On the two-year anniversary of the immigration raid at a kosher meatpacking plant in Postville, Iowa — one of the largest workplace raids in history — FRONTLINE/World broadcasts an update to the original web story airing May 11, 2010, on PBS. The report takes an affecting look at the human cost of the crackdown on both sides of the border.
By Greg Brosnan, PBS
By the time Willian Toj reached El Rosario, news of his arrival had spread and most of the Guatemalan village had gathered to welcome him back in gloomy silence.
Friends and relatives comforted him as he returned to his shack with his family in tow. Like Toj, others from El Rosario had left the village to find work in the United States. Many were supporting entire families by wiring money home from one small town in the American Midwest. They too would soon be deported, penniless and laden with debt.
On May 12, 2008 U.S. Federal agents arrested nearly 400 undocumented workers in a raid on Agriprocessors Inc., the country’s largest kosher meatpacking plant in Postville, a small farming town in northeastern Iowa.
It was one of the largest single roundups in U.S. immigration history and dramatic images flashed across the nation as workers were led out in chains. The plant’s management was jailed on charges ranging from harboring illegal workers to bank fraud.
Meanwhile, up a winding dirt road in Guatemala, an economic disaster was unfolding.
More than 200 of those detained are thought to be from El Rosario and San Jose Calderas, two villages just a few minutes apart in Guatemala’s poverty stricken western highlands. The money they were sending back to their relatives had mostly sustained both villages. Now these breadwinners were either in jail or under house arrest in Postville, and awaiting deportation.
The raid had severed an economic lifeline linking the heart of the United States to one of the poorest corners of the Western Hemisphere, with an impact that had far-reaching consequences.
But this is not just a story of the hardship felt in rural Guatemala. Postville itself also faced economic collapse after losing much of its population and its main employer in the raid — all in the middle of the worst recession in decades.
The raid was carried out by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), a branch of the Department of Homeland Security.
Many criticized the agency for how it handled the raid and the prosecutions that followed, and questioned whether the government’s detention and deportation policies were effective or humane. ICE responded that “While we understand that our actions have an impact on communities, the responsibility for any disruption lies squarely with the law violators,” adding that it had been a highly successful raid “carried out exactly as planned.”
There was a Congressional review on the conduct of the Postville raid in July 2008.
When the administration changed hands, Homeland Security began reviewing all of its immigration and border security programs and policies, and has said that it would continue targeting criminal aliens and employers that flout the law. On the campaign trail Obama said that immigration sweeps were ineffective and placed all the burdens of a broken system onto immigrant families.
Immigration policy has been shifting more toward workplace enforcement and prosecuting those employing undocumented workers.
A month after the raid, my production partner Jennifer Szymaszek and I were in Postville, interviewing women fitted with immigration tracking anklets and facing deportation, amid the neatly trimmed lawns of small-town Iowa. They opened their doors and put us in touch with the families they had left behind. They were our connection to Guatemala, where we headed next.
We expected to find anxiety in the villages as a result of the raid, but were surprised by the extent of the impact — in home after home we visited, people told us stories of personal tragedy and hardship stemming from the events of May 12.
But it was Toj’s story that showed most acutely the risks and grim realities for illegal immigrants heading to America to work. The 30-year-old father of four had only been working at the Iowa meat plant 15 minutes when authorities arrested him.
He owed $7,000 to smugglers who arranged his transit to the U.S. The chances of him paying the money back were slim and he was already in danger of losing his ramshackle home. He had hoped to send money back to treat his mother’s cancer, but now he was powerless to help her.
has become a nation in fear –and worry –we have become ike the countries that we fled. give us your poor, your minorities,your persecuted, has changed to give us no more!
You can be assured of one thing: you will not see any more of these raids while Obama is in office.
Amazing! Someone put this together wothout blaming Sholom Rubashkin! Imagine! It CAN be done. It actually seems as if the US government is to blame. I don’t think I can handle the pressure….
I’m not a fan of illegal immigration and I believe that illegal is illegal. But please let’s get some perspective here!!! Is it called abuse when someone works the same amount as back home but makes 10 times the wages?
The government is to blame for the immigration they are not the ones to blame others.
I never worked at agri, I only visited the plant as a teenager on a tour and I slipped!! Not only slipped but on a grate thing where my foot actually slipped through the bars and I lost my balance and fell. And you know what? I got right back up and kept going, cuz this is a meat plant not a stroll through botanical gardens and if I wanted to put myself in the situation of going to visit a meat plant I agree to accept the conditions of doing so upon myself.
it afforded me a whole new view on illegal immigrants. like someone mentioned, they’re human beings like me and you and their suffering is unthinkable. I had no idea that Rubashkin was responsible for such a large amount of Parnassah worldwide….
If companies don’t hire illegal aliens, ICE would melt.
If they didn’t like the work, or thought it dangerous or not paid enough, these workers could have left and gone elsewhere. At the trial they say how they were afraid to complain- just leave. Not Rubashkin’s fault.
I worked For Agri the conditions they are saying such as slipping can happen and this happened to me, that is why Agri provides boots and this can happen in any plant, also sometimes the boots can get to your toes and swell this happened to me also this is how boots are. Working at a beef plant is not working at Goldman Sachs.
Rubashkin didnt help his family, of just the jews in postville or just anyone specific, ect ,ect…he helped and supported the whole postville!!!!!!!!!!!!! why is he getting blamed for things he helped the country with?? the prosecutors should be glad he helped these imigrants-rather than leaving them in the streets and without work-which is what they are doing instead..either way, plenty of other places are actually going against the law against child labor and are getting away scot free!!!
What did the US government accomplish here? Yidden came to the heartland of America and the entire town benefitted–local residents had jobs, local business made profit, hungry desperate immigrants found hope and freedom from dire poverty. The US government destroyed not only the Rubahskin family and a great kosher mea…t company, but an entire town, hundreds of American lives and Guatamlan lives have been irrevocably damaged. For what? Ad Mosai!
hashem! your people are suffering! ad masai! we need moshiach now!
That is just rlly rlly sad!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
A heartbreaking look into these decent people’s miserable lives. And according to the prosecution, the illegals complained how awful they were treated at Agri. I don’t believe it. Not just that they were not mistreated but even that witnesses said it. Unless they were given money to testify- highly illegl. And how did Sholom Mordechai HaLevi ben Rivkah impact upon these people? Will no one in Postville step forward and say what I heard here.
Thank you COL for showing this tragic video.
that is so sad. These are poeple, Hashems creations just like us and you see them struggling to earn a living, make a life for themselves. All they want is an honest days work,( not like the lowlife crime tendency, lazy people we have here.) You see the squalor these pple live in and then you hear about some multi billionare that just redid his home with 4 pools, cuz 2 were just not enough and makes you seethe. Its funny I always used to look at the mexicans living in trailors in iowa and wonder why they agreed to… Read more »