mail to The Associated Press that Rubashkin's defense team would be presenting witnesses to back up claims that Rubashkin was not a flight risk.

His defense also said the invocation of an Israeli emigration law, called the Law of Return, improperly clouded evidence against Rubashkin at an earlier bail hearing.

Along with the federal charges against Rubashkin, Agriprocessors and top managers have been accused of violating state and federal laws dealing with child labor, wage requirements and safety rules. The company has filed for bankruptcy protection.

If convicted, Rubashkin faces up to 30 years in prison and a minimum fine of $1 million on each of the bank fraud counts, the most serious of the charges.

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/ap/ ... 18329.html

Rubashkin, Wecht cases put flight risk argument on trial, lawyers say
by Toby Tabachnick
Staff Writer1 hr 21 mins ago | 19 views | 0 | 0 | | A federal judge’s decision to deny bail to Agriprocessors’ former plant manager, Sholom Rubashkin, based in part on the finding that Rubashkin is a flight risk to Israel, may sound familiar to the Pittsburgh Jewish community. It was that same argument which was raised, but quickly dropped, by U.S. Attorney Mary Beth Buchanan in the trial of former Allegheny County Coroner, Dr. Cyril Wecht.

The argument is based on Israel’s “law of return,â€

Orthodox Rabbis Rally Around Rubashkin as He Sits in Jail


By Nathaniel Popper
Wed. Jan 21, 2009
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During past presidential transitions, when pardons were in the air, many Orthodox Jewish activists set their sights on securing a pardon for Jonathan Pollard, imprisoned since 1987 on charges of spying for Israel. This year, though, members of the Orthodox community had another jailed cause célèbre to focus on: Sholom Rubashkin.

Rubashkin, former CEO of the kosher meat company Agriprocessors, has been confined to a five-person Iowa jail cell since November, awaiting trial on charges of bank fraud and helping workers at his plant to falsify their immigration status.

Tales of the working conditions at the slaughterhouse that Rubashkin ran in Postville, Iowa, have earned him widespread criticism, including that of members of the Orthodox community. In recent months, however, people from a wide range of Orthodox groups have gone to great lengths to rally behind Rubashkin, who has been denied bail pending trial as an alleged flight risk. According to his lawyer, more than 30 people have offered to put up their homes as collateral if Rubashkin is released on bail. Multiple groups have been formed to raise money for Rubashkin’s legal costs. And a delegation of rabbis representing a cross-section of the Orthodox community traveled to Iowa to visit Rubashkin in jail and make a plea for his release.

“This is very unusual,â€

Immigration Raid Spotlights Rift of Have-Nots
Posted By: Shannon Ogden Created: 1/23/2009 3:23:59 PM Updated: 1/23/2009 3:25:02 PM
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LAUREL, Miss. (AP) -- The work has always been stupefying and hard. Hour after hour standing on the line, soldering or welding or drilling in screws.

Even in today's nightmare economy, most people wouldn't want this daily grind that steals the soul in 12-hour shifts paying as little as $280 a week, before taxes.

But such labor prospers here in mostly rural Jones County, home to Laurel, where the area's biggest employer, Howard Industries, maintains a sprawling factory that builds electrical transformers and other big equipment behind a chain-link fence topped with barbed wire.

Assembly lines like these offer tenuous lifelines to those desperate enough to toil on them. And sometimes, competition for these jobs pits have-nots against have-nots.

For a long time, Howard workers were poor blacks and whites in this town of 18,000, where an estimated 30 percent of the population lives in poverty.

But in the past few years, immigrants poured across the Mexican border, eagerly applying for work on the Howard line and not complaining about long hours or menial labor.

A festering resentment began to take root in the hearts of some black and white residents, producing an odd alliance in a place that has seen decades of racism. Now, even the Ku Klux Klan has turned its hatred against Hispanics.

Many blacks and whites claimed Hispanics were taking over their city and taking away jobs by not complaining about safety issues in a factory that faced $193,000 in fines last year from federal inspectors citing dangerous working conditions.

The Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency swept in last summer and staged the largest single workplace raid. When nearly 600 Hispanics were herded past black and white Howard employees, jeers and applause and wide grins erupted.

"Bye-bye," some trilled in falsetto, fingers wagging. "Go back where you came from."

The assembly line rattles on. But now mostly blacks work it, with a smattering of whites, for the same wages paid to Hispanics. The plant, which has been working without a union contract since August, is mired in bitter negotiations over higher pay and safety issues.

------

Workplace raids reached an all-time high in 2008 with 6,287 arrests -- a tenfold rise since 2003. After the 9-11 attacks, in the name of national security, the Bush administration announced it wanted to detain, and then deport, every illegal immigrant in America. Such a drastic change in immigration policy was necessary to safeguard the country against terrorists, said the newly formed Department of Homeland Security.

But swooping down on low-paying jobs has yet to produce terrorism suspects. Asked if any of the raids had produced terror-related arrests, ICE spokeswoman Barbara Gonzalez replied, "Not to my knowledge."

Such raids have netted sweatshop workers in Massachusetts, kosher slaughterhouse employees in Iowa and federal courthouse janitors in Rhode Island.

But the biggest roundup -- 592 people arrested, mostly for the crime of illegally entering this country -- was here in Laurel.

Since then, 414 Hispanics have been deported; 23 have left voluntarily and 27 were released on bond pending immigration hearings. One remains incarcerated at a federal detention center in Jena, La. Nine were charged with identity theft for using false identification.

More than 100, mostly women with children, were released pending the outcome of their cases. They wade through a long, confusing current of immigration hearings that will determine their futures. Many fear venturing out, lest they receive withering glances in the Wal-Mart aimed at the electronic monitoring devices on their ankles.

Immigrant groups, religious leaders, and various Democrats have expressed hope that the raids will be curtailed under President Barack Obama. The immigrants in Laurel know this, and they hope Obama's promise of change applies to them.

"We just want to work," says Ismael Cabrera, a 37-year-old father of two, who paid a smuggler $2,000 to walk him across the desert into Arizona, then paid $1,000 more to get a ride to Laurel, where he first worked in a chicken slaughterhouse.

"It's not that we took the jobs from other people," he says in Spanish. "It's that they don't want to work them."

He waits on a deportation hearing and weeps at the prospect of going back to his hometown near Mexico City, where he made little money. His son, Cesar, has few memories of that place. He left when he was 6.

Now a sweet-faced boy of 13, Cesar respectfully interprets for his father in perfect English delivered with a Mississippi drawl.

Cesar is asked how he feels about going back to Mexico.

His gaze drops to his feet. His eyes brim with tears. He wipes his nose with the back of his wrist, sitting in Pentecostal church his family attends. "Bad," he manages to get out. "It would feel bad."

Cabrera wipes his own face with the sleeve of his shirt.

"Sometimes I ask myself if it was worth it to come here," he says in a voice just above a whisper.

------

Local 1317 of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers had been making a special effort to sign up Hispanics, estimated by the union to be about 40 percent to 60 percent of the Howard work force. It had signed up about 150 before the raid, said the local's president, Clarence Larkin, who is African-American.

Those new members are now gone, and with them, Larkin said, went a budding sense of solidarity.

The turnover rate for non-Hispanics is 40 percent, he said. There was very little turnover among Hispanic workers, which deepened the divide between the groups.

"As long as you can keep people at odds with each other, that drives out the union," Larkin said. "It's divide and conquer. To be successful, you have to be united. And this made the union weaker."

ICE spokeswoman Gonzalez said the raid came after a union member called two years ago to complain about undocumented workers at the plant.

------

Blacks in Mississippi know plenty about exploitation. Laurel itself had long been Klan territory, where hooded, robed men marched proudly down the main thoroughfare before the civil rights movement.

White Knights Imperial Wizard Sam H. Bowers, suspected in hundreds of attacks including the infamous "Mississippi Burning" murders of three voter registration workers, lived in Laurel.

These days, hate has a new target.

"Time for Mexico and Mexicans to get the hell out!!!" blasts a recruiting message on a Klan Web site. In rallies staged in recent years in Laurel, Tupelo and other Mississippi cities, Klan members gathered to accuse Hispanic immigrants of being child molesters, job stealers and destroyers of the American way of life.

