What a horrendous account on what the US government and the so-called Kosher meat warehouse are doing to the poor workers in Iowa. The women & children of the workers are forced to wear ankle tracking devices and aren’t allowed to work. I can’t believe this heinous activity is happening in the US.
http://www.democracynow.org/2008/8/20/iowa_town_turned_into_open_air
August 20, 2008
Iowa Town Turned into “Open-Air Prison” as Wives of Men Arrested in Largest Immigration Raid in US History Forbidden to Work…or Leave
Three months after the largest immigration raid in US history, when nearly 400 workers were arrested at a meatpacking plant, Postville, Iowa is a changed town. Postville lost more than a quarter of its population in the raid. And for those left behind, namely the wives and children of the men taken away, the town has been turned into what some have described as an open-air prison. Dozens of immigrant women remain in Postville without status or a means of support. Many of them are even forbidden from leaving and have been made to wear electronic monitoring bracelets. [includes rush transcript]
Guests:
Paul Ouderkirk, Priest at St. Bridget’s Roman Catholic Church in Postville, Iowa.
Monica Ramirez, Staff Attorney with the ACLU’s Immigrants’ Rights Project.
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AMY GOODMAN: It’s been three months since immigration officials descended on the tiny town of Postville in northeastern Iowa to conduct what would become the largest immigration raid in US history.
On May 12th, helicopters, buses and vans carrying dozens of armed immigration agents descended on Agriprocessors, the largest kosher slaughterhouse and meatpacking plant in the country. Nearly 400 workers, most of them Mexican and Guatemalan, were arrested. Nearly 300 of them were charged with aggravated identity theft and Social Security fraud. Many were sent to prisons scattered across the state.
Postville lost more than a quarter of its population in the raid. And for those left behind, namely the wives and children of the men taken away, the town has been turned into what some have described as an open-air prison. Dozens of immigrant women remain in Postville without status or a means of support. Many of them are even forbidden from leaving and have been made to wear electronic monitoring bracelets.
The women are now forced to rely on donations from St. Bridget’s Roman Catholic Church and the local food pantry. [Father] Paul Ouderkirk spent the past half-century as a priest and had been in retirement for five years when he was called back to active duty at St. Bridget’s after the raid. He joins us now on the phone from Postville.
Welcome to Democracy Now!
PAUL OUDERKIRK: Thank you, Amy. Good to be with you this morning.
AMY GOODMAN: It’s very good to have you with us. Describe what’s happening in Postville.
PAUL OUDERKIRK: At the present moment, the women you described as being prisoners are still here. I know of only—out of forty-three that have leg monitoring devices, I know of only six so far that have received permission to go home and had the monitors removed. A couple went yesterday. So we are constantly providing for all the rest, since they can’t work, have no income, and they have children.
Right now, one of the primary concerns is getting the children into school. And school here in Postville begins on Thursday, and we still talk to many of the mothers who are afraid to put their children in school. And I talked to a young girl—she’s about fifth grade—yesterday who said she couldn’t go, because she didn’t have money to buy school supplies. So we’re trying to sort through all of that and help them as much as we can.
AMY GOODMAN: Can you go back to the beginning and describe exactly what happened in May?
PAUL OUDERKIRK: On May 12th, the raid took place. And right after the raid, when the buses began to take people away, about between 300 and 400 people rushed to our church out of fear. And for the next six days, they lived, slept, ate, and many of them refused to leave the church. We had them sleeping in our church, sleeping in the hall. They were afraid to go home, because the common fear was that immigration would know where their apartments were or their homes were and would come and take them and their children away. And so, we kept them.
And they relied on us for everything. At one time, according to my own calculations, we were feeding up to a thousand people a day, because we had to bring in food, volunteer workers, and our parish kitchen is not that big. But thanks to outside donations from various service organizations and area churches, we were able to feed them. And at the end of that week, we encouraged them to go back to their apartments, because we had to provide them some kind of a normality. The church and the hall was being taxed to the extreme. And, little by little, they began to go home.
