What Could Have Been: The Postville Raid of 2000?
Colleen Bradford Krantz, Aug. 7
In 2008, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents carried out what was then the United States’ largest workplace raid on record.
It happened in the small northeast Iowa town of Postville. Dozens of agents descended on a kosher meatpacking plant, taking into custody more than 400 people suspected of being undocumented immigrants.
It was to have happened eight years earlier.
I reported this bit of news in my new book, “Train to Nowhere; Inside an Immigrant Death Investigation,” as part of the background of Alonzo Martinez, an immigration supervisor who worked on another immigration case at the heart of my book. He also was to have been part of the Postville raid that was set to go in the fall of 2000.
Instead, someone within the Clinton administration called the Postville raid off even though numerous agents were far into their trip to Iowa from Texas and elsewhere. Hours of research had been invested in data work, and agents were expecting to find an estimated 200 undocumented immigrants working at the kosher plant.
The raid-that-didn’t-happen had been organized out of the Des Moines and Omaha offices of what was then the Immigration and Naturalization Service. They heard from the regional offices in Texas that the raid was off. The call to that office had come from the immigration offices in Washington D.C.
The best information the agents could get was that someone had canceled it for one of two reasons: 1) a friend of the Rubashkins, the family out of New York that ran the kosher plant, Agriprocessors, had asked for or implied that it shouldn’t happen, or 2) someone was concerned about the impact on the kosher meat supply in the United States.
It left me wondering whether Postville, which would see the likely impact doubled when it was finally carried out, came out better or worse off by what sounded like a favor to someone. Would the plant have still gone through bankruptcy if they had lost 200 from the workforce instead of 400? How many fewer residents of several Guatemalan villages, who heard of the good odds of getting a job in Postville, would have gone elsewhere in the United States or remained home, avoiding being taken into custody eight years later?
Who was being helped by this “favor?” Probably not some struggling Central Americans. Probably not small town Iowans trying to keep their local economy on solid ground. Probably some business owners
The Des Moines Register took the initiative to dig into this news tidbit from my book. The article appears today at
It’ll give you something to think about.
This was also posted Sunday on author Colleen Bradford Krantz’s blog.