AI
Friday, August 09, 2019 9:14:24 PM
Was the operation coordinated with Trump's 2020 election campaign?
ICE Arrests Hundreds in Mississippi Raids Targeting Immigrant Workers
Handcuffed female workers are escorted onto a bus on Wednesday after a raid by U.S. immigration officials at a Koch Foods plant in
Morton, Miss. Rogelio V. Solis/Associated Press
By Miriam Jordan
Aug. 7, 2019
Federal agents raided several companies across Mississippi on Wednesday, rounding up hundreds of immigrant workers in what federal officials said might be the largest worksite enforcement action ever in a single state.
In a coordinated sting, more than 600 agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement showed up at the sites with federal warrants that allowed them to search the premises. About 680 immigrants who were believed to be working without legal documentation were apprehended and taken away on buses.
Lindsay Williams, a spokesman for the agency, said the federal agents executed the search warrants in conjunction with the United States Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Mississippi.
The operation was the culmination of a yearlong investigation, and it unfolded just hours before President Trump — who has made illegal immigration a trademark issue and who recently vowed to deport millions of undocumented immigrants — arrived in El Paso, a majority Latino city on the Mexico border where 22 people were killed over the weekend in an attack that federal authorities are investigating as an act of domestic terrorism.
[...]
“We have officially returned to the era of massive worksite raids,” said Ali Noorani, executive director of the National Immigration Forum, an advocacy organization. “The net result will be immigrant workers pushed further underground, families separated and local economies decimated. The American worker and their family lose their neighbors, fellow church members and friends.”
“The American economy loses a work force that is contributing in more ways than we can imagine,” he continued. “And, along the way, we are no safer as immigrant communities are pushed further from law enforcement.”
The poultry industry has long relied on immigrant labor to do the physically taxing work of cutting, cleaning, deboning and packing chicken in cold, sometimes dangerous conditions.
In statements, both poultry processors said they utilized E-Verify, a government electronic system designed to confirm that employees are eligible to work in the United States.
Immigrants eager for work traditionally have used fake Social Security numbers and green cards to secure jobs. But those do not pass E-Verify. Thus, in recent years, more immigrants have resorted to using the identities of legal United States residents, the identities of dead citizens, or the Social Security numbers of their American-born children to pass the electronic verification program.
After The New York Times revealed last December that Mr. Trump’s golf resorts employed undocumented immigrants, the Trump Organization terminated dozens of workers and said that it had begun to use E-Verify. The company has faced no penalties for hiring housekeepers, groundskeepers and cooks who used phony documents to obtain employment, some with the knowledge of at least one manager in New Jersey.
[Making President Trump’s Bed .. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/06/us/trump-bedminster-golf-undocumented-workers.html?module=inline : A Housekeeper Without Papers]
Peco Foods, which is based in Tuscaloosa, Ala., is described on its website as a “fully integrated grower, processor and marketer” of poultry products. The 80-year-old company is family-owned, according to the website.
In a statement, the company confirmed that three of its facilities in Mississippi — in Bay Springs, Canton and Sebastopol — had been raided. It said it had adhered to all local, state and federal laws and had used E-Verify to screen its new hires.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/07/us/ice-raids-mississippi.html
Though mine was a rhetorical question there are grounds for seeing there had been some possible coordination with Trump people in the timing of the ICE event with Trump's El Paso visit.
ICE Arrests Hundreds in Mississippi Raids Targeting Immigrant Workers
Handcuffed female workers are escorted onto a bus on Wednesday after a raid by U.S. immigration officials at a Koch Foods plant in
Morton, Miss. Rogelio V. Solis/Associated Press
By Miriam Jordan
Aug. 7, 2019
Federal agents raided several companies across Mississippi on Wednesday, rounding up hundreds of immigrant workers in what federal officials said might be the largest worksite enforcement action ever in a single state.
In a coordinated sting, more than 600 agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement showed up at the sites with federal warrants that allowed them to search the premises. About 680 immigrants who were believed to be working without legal documentation were apprehended and taken away on buses.
Lindsay Williams, a spokesman for the agency, said the federal agents executed the search warrants in conjunction with the United States Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Mississippi.
The operation was the culmination of a yearlong investigation, and it unfolded just hours before President Trump — who has made illegal immigration a trademark issue and who recently vowed to deport millions of undocumented immigrants — arrived in El Paso, a majority Latino city on the Mexico border where 22 people were killed over the weekend in an attack that federal authorities are investigating as an act of domestic terrorism.
[...]
“We have officially returned to the era of massive worksite raids,” said Ali Noorani, executive director of the National Immigration Forum, an advocacy organization. “The net result will be immigrant workers pushed further underground, families separated and local economies decimated. The American worker and their family lose their neighbors, fellow church members and friends.”
“The American economy loses a work force that is contributing in more ways than we can imagine,” he continued. “And, along the way, we are no safer as immigrant communities are pushed further from law enforcement.”
The poultry industry has long relied on immigrant labor to do the physically taxing work of cutting, cleaning, deboning and packing chicken in cold, sometimes dangerous conditions.
In statements, both poultry processors said they utilized E-Verify, a government electronic system designed to confirm that employees are eligible to work in the United States.
Immigrants eager for work traditionally have used fake Social Security numbers and green cards to secure jobs. But those do not pass E-Verify. Thus, in recent years, more immigrants have resorted to using the identities of legal United States residents, the identities of dead citizens, or the Social Security numbers of their American-born children to pass the electronic verification program.
After The New York Times revealed last December that Mr. Trump’s golf resorts employed undocumented immigrants, the Trump Organization terminated dozens of workers and said that it had begun to use E-Verify. The company has faced no penalties for hiring housekeepers, groundskeepers and cooks who used phony documents to obtain employment, some with the knowledge of at least one manager in New Jersey.
[Making President Trump’s Bed .. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/06/us/trump-bedminster-golf-undocumented-workers.html?module=inline : A Housekeeper Without Papers]
Peco Foods, which is based in Tuscaloosa, Ala., is described on its website as a “fully integrated grower, processor and marketer” of poultry products. The 80-year-old company is family-owned, according to the website.
In a statement, the company confirmed that three of its facilities in Mississippi — in Bay Springs, Canton and Sebastopol — had been raided. It said it had adhered to all local, state and federal laws and had used E-Verify to screen its new hires.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/07/us/ice-raids-mississippi.html
Though mine was a rhetorical question there are grounds for seeing there had been some possible coordination with Trump people in the timing of the ICE event with Trump's El Paso visit.
It was Plato who said, “He, O men, is the wisest, who like Socrates, knows that his wisdom is in truth worth nothing”
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