And then we began to look into their needs. You know, what were their needs? They needed food, they needed clothing, they needed advice. They wanted to know where their husbands were. And the third thing we had to be aware of is that they were going to need some legal help. And here in Postville, there are no immigration lawyers here.
AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to turn now to our next guest. We’re joined by Father Paul Ouderkirk. He’s speaking to us from Postville. But we turn now to our next guest, from the American Civil Liberties Union, which recently obtained a government manual distributed to defense lawyers who were assigned to represent the immigrant workers arrested in the Postville raid. According to the ACLU, the document contains prepackaged scripts for plea and sentencing hearings, as well as documents providing for guilty pleas and waivers of rights that were used to push more than 300 postal workers through mass criminal proceedings as quickly as possible. Monica Ramirez is a staff attorney with the ACLU’s Immigrants’ Rights Project, joining us on the phone from San Francisco.
Monica Ramirez, welcome to Democracy Now! Explain this document.
MONICA RAMIREZ: Sure. Thank you so much for having me. The government manual provided for the workers to waive, as you said, all of their legal rights and, in the overwhelming majority of cases, to plead guilty to charges of falsely using identity documents for employment. The manual itself was an important tool used to rush defendants through the criminal justice and immigration systems in an unprecedented way. The Postville raid processed hundreds of immigrant workers, as you mentioned, with unprecedented speed. While the size of the raid is significant, the critical and novel element that sets Postville apart from prior immigration raids that we’ve seen in the past two years or so was the preplanned and massive criminal prosecution of immigrant workers.
And, you know, there are a number of key factors that, by design, in fact, were used in combination in Postville to compromise, if not outright negate, meaningful legal representation, voluntary and knowledgeable waivers of rights, and public confidence in a fair prosecutorial and judicial process. These factors include appointment of too few defense counsel to represent multiple defendants, the use of exploding seven-day plea offers, and the conditioning of pleas upon defendants accepting stipulated judicial orders of deportation that compel the waiver of all rights and protections under the immigration laws. So this was definitely an unprecedented raid, and the combination of factors here seriously undermined meaningful legal representation and raises a lot of disturbing questions about whether the constitutional rights of the workers were protected in these prosecutions.
AMY GOODMAN: I recently spoke to Erik Camayd, the Spanish court interpreter who spoke out for the workers rounded up in Postville. I asked him to describe his experience at the trial.
- ERIK CAMAYD-FREIXAS: It was a unique experience for me in my twenty-three years as a federal interpreter. It started with waiting around in the courtroom until they started bringing in the defendants, and they were shackled at the waist, wrists and feet and coming in in rows of ten. Then they sat down to be arraigned. And one of the first things that struck me is that there didn’t seem to be a presumption of innocence. The presumption of innocence became kind of like empty words, because they were shackled. They were on an immigration detainer, so they didn’t have any right to bail, like normally defendants would. And so, that’s how it started.
It was a very long process that lasted two weeks. And as I went along, day after day, there was a new irregularity in the process. And eventually, I guess, there was an irregularity at every step, I would say, comparing this process, these fast-tracking judicial proceedings, with the judicial proceedings that I’ve watched in federal court over twenty-three years of professional practice.
AMY GOODMAN: He’s a professor of modern languages at Florida International University. Highly unusual for an interpreter, for a court translator to speak out as he has, but he decided to do this, Monica Ramirez, based on what each of the people were going through that was being brought through the court system. Your response?
MONICA RAMIREZ: My response to his comment?
AMY GOODMAN: Yes, and the fact that he spoke out, saying this was highly unorthodox, what was taking place.
MONICA RAMIREZ: Well, I think it’s incredibly important that he spoke out. I think without his essay, there would be a lot that we would still not know about how these prosecutions were conducted.
