Immigrant Workers, Families Caught in National Round-Up

by James Frickey / February 2007issue of Socialist Action newspaper

On the same day that President Bush delivered his State of the Union address urging Congress to overhaul federal immigration policy, federal agents conducted one of the largest immigrant sweeps in U.S. history. Democratic and Republican lawmakers responded to the raids by reopening the immigration debate that sparked a mass upsurge of immigrant-led opposition last spring.

The cities and towns targeted for the most audacious of the federal raids are considered strongholds of the movement for immigrant rights. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE, part of Homeland Security) seems to be making an example of them in order to prevent a mass response to the impending congressional immigration reform bills, written by the largest employers of immigrant labor.

Los Angeles, epicenter of the great social rumbling of immigrant workers last spring, scene of high-school student walkouts in the tens of thousands and two mega-marches of a million immigrants that ground the city to a virtual halt, was forced to endure the largest single roundup in California history.

The raids occurred 11 days before the start of a national conference in Los Angeles, at which close to 300 activists took up the call for a repeat of the Great American Boycott of May 1, 2006.

ICE arrested 761 immigrants in the Los Angeles area on Jan. 23. It targeted jails in five counties, arresting 423 immigrants who were being held on charges unrelated to their immigration status. Agents also fanned out into the immigrant communities to arrest an additional 338 people, half for ignoring a deportation order, the rest for “illegal” entry into the U.S.

Organizers for the Pomona Day Labor Center, south of Los Angeles, reported that ICE had raided apartment complexes nearby and made dozens of arrests. One immigrant worker was reported beaten near the center. The Day Labor Center called for a Jan. 26 march on the immigration office downtown.

The L.A. arrests came as a shock to city residents. Many immigrants expressed concern for their personal safety—an uncommon sentiment in a city whose high concentration of immigrants gave them a sense of safety in numbers. "We used to feel secure here," Nicaraguan electrician Manuel Salomon told Reuters as he sipped coffee in a Mexican bakery in the city. "But it looks like that honeymoon is over."

An ICE spokesman said that 24 of the L.A. detainees were “repeat offenders,” who now face up to 20 years in prison. "We think that's a significant deterrent," he said.

Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa was in Washington, DC, on the day after the raids to promote the Democratic Party’s version of immigration reform at the National Press Club. Villaraigosa’s comments kept to the liberal Democrat line, emphasizing labor protections, border militarization, and the pathway to citizenship. "I think that will produce much better results than the raids that occur, that oftentimes two weeks later those people are back," he said.

Los Angeles was not the only stronghold of the immigrant movement to be victimized. ICE arrested 119 immigrant workers in the San Francisco Bay Area in a week-long operation that concluded on the same day as the L.A. roundups. It claimed to have been pursuing 25 immigrants with outstanding orders for deportation. In the process, however, its agents picked up 94 additional immigrants who they determined to be undocumented.

In Richmond, Calif., local officials complained that federal agents identified themselves as police officers to gain entry to homes. It was reminiscent of the way that ICE concealed itself last September in a raid in Watsonville, Calif., when agents claiming to be from the board of education arrested 109 immigrants.

The Richmond Police Department is prohibited from enforcing immigration law. However, at a community forum sponsored by CISCO (Contra Costa Inter-faith Community Organization) on Jan. 28, a Richmond police captain admitted that city cops had taken part in immigration raids during the past year.

The CISCO-sponsored forum drew over 450 people, mainly Latino immigrants, to St. Mark’s Church in Richmond. Several people who were directly affected by the raids took the podium.

One woman protested through tears that the ICE agents had entered her home in the middle of the night—and dragged her five brothers to jail in their pajamas. Another person said that ICE and Richmond police had broken down her door to gain entry.

Smithfield: ICE the union-buster

Smithfield Foods, the largest pork-processor in the world, had its plant in Tar Hell, NC, raided by ICE on the same day as the Los Angeles and Bay Area mass arrests. Twenty-one immigrant workers were arrested in the plant, in addition to 54 immigrant residents of Tar Heel.

Smithfield has openly colluded with ICE in the past to attempt to crush a union organizing drive in the Tar Heel Plant by the United Food and Commercial Workers. The company participates in a voluntary ICE program that asks for the names and social security numbers of all workers at a job site. If the worker’s name does not match the number, ICE issues the employer a “no-match” letter that can be used as a pretext to fire him or her.

