By mary sanchez

Pray that you never need an advocate as much as those caught up in the Agriprocessors immigration raid in Postville, Iowa.

A lot of people are feeling soiled by the raid, which officials at U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) initially bragged was the largest such operation in immigration history. Nearly 400 people were scooped up and shuffled in shackles to a fairground designed to hold cattle.

Now, three months after the raid at the kosher meatpacking plant, more details are emerging -- and attorneys, clergy, members of Congress and labor officials are decrying a major miscarriage of justice.

Translators and even local townspeople say they were duped into participating in a federal government plan to railroad exploited workers. And labor investigators complain that ICE overran an ongoing investigation into horrible working conditions in the Agriprocessors plant.

And for what? So that ICE could make its numbers look good. So that it could claim it had deported more "criminals."

At the heart of the Postville operation was a "hurry up and charge ’em" process that made it difficult, if not impossible, for attorneys to meet with the arrestees.

Immigration officials, it seems, were bent on charging the immigrants with higher crimes than simply working illegally. They wanted crimes punishable by mandatory jail time. The hook was some immigrants’ use of Social Security numbers not issued to them. That’s document fraud and identity theft, which everyone can agree is a bad thing.

But it’s not clear how many -- if any -- of the immigrants were knowingly using a real person’s identity to work at Agriprocessors. For the crime to rise to aggravated identity theft, which is what ICE officials were intent on charging the workers with, the suspects had to knowingly defraud those whose Social Security numbers they were using.

Many of the workers were Guatemalan Mayans, indigenous people who are not literate in Spanish, much less English. They were brought in groups of 10 before judges who held court in trailers. ICE was in a hurry because within 72 hours, statutes say, the suspects either had to be charged with a crime or released for deportation.

Observers and translators say many of the people didn’t even know what a Social Security card was. They reportedly had shown up for work and had their paperwork filled out by others employed by Agriprocessors. Almost 100 fraudulent green cards were found in the company’s human resources department.

The immigrants were offered a plea deal: Either take five months in jail and deportation, or serve as much as two years in jail if convicted. Guess what the workers chose?

Most of them just wanted to be reunited as quickly as possible with their families in Guatemala. So they took the plea. Now, nearly 300 sit in jails throughout the nation -- yes, at taxpayer expense -- serving their time and awaiting deportation.

Meanwhile, the Iowa labor investigation of Agriprocessors is getting back on track. State officials are attempting to document countless stories of chemical burns, broken bones, and amputations when body parts were caught in the machines of the plant, among other injuries. That’s in addition to accusations of child labor (one teen told of working 17-hour shifts) and of female workers being told their jobs could become easier in exchange for sexual favors.

But many of their witnesses have already been deported or have simply fled. So much for holding employers responsible for breaking the law.

Postville, Iowa. The name conjures Norman Rockwell civility, small-town values -- the moral fiber of America. Instead, it harbored a throwback to the hellish abattoirs chronicled by Upton Sinclair a century ago. And then it became, in the words of one federally certified translator brought in to help interpret for the hapless workers, "a judicial assembly line where the meat packers were mass processed."

(c)2008, The Kansas City Star

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