I think one critical element that he highlighted in his essay—I’m not sure if he described it in the clip that you just played, but one critical element of the criminal prosecutions here was the predetermined decision to appoint a single criminal defense lawyer to represent large numbers of defendants. Only eighteen, I believe, criminal defense attorneys were appointed by the federal court to represent the more-than-300 workers, and every attorney represented seventeen defendants, on average. Now, it’s unclear how the court decided to appoint that number, how the defense lawyers were selected or identified for appointment. No explanation has been offered as to why an insufficient number of defense attorneys were appointed to provide individualized representation.
And individualized representation was especially critical here, given that the anticipated proceedings would involve complex questions of immigration law and where language, cultural and other barriers would likely impede communication between the client and counsel. Now, the appointment of twenty-six Spanish-language interpreters to work with defense attorneys did not obviate the need for more defense attorneys. Because most of the defendants—defendants were Guatemalans of Mayan descent for whom Spanish was a second language, Spanish-language interpretation of legal concepts and other matters related to the defendants’ prosecutions were likely inadequate. And so, the need for more attorneys and more interpreters cannot be overstated and should be further investigated, particularly in light of the preplanned exploding plea offers and expedited proceedings, more generally.
AMY GOODMAN: Father Paul Ouderkirk, I wanted to go back to Postville for a description, for people who wouldn’t be familiar with this town, which isn’t unusual, a place first settled by German and Norwegian Lutherans and Irish Catholics more than 150 years ago, Hispanic immigrants raising children, buying houses, businesses. AP had an interesting report by Monica Rhor that described the different cultures living next door to each other and what has happened since, in the bringing in of new immigrants to work, like Somalis.
PAUL OUDERKIRK: Well, when I was pastor here for four years, we had a very active diversity council, and it was commonly held that there were twenty-seven different cultures living and working here. And the diversity council became very active, and we did a lot of creative things. Well, you can well imagine that the raid wiped out all those years, about ten years, of good hard work and mutual understanding overnight. And right now—the population of Postville before the raid was 2,400. After the raid, it was less than 2,000.
And only recently, when they’re bringing in the—they brought in the Somalis, but this is not a permanent solution to the lack of workers in the plant. The Somalis that were brought in, oh, about three weeks ago, two-thirds of them have been fired. It was discovered that they are Muslim, and they pray five times a day, and the plant did not want to allow them to have that time. So—
AMY GOODMAN: This is an interesting contrast. You have the Muslim workers, and it’s a large—the largest kosher agriprocessor in the world, is that right?
PAUL OUDERKIRK: That’s correct. And they—I toured it. I’m the only one of our staff that has ever toured it, and I toured the plant twice. And the second time, they told me their goal was to become the largest kosher plant, so they could control all the kosher meat going into Israel. And I don’t think they have quite gotten there yet, but they were employing over 900 workers.
The raid, while it took only 390 or 400—by the way, not all of the people that they took did they take correctly. We know of an instance of a mother that was taken, and she was kept in prison for three days, protesting that she had two children at home she needed to take care of, and they didn’t pay any attention to her. And when they let her out—normally they would have put a leg bracelet on a mother like that—on her, they didn’t, because they could see she was so emotionally wrought that they just said, “Go back to Postville and take care of your children, and don’t leave.” Well, she came into our office, and she was—I’ve never seen anybody so terribly emotionally distressed, her husband being arrested, three days away from her children and in prison with mostly men. And she said to us, “They are never going to do that to me again.” She was terrified. And suddenly, she’s gone. We don’t know where she went.
AMY GOODMAN: I’m looking at this AP piece that goes on to say, “Now, about 20 to 25 women remain tethered to the bracelets—black electronic monitoring devices that dig into the skin of their right ankles, leaving dark bruises and painful cuts. Some women try without success to protect their flesh with makeshift bandages fashioned from bandanas and shorn socks.
“And the women who happily embraced hard work are forced to subsist on donations from St. Bridget’s and the local food pantry while they await court dates.
“While they wait, they worry.”