In November, 75 Smithfield workers—including leaders of the union drive—received “no-match” letters and lost their jobs. One thousand of their coworkers then shook the company to its foundations by walking off the job in protest and refusing to return until all were reinstated. After two days of lost production, the company gave in and rehired the workers while it “investigates” the “no-match” claim.

The Smithfield raid comes in the wake of the ICE raids of Swift & Co. meatpacking plants in six states, which netted 1300 immigrant workers.

Local police join raids in Danbury

ICE agents arrested six immigrants in Danbury on Jan. 24, among them Tereza Pereira, 42, a Brazilian mother of two children born in the U.S. Pereira, a self-employed house cleaner, has been trying to obtain legal status with the help of a lawyer since 1997. Her lawyer said that clerical errors led to Pereira’s application being cancelled and a warrant issued for her deportation.

ICE agents entered Pereira’s house in the evening and when they found she was not at home forced her 15-year-old son to call her at work. He told his mother that the police were in the house, but was not permitted to say why.

Afraid that something had happened to her husband, Pereira rushed home with her employer. When she arrived at the house, ICE agents handcuffed her and escorted her to a white van, treating the diminutive woman harshly, according to an eyewitness.

Danbury Chief of Police Al Baker admitted that a local detectives unit had participated in the raid. Homeland Security would not confirm the arrest of Pereira or the five other immigrants detained.

Danbury has endured 23 immigrant arrests since 11 day laborers were caught in a federal sting on Sept. 19, 2006. A group of city residents banded together after these raids to form the Campaign to Stop the ICE Raids in Danbury. The Campaign has organized a series of educational forums across the state on the situation in Danbury.

On Sunday, Feb. 25, it will host a major forum, “Stop the Raids! A Forum in Solidarity with the Immigrant Community,” which will feature Swift & Co. workers who survived the ICE raid in Hyrum, Utah; Ana Avendano, director of the AFL-CIO’s Immigrant Workers Program; and an attorney for the immigrants of Hazelton, Pa. from the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund.

Arrests throughout the country

Most ICE arrests are “routine,” involving relatively small numbers of people, and are often not even reported by the agency or the press. Larger ICE round-ups in recent weeks include the following:

• In Charlotte, N.C., 60 immigrants were arrested during a three-day operation that ended on Jan. 12. The arrests were part of “Operation Secure Streets.” ICE targeted immigrants with prior convictions for driving under the influence of alcohol.

• In Grand Rapids, Mich., ICE agents and local police announced on Jan. 18 that they had rounded up 133 immigrants around Grand Rapids. Local police and sheriff’s departments collaborated with ICE in the sweeps. Gang members were alleged to be among the detainees.

• In Boston on Jan. 19, ICE arrested 12 “criminal aliens” with “prior convictions for a variety of felony offenses.” Ten of the people arrested during the operation are permanent residents of the United States.

• In Chicago, 11 Polish women working for a cleaning service were arrested on Jan. 24.

• In Baltimore, ICE arrested 24 undocumented workers on Jan. 24. ICE officers had stopped for coffee at a 7-11 convenience store when the workers approached, having mistaken the agents for contractors.

In what has become its standard operating procedure, ICE deflected criticism for its arrests by emphasizing the “criminal” records of many detainees. ICE targets the most vulnerable immigrants in society, such as those who have drunken-driving convictions.

In truth, nearly all of the so-called crimes committed by immigrant detainees involve their attempts to obtain work in the U.S., like inventing a social security number for a job application or reentering the country after having been deported.

Three-quarters of all undocumented workers have social security tax deducted from their paychecks, none of which they will ever collect. In effect, they subsidize social security to the tune of $7 billion per year.

President Bush has budgeted for 27,000 more beds in immigration detention facilities for 2007. In his State of the Union speech, Bush said he is doubling the size of the Border Patrol.

Meanwhile, Iraq war profiteer Kellogg Brown and Root (KBR), a subsidiary of Halliburton, has been hired at a cool $385 million over five years to build immigrant detention facilities if a “mass emergency” is ever declared. Until then, KBR is to receive an estimated $450,000 annually for administrative costs.

Pressed to define “mass emergency,” a spokesman for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers used the analogy of the the Mariel Boat Lift, which saw the arrival of 125,000 Cubans to the U.S. in 1980. That would be the size of an event to trigger the contract with KBR.