Agents raid meat plants in Nebraska, 5 other states

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BY ART HOVEY / Lincoln Journal Star

GRAND ISLAND — An untold number of workers at the Swift & Co. meatpacking plant could face deportation after federal immigration officials descended on the plant Tuesday with search warrants in hand.

Greg Palmore, spokesman for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said there would be no tally until today on how many Swift employees would be leaving the country immediately and how many others would have hearings before a judge to try to verify they are in the United States legally.

“This is a work-site investigation that has identified a large identity-theft scheme,” Palmore said.

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Immigration and Custom Enforcement police stand guard at the entrance of a Swift & Co. meat processing plant in Greeley, Colo., on Tuesday. Agents raided meat processing plants in six states, including Nebraska, and arrested an unknown number of suspected illegal immigrants in an identity theft investigation, temporarily suspending operations at all six plants. (AP)

Immigration and Custom Enforcement police stand guard at the entrance of a Swift & Co. meat processing plant in Greeley, Colo., on Tuesday. Agents raided meat processing plants in six states, including Nebraska, and arrested an unknown number of suspected illegal immigrants in an identity theft investigation, temporarily suspending operations at all six plants. (AP)

Five other Swift plants in Colorado, Iowa, Minnesota, Texas and Utah also were targeted by agents who arrived in the culmination of an investigation that, Palmore said, began in February. The plants include all of Swift’s domestic beef processing capacity and 77 percent of its pork processing capacity.

Stolen Social Security numbers were a major focus in an enforcement action that began in Grand Island shortly after sunrise and included buses brought in to haul away anybody who could not prove legal status.

Grand Island Police Chief Steve Lamken said he refused to let his officers take part in the raid.

“When this is all over, we’re still here taking care of our community and if I have a significant part of my population that’s fearful and won’t call us, then that’s not good for our community,” he said.

By 4 p.m., there were no obvious signs of a major departure from the usual work routine outside a massive beef-processing plant on Grand Island’s eastern outskirts. Trucks were entering and leaving, and there were numerous cars in the employee parking lot.

The immigration crackdown is sure to attract major attention from Nebraska’s Hispanic community, other meatpackers and just about everybody with business or community ties to Hispanic residents.

While Tim Counts, a Minneapolis-based ICE spokesman, said the agency has been more aggressive over the last several years enforcing immigration laws, raids at meatpacking plants in Nebraska have been rare since the early 1990s.

Counts portrayed the joint operation as “very methodical, very organized and very low-key overall.” It was not a raid, he said, and not a precipitator of the kind of chaos that ensued when the now defunct Immigration and Naturalization Service came to the same Grand Island plant, then owned by Monfort, in 1992 with dogs and helicopters.

Grand Island’s Hispanic population seemed to be drawing little comfort from Tuesday’s tactics.

Odalys Perez of the Grand Island Multi-Cultural Coalition said she was “so upset I don’t have words to describe how upset I am.”

Despite Counts’ assurances of an orderly operation, Perez referred to the day’s events as “really bad and really sad” and a major source of disruption to Hispanic families. “How do you explain to a 10-year-old that he’s going to go home to an empty house?” she said.

At least two local school buildings were being used to house students who needed food, a blanket and a place to stay, Perez said.

Some of those whose lives were disrupted live in apartments in the building where Perez has her office. One woman whose husband was taken away “took her child and moved to Columbus to be with her family,” she said.

Marian Alvarez, owner and manager of the Latin American Grocery Store in downtown Grand Island, said many of the Hispanic businesses along West Fourth Street felt the effects immediately.

“I’ve only had five customers all day,” she said. Other retail outlets closed early “because nobody is coming in today.”

Counts said the workplace enforcement at Swift is the most recent in a series that have resulted in thousands of arrests in the past year. “In fact, we’ve arrested more people in 2006, like seven times more people, than the old INS arrested in 2002.”

Mass detainments drew an outpouring of concern from the Appleseed Center, which includes immigrant advocacy in its nonprofit work in Lincoln.

Darcy Tromanhauser and Milo Mumgaard said sending workers south of the U.S. border to face hunger and destitution was hardly an acceptable substitute for national immigration reform.

“It seems to be completely heartless and mean-spirited right before the holiday season,” Tromanhauser said, “and there’s a better way. All this will do is separate many Nebraska families and leave a lot of kids tonight without parents coming home. Some of these kids will be American citizens.”

Mumgaard said Appleseed advocates “want to see the immigration problem fixed. We do not want to see new rounds of human misery foisted upon people.”

The company’s president and chief executive, Sam Rovit, issued a news release denying knowingly hiring illegal workers.

Swift spokesman Sean McHugh offered prepared remarks from the company’s headquarters in Greeley. He said there were no criminal charges against the company’s managers and it was uncertain how long or how much meatpacking operations would be disrupted.

“Swift believes that today’s actions by the government violate the agreement associated with the company’s participation over the last 10 years in the federal government’s Basic Pilot worker authorization program,” the statement said, “and raise serious questions as to the government’s possible violation of individual workers’ civil rights.”

Since 1997, Swift has used a government pilot program to check Social Security numbers. Company officials have said one shortcoming may be the program’s inability to detect when two people are using the same number.

McHugh was not immediately available for follow-up questions.

Reach Art Hovey at 523-4949 or ahovey@alltel.net. The Associated Press contributed to this report.