And it goes on to say that “Last week, the Iowa Labor Commissioner’s Office said an investigation had uncovered 57 cases of child labor law violations at the facility [at Agriprocessors], which has also been cited for numerous safety and health violations. The claims have prompted debates among rabbis about kosher law’s protections for food workers, and how Orthodox oversight officials should involve themselves.”
PAUL OUDERKIRK: Well, you mentioned one thing that we have seen a lot firsthand, and that is the protection of the workers. We know that they are mistreated. A couple were beaten. They were asked to work faster when a line was going already so fast they could barely keep up to it.
When I was pastor here, I saw many cases of carpal tunnel, because they had heavy electronic knives that they had to swing over their heads to cut the legs of chickens and turkeys day after day.
We had the case of a young man whose—he was working on a machine. It got blocked. They shut it down. He reached in to unblock it, and his own foreman turned it on, and he lost a hand. And to this date, he doesn’t receive very much compensation from the plant. He’s seeking to get his just dues there.
But we saw people that were cut and others who were illegally charged for buying their own safety work clothes, when the plant should provide that. They were charged for washing. Different deductions were taken out of their checks that were never explained to them.
And now, when the women come to us—yesterday was our day to help them with rents, utilities, special needs. We do that twice a week. And since our goal is to assist those directly impacted by the raid, we always take those people first, because the other thing that’s happened is that the plant, after firing some of these workers, the workers end up down here looking for assistance, because they have nothing.
AMY GOODMAN: On that note, we have to leave it there, but we will continue to follow the story of Postville—Postville, Iowa—where the largest immigration raid in US history took place this past May. I want to thank you, Father Paul Ouderkirk, for joining us, and Monica Ramirez, staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union’s Immigrants’ Rights Project.
July 14, 2008
Court Interpreter Breaks Confidentiality Code to Speak Out for Workers Rounded Up in Largest Immigration Raid in U.S. History
On May 12th, Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested nearly 400 workers at a meatpacking plant in Postville, Iowa in the largest immigration raid in US history. Many were sent to prison. We speak with Erik Camayd-Freixas, a professor and Spanish-language court interpreter who was flown into Iowa for the trial. He broke the code of confidentiality among legal interpreters to describe the workers’ predicament in what he calls “the saddest procession I have ever witnessed.” He says most of the workers were peasants from Guatemala and did not fully understand the criminal charges they were facing. He also says that court-appointed lawyers had little time to meet with the workers, many of whom ended up waiving their rights. [includes rush transcript]
Guest:
Erik Camayd-Freixas, professor of modern languages at Florida International University in Miami. He was a court-appointed interpreter at the trial of the nearly 400 workers arrested in an immigration raid in Postville, Iowa in May. He has written a scathing account of the trial. It’s called “Interpreting After the Largest ICE Raid in US History: A Personal Account.”
AMY GOODMAN: We turn now to Postville, Iowa, a small town of just over 2,000 people. On May 12th, the town became the site of the largest immigration raid in US history. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, known as ICE, arrested 389 workers at Agriprocessors, the largest kosher slaughterhouse and meatpacking plant in the country. Nearly 300 of the workers were charged with aggravated identity theft and Social Security fraud. Many were sent to prison.
Erik Camayd is a professor of modern languages at Florida International University in Miami. He was one of the twenty-six court-appointed interpreters flown into Iowa for the trial.
In an account describing his experience, he wrote: “Then began the saddest procession I have ever witnessed, which the public would never see, because cameras were not allowed past the perimeter of the compound. Driven single-file in groups of 10, shackled at the wrists, waist and ankles, chains dragging as they shuffled through, the slaughterhouse workers were brought in for arraignment, sat and listened through headsets to the interpreted initial appearance, before marching out again to be bused to different county jails, only to make room for the next row of 10. They appeared to be uniformly no more than 5 ft. tall, mostly illiterate Guatemalan peasants with Mayan last names, some in tears; others with faces of worry, fear, and embarrassment.”
