After the Postville, IA raid on May 12, 2008, Immigration and Law Enforcement pressed criminal charges against 300 illegal workers for identity theft, asserting that these workers had criminally stolen the identity of the social security card holders whose numbers they used. The defendants were railroaded through a court. One of the workers, now in federal prison, appealed. The Supreme Court yesterday in a unanimous decision threw out the conviction and in doing so forbad ICE from using this overkill tactic. The court’s reasoning: the workers had not idea the numbers were for actual people.
According to the NY Times, “The Obama administration has said that it will shift the focus of immigration enforcement to employers who intentionally hire unauthorized immigrants in order to pay lower wages or otherwise lower costs. But last week the administration said agents would continue to detain illegal immigrants found in raids.”
The article in full:
By ADAM LIPTAK and JULIA PRESTON
Published: May 4, 2009
WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Monday rejected a favorite tool of prosecutors in immigration cases, ruling unanimously that a federal identity-theft law may not be used against many illegal workers who used false Social Security numbers to get jobs.
The question in the case was whether workers who use fake identification numbers to commit some other crimes must know they belong to a real person to be subject to a two-year sentence extension for “aggravated identity theft.”
The answer, the Supreme Court said, is yes.

Continue reading Supreme Court: ICE can no longer use identity-theft charges

On October 7, 2008, as reported by the New York Times, “the Weld County, CO, Sheriff’s Office, armed with a search warrant, seized thousands of confidential tax returns from Ms. Cerrillo’s business. They told her they were looking for people with fraudulent Social Security numbers, commonly used by illegal immigrants to get work.”
This raid set off a legal fight over creative enforcement of immigration laws by state and local police. Under the so-called 287G program, the Department of Homeland Security contracts with non-federal agencies to enforce immigration laws. Janet Napolitano, Obama’s head of DHS, has launched a review of the program.
Below is a March 11 article by the Times on an ACLU suit in a state court to prevent the tax returns from being used by law enforcement. Following that is the original Times article from February 9.
Amalia’s tax service Judge Puts Halt to ID Theft Inquiry Focusing on Immigrants

Continue reading Colorado local police raid tax practice to nab illegals

I missed this one – the Postville plant which was raided in May this year (see prior postings) filed on bankruptcy on November 4. It is still operating at a much lower volume. Below is the article about the bankruptcy filing by the Des Moines Register.
Agriprocessors files for bankruptcy after bank seeks to foreclose
ERIN JORDAN • ejordan@dmreg.com • November 5, 2008
A kosher meatpacking plant in Postville filed for bankruptcy Tuesday, blaming a May 12 immigration raid for financial difficulties.
Agriprocessors Inc. filed for Chapter 11 protection in New York, where the headquarters are located. The Postville plant is listed as the company’s principal asset.
The company says it owes between 200 and 999 creditors $50 million to $100 million, according to records filed in U.S. District Court. Agriprocessors lists assets of $100 million to $500 million.
The company’s board of directors met Tuesday and decided to file for bankruptcy a day before a scheduled hearing on a lawsuit from the company’s largest lender, First Bank of St. Louis.

Continue reading Agriprocessors declared bankruptcy in November

I stay away from much of the news about immigrants and voting but this looney study is too outrageous not to comment on. the Center for Immigration Studies, which does some decent conservative work in the area of immigration policy, and is a good place to go to read arguments critical of liberal immigration policies, fell off the train in a recent study on voter fraud. Actually a former executive director of the CIS wrote the study. He estimates that between 1.8 and 2.7 million illegal immigrants may be registered to vote. Given the scrupulous, under-the-glare-of-headlights approach of voter registrars, the figure is patently ridiculous. CIS previously published a report which associated immigration with climate problems in the United States.
Study calls into question number of non-citizen voters
By John Riley
The Dallas Morning News, October 7, 2008
http://trailblazersblog.dallasnews.com/archives/2008/10/study-calls-into-question-numb.html
The former head of a Washington think tank specializing in immigration issues says that voter registration numbers in Texas and elsewhere may be inflated because of the presence of non-citizens on voter rolls.
Below is a news article from the Dallas Morning News of 10/7/08.

Continue reading Delusional thinking about immigrants and voting registration fraud

According to the Migration Policy Institute, Arizona’s employer-sanctions law that went into effect on January 1, 2008, does not preempt federal immigration law or violate federal constitutional protections according to a recent court ruling. I have posted on this law earlier this year.
The US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit rejected the arguments of various business and civil rights organizations but left open the possibility of a challenge to the law once the statute is enforced.
Under the Arizona law, employers that hire unauthorized immigrants can have their business licenses suspended or revoked. The law also requires them to use E-Verify, a federal database, to determine their employees’ work-authorization status.
No action has been brought against an employer since the law went into effect.
The Ninth Circuit was the first federal appellate court to rule on state employer-sanctions laws in recent years. A similar case is now pending before the Third Circuit Court of Appeals. Depending on the outcome of that appeal, the issue may be headed to the US Supreme Court for resolution.

