Vol. 71/No. 16      April 23, 2007

The immigration cops arrested 60 sanitation workers employed by Quality Service Integrity (QSI), a cleaning company contracted by Cargill, and two QSI bosses. The sanitation agency employs about 100 people at the plant, where 2,200 workers slaughter 18,000 hogs per day. Cargill is the country’s second largest beef and fourth largest pork producer.

The 60 are mostly from Mexico, with some from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Argentina. They are charged with immigration violations and “identity theft.”

Two cleaning agency managers were also arrested, and charged with aggravated identity theft and with “aiding and abetting aggravated identity theft in connection with the alleged hiring of illegal immigrants.”

Eleven of the workers grabbed by ICE agents were released “for humanitarian reasons”: one needed kidney dialysis and the others have small children at home.

ICE has charged another 14 Beardstown plant workers with identity theft, but has not yet arrested them.

Beardstown, about 200 miles southwest of Chicago, is a river town of 6,000 people, about a third of whom are Spanish-speaking immigrants.

About 10 immigration rights advocates held a candlelight vigil the evening of April 4 outside a detention center in Broadview, Illinois, where some of the arrested workers were being held, reported Reuters.

Also that night, the Chicago-based Illinois Coalition for Immigrants and Refugee Rights sponsored a community meeting in Beardstown to update residents and explain where the arrested workers are being sent, and what the next steps for their defense will be.

WAND-TV in Springfield, Illinois, reported that three of the arrested workers spoke at a news conference the day after the raid. “They didn’t let us go to the bathroom, in some cases they helped us drop our pants to go to the bathroom and in other cases they didn’t let us,” a female worker, who was not identified by name, said through a translator. “The only thing I ask … is that they treat us humanely.”
 
 
Related articles:
‘Legalization now!’
15,000 march in Los Angeles;
Reject bosses’ ‘immigration reform’
Legalize the undocumented now!  
 
 
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