This is one of the workers speaking in her own words.
- ELIDA: [translated] My name is Elida, and I’m from Guatemala. I have two children. I brought here because of the situation in our town in Guatemala. We couldn’t survive, because we were poor. We came here to make a living, to work. But where we worked, they exploited us. We didn’t have any option but to accept the work, because we knew we needed the money. I think it’s very unjust, what they’re doing to us, because after they needed the work of our hands to do this labor, now they’re paying us like this. If they could only realize that all of us here are so traumatized by what happened.
AMY GOODMAN: We turn now to Professor Erik Camayd. He joins us now from Miami. We’re also joined in New York by Roberto Lovato, a writer with New America Media and frequent contributor to The Nation magazine, who writes extensively on immigration politics and immigrant rights.
Erik Camayd, describe your experience.
ERIK CAMAYD-FREIXAS: Well, it was a unique experience for me in my twenty-three years as a federal interpreter. It started with waiting around in the courtroom until they started bringing in the defendants, and they were shackled at the waist, wrists and feet and coming in in rows of ten. Then they sat down to be arraigned. And one of the first things that struck me is that there didn’t seem to be a presumption of innocence. The presumption of innocence became kind of like empty words, because they were shackled. They were on an immigration detainer, so they didn’t have any right to bail, like normally defendants would. And so, that’s how it started.
It was a very long process that lasted two weeks. And as I went along, day after day, there was a new irregularity in the process. And eventually, I guess, there was an irregularity at every step, I would say, comparing this process, these fast-tracking judicial proceedings, with the judicial proceedings that I’ve watched in federal court over twenty-three years of professional practice.
AMY GOODMAN: Can you describe for us, as you pieced it together, what actually went down in May when this raid took place, the largest immigration raid in US history?
ERIK CAMAYD-FREIXAS: Well, the plant was stormed by what is really a paramilitary force of hundreds of agents. And they brought the detainees to the National Cattle Congress that had been prepared as a detention center. The security there was high security.
And then, after the initial appearance where the detainees were arraigned, we went—the different interpreters with their attorneys went to the different jails in throughout eastern Iowa, where the arraigned detainees had been taken. And then we met with each one individually, of the ones that each attorney had assigned to, and explained the plea agreement to them and went through basically an interview, fairly in-depth, with each of the clients.
I think that it is important to mention that one of the things that struck me about these proceedings is that the different officers of the court did not witness the entire process from beginning to end. The interpreters did. We were there from before arraignment for the very brief attorney-client conferences in preparation for arraignment, through the arraignment, and then in the interviews in jail and the sentencings and in the interviews after sentencing. There were different judges doing the arraignment and the sentencing. Magistrates were doing arraignments and hearing the pleas, and then US district court judges were doing the sentencing. So there wasn’t a continuity, so that basically none of the other officers of the court were able to see the entire process the way that interpreters could.
AMY GOODMAN: Erik Camayd, can you talk about some of the people you interpreted for, to give us a thumbnail sketch of who they were, like the man who walked from Guatemala to Iowa to work?
ERIK CAMAYD-FREIXAS: Yes. That was a very striking case, because the attorney asked him, through the interpreters, how he came to the United States, what his story was, to see what actually was the background of his case. And when asked how he came to the United States, he answered, “I walked.” And we looked at each other. The attorney thought that maybe I was misinterpreting. So we asked again, “What do you mean?” And he said, “I walked for a month and ten days, until I crossed the river.” So he actually walked all the way from Guatemala, across Mexico, by himself, until he crossed the border alone, and then he gathered with other—he met other immigrants and hitchhiked rides on a truck to Dallas and then to Postville. So, we understood how desperate his family situation was.
There were many in that same predicament. They were basically begging to be deported. And, of course, what made this case unique was that, for the first time, at least in this scale, they were not being deported but actually criminally prosecuted and sent to jail for five months or more. And the fact that they did not have a right to bail and that if they wanted to plead “not guilty” they would have had to wait possibly longer, up to six or eight months in jail without bail waiting for a trial, made this situation very, very difficult to really say that there was justice done in many of these cases.
