Postville Raid - The Raid

The Raid

With helicopters, buses and vans, hundreds of federal officials from the ICE together with agents and officers of other federal, state, and local agencies, raided the meat packing plant in the morning hours of 12 May 2008, seizing company records and arresting 389 individuals. According to the U.S. attorney's office for the Northern District of Iowa, those arrested included “290 Guatemalans, 93 Mexicans, 2 Israelis and 4 Ukrainians”. Eighteen were juveniles.

According to a retired federal agent, a raid on Agriprocessors expected to lead to the arrest of about 100 illegal workers mostly from Eastern Europe was planned in 2000, and canceled at the last moment over political concerns. The 2008 raid was planned for months. An affidavit the Homeland Security Department filed in court before the raid cited “...the issuance of 697 criminal complaints and arrest warrants against persons believed to be current employees,” and to have acted criminally. The affidavit cited unnamed sources who alleged that the company employed 15 year old children, that supervisors helped cash checks for workers with false documents, and pressured workers without documents to purchase vehicles and register them in other names. It also cited a case in which a supervisor blindfolded a Guatemalan worker and allegedly struck him with a meat hook, causing no serious injury. Sources quoted in the affidavit and application for search warrant also alleged the existence of a methamphetamine laboratory at the slaughterhouse, and that employees carried weapons to work. Later press reports do not indicate that a methamphetamine laboratory was found during the search.

The arrested workers were taken to a nearby fairground, the National Cattle Congress in Waterloo, Iowa, where they were charged with aggravated identity theft, a criminal offense that carries a mandatory two years sentence, and briefed on their rights and options. The immigrant workers, most of them without prior criminal records, were offered a plea agreement in exchange for a guilty plea to lesser charges. 297 accepted the agreement and pleaded guilty to document fraud. In an expedited procedure known as “fast track”, hearings were scheduled over the course of the following three days, in which the judges took guilty pleas from the defendants, who were bound by handcuffs at the wrists as well as chains from their upper torso to their ankles, in groups of ten, and sentenced them immediately, five at a time. Most of the workers were sentenced to five months in prison and were deported afterwards. Before this raid, undocumented people who had no prior records were usually not criminally charged in the aftermath of a raid, and were instantly deported on civil immigration violations. Forty-one of those arrested were allowed to remain in the USA, being granted a special visa, known as U-visa, for those who suffered violent abuse.

In a decision issued on May 4, 2009 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that federal prosecutors have inappropriately used aggravated identity theft laws to prosecute undocumented workers. According to the ruling, a prosecutor must be able to show that immigrants knowingly used identification that actually belonged to another person, not merely that they were using fake documents, as in the case of the Postville detainees.

The Rubashkin family, ultra-Orthodox Jews of the Lubavitcher hasidic movement, who owned and operated Agriprocessors, has denied any knowledge of criminal activity. Aaron Rubashkin, the owner of the company said that he had no idea that his workers were illegal and that they had produced what appeared to be legitimate work documents. Getzel Rubashkin, one of his grandsons who worked at the plant, was reported as saying: “Obviously some of the people here were presenting false documents. Immigration authorities somehow picked it up and they did what they are supposed to do, they came and picked them up. God bless them for it.”

According to the ICE, costs of the raid totaled $5,211,092 as of August 21, 2008, not including costs associated with the U.S. Attorney’s Office, the U.S. Department of Labor or local Postville authorities.

The majority of the arrested workers were Mayan indigenous peoples from Guatemala. Four of the workers were Ukrainian and 93 were Mexican.