By Mary Sanchez, Kansas City Star columnist

At last, Washington seems to be getting serious about immigration reform. Democratic leaders in Congress have begun hearings to look into ways to overhaul federal immigration enforcement, and President Barack Obama promised to convene a working group on the matter.

Obama ought to assemble that brain trust quickly and load its members up on a bus to Postville, Iowa.

There they can take in the sights of a small town that’s paying the price for our government’s inhumane and broken immigration policy. If they hurry, they might make it there in time for the church-led vigils marking the May 12 anniversary of the raid of Agriprocessors, the giant slaughterhouse that once was Postville’s largest employer.

Just a year ago, agents of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement descended on the company and arrested nearly 400 undocumented immigrants in what government officials proudly billed as the nation’s largest immigration raid ever. Helicopters and SWAT-like sweeps of agents stormed a meatpacking plant, rounding up the unsuspecting, mostly Guatemalan and Mexican immigrants like the animals the workers processed.

Mothers grabbed cell phones before agents grabbed them, frantically calling Postville church officials, pleading that someone “take care of my children!”

The people were shackled, put on buses and hauled off to be warehoused at a 60-acre site usually known for showing cattle.

After the raid, Agriprocessors limped on, so desperate for labor at one point that it hired workers out of Texas homeless shelters. But the company’s many depredations toward its employees and its long list of environmental misdeeds caught up with it, and last fall it filed for bankruptcy.

A year later, Postville is financially reeling. Because the town numbered only 2,200 residents before the raid, the impact of Agriprocessors’ troubles has been dramatic, virtually wiping out the biggest local employer and a large part of its population as well. Many businesses in town had unsecured debt with the plants’ owners, and so they’ve taken a hit, too.

On their long bus ride west, Obama’s working group might want to peruse the Cliff Notes for Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle,” just to get a feel for what things were like for Agriprocessors’ workers.

The accidental amputations by equipment, the women who were told by bosses to wear tighter pants and lower-cut blouses, the underage workers pulling double shifts.

Postville is still home for many former plant workers who wear GPS monitors on their ankles, so their whereabouts can be tracked. Some are waiting on fall dates with overburdened deportation courts. They aren’t allowed to work, so they are completely dependent on the local church community.

In Postville, humanitarian efforts have been led by Catholic, Lutheran, Presbyterian and Jewish leaders. Maybe the working group could visit with a Catholic nun who was among the many religious leaders who boldly stepped in to clean up the emotional and legal mess created by the raids. She could tell them about the hate mail she received for her trouble.

The Obama team could talk with school officials who needed counselors to reassure students that their parents would not be hauled off like chattel. They could hear from a federal translator who believes he was duped into helping coerce Spanish-speaking immigrants into agreeing to criminal charges they didn’t understand, for offenses such as “aggravated identity theft” and “Social Security fraud.” And then ponder why no one in the official chain of command seemed to find anything wrong with those tactics.

The show of force a year ago was calculated to look bold and decisive, but it turned out to be wild and counterproductive.

Congressional leaders can’t repair the financial and emotional damage Postville’s residents have suffered. But they can admit the mistakes made and earnestly begin the overhaul needed to set the nation’s immigration policy right.

To reach Mary Sanchez, call 816-234-4752 or send e-mail to