Yesterday, federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials and local law enforcement friends raided a meat packing plant in Postville, Iowa. Over 300 were arrested. This was the largest such raid in Iowa history.
Postville is a quiet little town of fewer than 2,000 people. It has become famous, and now possibly infamous, in recent years because of a meat processing plant which has brought workers from all over the world: Russia, Israel, many others, and of course Mexico.
This makes Postville unique in rock-solid white NE Iowa, which is, for the most part, composed of farmers and those businesses and few industries which support agriculture. A book has even been published about its uniqueness: Postville.
In general, life in the town has been interesting, peaceful, and certainly different! They have a soccer league. Cleverly, one of the rules is that there may be no more than two players on each team from the same country!
A couple of years ago, there was a similar raid on a plant in Marshalltown. They took "everyone," leaving kids at home with no parent. The Feds took a lot of heat for that! This time, the officials did release several people for "humanitarian reasons," most notably child care. They made certain that there was a responsible person remaining home for each child.
It's nice to know that government officials can learn from past behavior and can be a bit flexible and exhibit common sense.
Charges range from multiple persons with the same social security number and identity theft to just plain being there illegally. There were nearly 700 warrants!
There was no mention of any arrests or charges brought against the plant management who hired these folks.
Tuesday, May 13, 2008
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Congratulations to federal immigration, customs enforcement officials and Postville IA local law enforcement.
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