The ICE raid on August 25 netted 595 workers at the plant of Howard Industries, Inc., which produces electrical transformers. This was the largest raid in history. Workers came from Germany, Peru, Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala, Panama, Honduras and Brazil. It appears that ICE will not pursue its highly objectionable practice of railroaded illegal workers through a mass criminal conviction, but rather deport them, as ICE did in the Postville IA raid in May of this year.
The particularly noxious aspect of the Postville strategy is that of railroading the workers into confessing, with scant legal advice, to plead guilty to Social Security fraud in misusing social security numbers. Many of the worker were not aware they were misusing numbers, rather just using numbers given to them by management. Only eight were charged criminally with identity theft.
The Des Moines Register ran an article late last week about the apparent change in strategy by ICE. Most likely the uproar over the strategy influenced ICE.
The article in full:
Critics tie scant new charges to wariness after Iowa raid. Raid in Postville: Comparison to Mississippi Arrests
By Leys Tony
The Des Moines Register, 1August 28, 2008
Critics of the way suspected illegal immigrant workers were handled after last May’s raid in Iowa noticed a change in government tactics after this week’s raid in Mississippi.
Federal officials detained 595 workers at a Mississippi electric-transformer factory Monday but filed criminal charges against just eight of them.
That’s in marked contrast to what happened after the raid at the Agriprocessors meatpacking plant in Postville, where prosecutors filed criminal identity-theft charges within days against 305 of the 389 workers who were arrested. Most of those people quickly pleaded guilty during mass hearings held at the National Cattle Congress grounds in Waterloo and now are serving five-month prison sentences.

Continue reading Follow up on the Mississippi ICE raid

Talk about over-reaching! A few more stories like this will help discredit the more florid of the anti-illegal immigration crowd. In a suburb of Nashville, an illegal immigrant was arrested at a routine traffic police stop, nine months pregnant. At delivery, a police officer stood in the delivery room, she was chained to bed most of the time, and she was refused a breast pump when sent back to prison. She returned to her baby after two days.
The police of Davidson County were operating under a so-called 287G agreement with ICE, which is intended to expedite the deportation of criminals found to be illegal.
The New York Times article in full:
Immigrant, Pregnant, Is Jailed Under Pact
It started when Juana Villegas, an illegal immigrant from Mexico who was nine months pregnant, was pulled over by a police officer in a Nashville suburb for a routine traffic
By the time Mrs. Villegas was released from the county jail six days later, she had gone through labor with a sheriff’s officer standing guard in her hospital room, where one of her feet was cuffed to the bed most of the time. County officers barred her from seeing or speaking with her husband.

Continue reading Chained to bed while delivering baby

Shortly after the May 12 raid of Agricproecessors, close to 400 arrested illegal workers are tried and pled guilty to criminal charges. One of the professional trnaslaters, Erik Camayd-Freixas, found the judicial process so unnervingly abusive of defendant rights that he wrote an 8,000 word account of it. The NY Times published an article on July 11th about his account. The Sanctuary posted a copy of the entire account, which I have coped below.
INTERPRETING AFTER THE LARGEST ICE RAID IN US HISTORY:
A PERSONAL ACCOUNT
Erik Camayd-Freixas, Ph.D.
Florida International University
June 13, 2008
On Monday, May 12, 2008, at 10:00 a.m., in an operation involving some 900 agents, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) executed a raid of Agriprocessors Inc, the nation’s largest kosher slaughterhouse and meat packing plant located in the town of Postville, Iowa. The raid …officials boasted… was “the largest single-site operation of its kind in American history.” At that same hour, 26 federally certified interpreters from all over the country were en route to the small neighboring city of Waterloo, Iowa, having no idea what their mission was about. The investigation had started more than a year earlier. Raid preparations had begun in December. The Clerk’s Office of the U.S. District Court had contracted the interpreters a month ahead, but was not at liberty to tell us the whole truth, lest the impending raid be compromised. The operation was led by ICE, which belongs to the executive branch, whereas the U.S. District Court, belonging to the judicial branch, had to formulate its own official reason for participating. Accordingly, the Court had to move for two weeks to a remote location as part of a “Continuity of Operation Exercise” in case they were ever disrupted by an emergency, which in Iowa is likely to be a tornado or flood. That is what we were told, but, frankly, I was not prepared for a disaster of such a different kind, one which was entirely man-made.
I arrived late that Monday night and missed the 8pm interpreters briefing.

Continue reading Mass convictions after the Postville raid – railroading the defendants

Thanks to Citizen Orange for following the Agriprocessors story emenating from Postville, IA. To bring us to this week recall that On May 12 ICE raided the Agriproccessors plant in Postville, IA, said to be with its 1,000 odd employees the largest kosher meat processing facility in the world. ICE arrested 389 workers for illegal status. This was heralded as the largest ICE raid ever.
Several newspapers reported that arrests have begun at the low managerial levelfor immigration fraud. None of the top executives, including the surrounding the Rubashkin family, from Brooklyn, has been arrested, but I expect that is in the cards, and for offenses which carry serious time in the slammer. The Wall Street Journal reports that one official described the working conditions in the plant as “medieval.”
The Wall Street Journal article:
U.S. Arrests 2 Supervisors at Agriprocessors
By MIRIAM JORDAN
July 5, 2008
Federal agents Thursday arrested two supervisors at Agriprocessors Inc., a large kosher meatpacking plant, on charges that they helped illegal immigrants secure fake documents and encouraged them to reside in the U.S.
The arrests marked the first by U.S. authorities of individuals in supervisory roles at the Postville, Iowa, plant. On May 12, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents arrested 389 workers at the facility, most of them undocumented immigrants from Latin America.

Continue reading More on Postville IA raid

The National Council of State Legislatures issued a report on 1,106 bills which have been filed in state legislatures to deal with illegal immigrants. Of the 44 states considering at least one bill, 26 have enacted at least one.
The leading topics are employment (sanctions against employers who hire illegal workers, and other provisions); driver’s licenses (tightening their distribution); and law enforcement (some calling for coordination with ICE). Other topics include education and healthcare.
Go here for a copy of the report.