ICE raids poultry plants in six central Mississippi communities, arresting hundreds

Immigration and Customs Enforcement raided seven poultry processing plants in central Mississippi this week, arresting some 680 undocumented workers.  Read coverage here, here, here, here and here.  My first thought when I heard of the raids was, "this is Postville redux," referencing the 2008 raid in Postville, Iowa, in which 400 employees of the Agriprocessors meat packing plant were arrested.  One similarity is that the communities were rural and many of those whose parents were seized were at school when the raids occurred, leaving the children involuntarily abandoned.  The raids are being covered as the largest single-state immigration raids in history.

The locations where the raids occurred were Morton, (population 3,482, two plants raided), Carthage (population 5,075), Canton (population 13,189), Pelahatchie (population 1,461), Walnut Grove (population 1,911) and Bay Springs (population 1,786).

The Washington Post quoted Mike Hurst, U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Mississippi, about the raids. 

To those who use illegal aliens for a competitive advantage or to make a quick buck, we have something to say to you: If we find you have violated federal criminal law, we are coming for you.

Yet this story suggests that the owners of the plants have not suffered consequences for employing undocumented workers.  Some of the plants were owned by Koch Foods, others by Alabama-based Peco Farms.  Subsequent reporting indicates that the employers knew they were hiring undocumented workers.

A Mississippi Today story discusses the state's labor crunch, particularly in the food processing sector, quoting Andy Gipson, the state's agriculture commissioner.

It probably means those plants are going to be shutting down for some period of time until they can fill those positions with legal workers.  I think that it should cause everyone to stop and think about the future of agriculture workforce in this state.

The story, by Anna Wolfe, continues:

The resulting decline in the labor force affects a low-paying sector already struggling to recruit and retain employees to work in some of the most dangerous jobs in the country. One day last month, there were 1,964 in-state job openings on the Mississippi Works job search engine for “meat, poultry and fish cutters and trimmers” — the single most common job opening on the website. 

Mississippi is now the fifth largest poultry-producing state in the nation.

In the wake of the raid, Scott Horsley's NPR story queried what impact the multiple raids would have on the industry, noting, "you can still buy a rotisserie bird at your local supermarket tonight for less than $10."

So far, the government crackdown has had little effect on the wider food processing industry, a dangerous business that is heavily reliant on immigrant labor.

The Trump administration says its crackdown helps discourage illegal immigration. But workers' advocates warn it leaves vulnerable employees open to exploitation and unsafe working conditions.

Horsley quotes Debbie Berkowitz who directs a health and safety program at the National Employment Law Project.

Americans really need to think about where their chicken and where their beef and their pork comes from and really demand that the industry raise labor standards.

A former head of OSHA under the Obama administration, Berkowitz also said:

The industry is totally dependent on finding workers who will not raise issues and who, to a degree, live in fear of the company and they'll just keep their head down and do the work.  For the last 30 years that's been immigrant labor.

One Washington Post story about the recent raids quoted 49-year-old, Elizabeth Iraheta, a U.S. citizen from El Salvador, who works at the poultry plant in Morton.  She had taken home the 12-year-old daughter of an arrested co-worker.

We came here to work, and [the agents] are not looking for criminals.  They’re looking at work sites for people who came to this country to work, who came to fight for their family.

The Washington Post also quoted Marc Perrone, president of the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union, who said the immigrants in the raided plants, represented by the union, now live in fear.

Workers across this country are too scared to stand up for their rights and to report wage theft, dangerous work conditions and other workplace issues.  We urge the President and Congress to work together to fix our country’s broken immigration system, and to honor the due process that these workers and their families deserve.

Interestingly, Tony Horwitz, then writing for the Wall Street Journal, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1994 for reporting out of Morton, Mississippi.  The headline was "9 To Nowhere -- These Six Growth Jobs Are Dull, Dead-End, Sometimes Dangerous: They Show How '90s Trends Can Make Work Grimmer For Unskilled Workers."  Horwitz is more famous for his book Confederates in the Attic and, published just this year, Spying on the South.