Day One : The Day of the Raid

On the afternoon of Monday, May 12, my sister received an email from the Peace and Justice Center of the Cedar Valley, with information of an immigration raid that had taken place earlier that morning in Postville, Iowa, just about an hour and a half drive from her home in Waterloo. The raid took place at Agriprocessors, Inc., the nation’s largest kosher meat-packing plant. It stated that around 300 undocumented workers had been detained, and that they were all to be transferred to the National Cattle Congress (NCC) in Waterloo, and that Catholic Charities was looking for assistance from bilingual Spanish speakers, to assist with their initial consultation with immigration lawyers. So, my brother-in-law’s sister (who also speaks Spanish) and I (we both just happened to be in town visiting our siblings) decided to give them a call to see if we could be of any assistance. We were told to go to the NCC in the morning, and that we would meet up with the lawyers there, to help with the initial interviews, and filling out paperwork, etc.

Our Monday afternoon was spent watching news reports, and reading internet news articles, trying to figure out exactly what had taken place. Turns out that there were arrest warrants for 697 undocumented workers of the plant, and that only 390 of them (40% of employees of the plant - 314 men and 76 women) had been detained, leaving another 300 workers unaccounted for. The video we saw on the evening news was quite disturbing – in all honesty, the footage we saw looked like it had been shot at a concentration camp. Lines of hundreds of people, handcuffed, shackled, and chained together, marching together, heads hanging low in despair. It was quite the scene.

Monday afternoon, all of the detainees were transferred to the NCC, where Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) had set up a temporary detention center, where these people were to be kept for at least four days. Monday night, a prayer vigil was scheduled to take place outside the gates of the NCC, so the two of us went, along with my sister and one of her friends. In the end, there was no candlelight vigil that actually took place – it was more of a protest than anything. However, we were standing outside the gates when the large buses from Homeland Security pulled in, bringing in who knows how many more detainees. It really was quite an emotional time – tears were shed by some of those present, others shouting and waving signs, showing their support for those being detained.

While all of this is going on in Waterloo, family members and friends back in Postville, of those taken away were scrambling in fear and confusion. Many went into hiding, in fear of being taken themselves. Many of the members of this small community of 2000 something residents, would not come out of their homes. The ones that did would only go as far as St. Bridget’s Catholic Church, where camp was being set up, to help take care of the basic needs of these people, and to provide a safe haven for them.

Families have been torn apart - children left without their parents. Wives without their husbands and husbands swiped away from their wives. Brothers, sisters and friends separated. Families will be without income this week and for weeks to come...no way to put food on the table. No way to pay for rent and utilities. If you're able to help in any way (no matter what your take is on immigration - there are hundreds of families in dire need of help), monetary donations are badly needed, and are being accepted at those programs I mentioned on my first post of the raid.