BY MAGGIE PUCCI

MARYDEL, Maryland - Agents of the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) and Maryland state police officers arrested 124 workers on August 28 in raids on two poultry processing plants on Maryland's Eastern Shore. They were charged with living and working in the United States "illegally." Most of the workers are from Mexico, Guatemala, and Haiti and worked at Allen Family Foods Inc. plants in the towns of Cordova and Hurlock.

Seventeen of the 124 people were later released after producing immigration documents. Benedict Ferro, district director of the INS office in Baltimore, told the Washington Post they released 11 Haitians because they were in the process of proving their legal status.

Twenty-nine of those arrested were deported to Mexico on August 30. Under the terms of their expulsion, they will be barred from returning to the United States for the next five years without special permission.

More than 40 INS agents and state cops entered the plants just after the 7 a.m. shift change. They searched the slaughterhouses, checking papers of workers while they stood on poultry processing lines. They also seized the company's personnel records.

These raids are part of a series of INS sweeps on the Eastern Shore of Maryland and parts of Delaware. In 1994 the INS assessed a $93,000 fine against Allen Family Foods after an informant fingered several workers suspected of working without acceptable immigration documents. Last summer, the INS detained 42 workers in a similar raid at a Showell Poultry Inc. processing plant near Ocean City, Maryland.

The chicken processing industry is a major employer in the region, with 14,000 working in 38 processing plants, feed mills, and hatcheries owned by eight companies.

Many of those deported were forced to leave behind children, spouses, and other family members. Juana Cabra, 20, was forced to leave behind her nine-month old daughter - a U.S. citizen -

and her common-law husband, Cesar, who said his wife wanted to take the baby with her back to Mexico but was not allowed to.

Family members who brought clothes and toiletry articles to the detention center for the deported workers were told to come back later for a "special visiting period." But when they returned they were told the workers had been shipped back to Mexico.

Friends and relatives were not able to see the remaining 66 arrested workers until two days after they were picked up by the INS and brought to a detention center in Salisbury, Maryland. The workers were forced to sleep in the detention center's gymnasium. Visitors were only allowed 15-minute conversations over phones in booths with glass partitions.

Marydel is a very small Eastern Shore town on the Maryland- Delaware border where a number of immigrant workers live. The workers are mostly from Mexico and Guatemala and live in crowded conditions in a run-down trailer park. When Militant reporters visited here a few days after the raids, several people expressed anger over the treatment of immigrant workers by the government and employers.

Everyone knew about the raids and many had friends who had been detained or deported. Francisco, 27, who was a teacher in Mexico, has been laid off from a poultry job here for several months. He described his frustration with living and working conditions both in Mexico and in this country. His salary as an elementary school teacher in Mexico was not enough to live on. But, in the United States, he said, "Whether you have papers or not, it doesn't matter, immigrants are still treated like less than human."

Workers we spoke to had not heard about the "March for Justice and Equality for Immigrants" to be held October 12 in Washington, D.C., about an hour and a half drive from Marydel. But many were interested in going once they found out and began discussing how to organize transportation from this area.  
 
 
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