Last year, Mississippi passed the most restrictive law in the nation against undocumented workers, making it a felony for an illegal immigrant to hold a job.

Republicans and Democrats have campaigned on anti-immigration platforms. In 2007, the Mississippi Immigrant Rights Alliance sent a protest letter to national Democratic Party chairman Howard Dean, saying Democratic candidates "are peddling racist lies against immigrants that violate the core of the party's progressive agenda. We do not need politicians whose only concern is getting elected."

------

More than 20 percent of Mississippi residents live in poverty -- the highest rate in the country, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

Added to those rolls since the raid: Cabrera, his son Cesar and many others.

One is a woman named Mary, who didn't want her last name used because she said she has cut a deal with federal prosecutors investigating whether Howard Industries knowingly hired illegal immigrants using false identification. "The investigation is ongoing," said ICE's Gonzalez.

A spokeswoman for the company, which has not been formally accused of wrongdoing, declined comment. Previously, Howard officials have said they never knowingly hired an undocumented worker.

Mary was a solderer on the line for $11 an hour. The burning light and noxious fumes seared her eyes until she wept. She can no longer read up close and she can't afford glasses. She hopes federal investigators will help her get a work visa to replace the fake ID she bought here.

Cabrera, now scraping by doing odd jobs like cutting grass, also purchased forged ID cards.

Sometimes the Social Security numbers are real and belong to real people.

But Laurel's factory raid targeted only illegal immigrants, not the people who sell them bogus documents costing anywhere from $60 to $200 a piece.

------

Cabrera doesn't know what will happen to him, or what he will do if deportation is ruled his fate.

Angelica Olmedo, a 32-year-old single mother, has already decided what to do. She will volunteer for deportation to Vera Cruz, where her parents grow sugar cane.

Her 13-year-old son, who was 5 when she paid for him to be smuggled to Mississippi, will return with her. After she was swept up in the Howard raid, she was released on "humanitarian" grounds because she was a single mom.

She was outfitted with an electronic ankle bracelet and told not to leave the state. "I feel like a dog," she said, sitting in the doublewide trailer she shares with her sister, her brother-in-law, their two daughters and her son. "They told me I have charge it every two hours, and I said, 'What am I? A cell phone?"'

It took about two months for Olmedo to realize that apparently no one was monitoring the devices. In time, the clumsy plastic device slipped off her foot. No one from ICE has said a word to her since.

"It's to shame me," she said. "That's all it was, to shame me. To make me look like a criminal. But I am not a criminal, I was only working."

People stared and pointed when she went out in public.

Yet Olmedo has met kindness from some former co-workers. "I had friends. African-American and white. They come and ask if I need money for food. I don't take it. They brought shoes."

------

At Howard Industries, where the day crew is just getting off, a freezing rain pelts workers walking to their cars, heads bowed to shield their faces.

They are mostly black and mostly male. Some carry the stooped shoulders of the bone-weary. Others bound toward the employee parking lot with the glee of the newly freed.

Larry Jones, 24, sits in his car with the heater blasting, sucking the life out of a Swisher Sweets cigarillo. He has been on the job as a coil winder for two months.

He makes $8.20 an hour. And he is thankful for the raid.

"Now they got to hire us. The illegals will work for less than we will, and they'll work more. They were getting jobs everywhere."

He added: "I know they got to work, but it's rough over here, too."


©2009 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, rewritten, or redistributed.http://www.firstcoastnews.com/news/uswo ... 84&catid=6

Miss. Company Pleads Guilty in Immigration Raid

The company had repeatedly denied knowing that illegal immigrants worked at the plant, but pleaded guilty in U.S. District Court to one count of conspiracy. The company agreed to pay a $2.5 million fine, which is larger than normal for such a conviction, the U.S. Justice Department said in a news release.

READ MORE:
http://www.alipac.us/ftopict-229347.html

Howard's HR gets House Arrest and $4,000 Fine

http://www.alipac.us/ftopict-230185.html