Even though I can tell you individual cases, the truth of the matter—and I will—the truth of the matter is that they were all treated exactly the same, with the same plea agreement. There was no case-by-case review, no circumstances—individual circumstances reviewed. So, basically, the innocent and the guilty were all bunched together.
AMY GOODMAN: You describe—Erik, you describe one man just weeping through it all. You say that he just said he was nobody.
ERIK CAMAYD-FREIXAS: Yes, yes. This was the first interview, and it lasted three hours. For most of those three hours, this man was just weeping, and he was weeping for his family, worried about his children. He had children back in Guatemala, his mother, his wife and his sister all depending on him. He was the sole earner for the entire family.
And one of the burdens of the interpreter is that in order to really be able to interpret accurately and convey the meaning and the spirit of the meaning that each person says, you really have to put yourself in their place. You have to become them, so to speak. And when I became this man, so I could interpret for him accurately, I was placed in the position that he was in, and I found it, quite frankly, to be an intolerable burden. Basically, I saw immediately that this man had no choice but to plead guilty, if he wanted to return to his family as soon as possible, after five months in jail and then at least another month for deportation. So, I could immediately see myself in that situation, and I realized that this man, just like many others—women, as well, parents—would be placed in jail for these five months, and every waking hour they would be consumed by the worry as to whether their family was going to make it, as to whether any of their children was going to make it that day. And on top of that, they would have to carry the burden of having failed their families.
So, to me, that situation, which was—I think could have been foreseen and should have been foreseen by authorities, because they are experienced in this, so they know, they must know, and it is their business to know, that many of these Guatemalan and Mexican people have families in their countries and children depending on them, as well as in Iowa, in the United States, in Postville, in this case, such that to place them in that position, basically holding their families’ well-being ransom over their heads in order to induce them to accept a plea agreement and plead guilty as the fastest way to get back home and then placing them in jail for that time under that kind of duress, I think that it’s very disturbing. It’s very disturbing.
AMY GOODMAN: Professor Camayd, you took the unusual step of breaking a code of confidentiality among legal interpreters. You’ve been doing this interpreting for almost a quarter of a century. You’re a professor of modern languages at Florida International University in Miami. Why did you do this?
ERIK CAMAYD-FREIXAS: Well, first of all, let me say that I’m a professor of interpreter ethics, so I knew exactly what I was doing and how and to what extent I could speak out and so forth. I do not advocate for other interpreters to do this. I think I was in a unique position, where I had the duty to do this, as a citizen and also as an interpreter.
Let me say that I did not break the code of confidentiality. The confidentiality clause in the Interpreter Code of Ethics is designed to prevent the interpreter from affecting the outcome of the case. Now, in this situation, the case was over May 23rd. The defendants had ten days in which to appeal the sentence, and I didn’t even begin writing my essay until the second week of June. So, by that time, not only was the case over and these people in jail, but also the appeal period, the ten-day period for appeal, had expired, so it was a closed case. So, at that point, the confidentiality did not apply any longer.
In addition to that, confidentiality is not absolute. There are other requirements, ethical requirements of the interpreter that override it many times. For instance, if you are a medical interpreter and you find out that a client has tuberculosis or another epidemic disease, and they tell you, “Please don’t tell anybody, because I’ll be placed in quarantine, and I won’t be able to support my family,” well, you have a duty to report it, because it’s in the public interest, and that overrides confidentiality.
In this case, there was also the—
AMY GOODMAN: We have five seconds, Professor Camayd.
ERIK CAMAYD-FREIXAS: OK. There was also the requirement for me to notify about any impediment in the legal process as an officer of the court. And that’s why I did what I did.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, I want to thank you very much for being with us, Professor Erik Camayd-Freixas. We will link to your report on what happened in Postville, Iowa.
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