Immigrant Hysteria

This is just appalling. (Bolds mine)

Union: DHS Raids Grabbed Legal Workers

Union officials are outraged over a massive immigration sweep yesterday, which sent 1,000 Homeland Security Department agents -- some in riot gear -- to meatpacking plants in six states to round up immigrant workers suspected of using fake identification, but may have picked up legal workers in the process.

"Stormtroopers came in with machine guns, rounded [the workers] into the cafeterias, separated identified citizens from non-citizens, and then they took away all green cards and put non-citizens onto buses," regardless of the immigrants' legal status, Jill Cashen of the United Food and Commercial Workers union (UCFW) told me this morning.

Cashen said that reports from all six states confirmed that legal immigrants were among those taken away, and have not been returned. "We're still trying to find out where the buses went," she said. "Children have been left at church day cares. Nobody knows where these people are."

A thousand stormtroopers with machine guns? Holy geez, can you say "overkill?" And not only are the people seized now without green cards or identification, no one knows where the hell they are. Supposedly they were brought to "detention centers." What detention centers? Where?

There are legal immigrants (and, very possibly, American citizens) that have been rounded up in these raids and have vanished, leaving children behind, and for what? Because they worked in a meat packing plant that may or may not have had illegal immigrants working there?

Recently unsealed court documents show that DHS had identified 170 identity-fraud suspects it wished to apprehend, but that the agency wanted to round up as many as 5,000 other workers because it "further expect[ed] to apprehend persons who are engaged in large-scale identity theft[.]" Union officials say the total number of detained workers may be higher than 5,000. (Update: We've uploaded those court documents to our document collection here.)


Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has not released official tallies from the raids, but have promised to do so at a 10 a.m. press conference in Washington. UFCW is holding a press conference at 9:30 to discuss what they believe to be heavy-handed tactics used by the federal government.

I don't know what this "identity theft" angle is... to me it sounds as if they're trying to throw in that delicious law breaker angle. "Look! It's okay because they're criminals!" And what kind of "identity theft" are we talking about, here? Are we talking about stealing a person's life savings through use of credit card fraud, or are we talking about a fake green card? How is creating a new identity equal to stealing someone else's identity?

"Stormtroopers" is a very effective word here... let's call this what it is: thuggery and terror tactics. Looks like the Department of Homeland Security is taking tips from the people they're supposed to be apprehending.

More in the Washington Post story:

Worker advocates condemned yesterday's raids, which came without warning. They advised detainees to remain silent and contact attorneys.

And I'm sure they're being allowed to do so.

"These actions today by ICE are an affront to decency," said Mark Lauritsen, a spokesman for the United Food and Commercial Workers union, which sought an injunction in court to halt the raids and planned protests around the country. Federal agents essentially stormed plants "in an effort designed to terrorize" workers, he said.

[...]

In an interview, Swift's president and chief executive, Sam Rovit, also criticized the arrests. He said that his firm's practices are similar to those of its competitors and that "everyone in the whole agriculture sector should be worried."

"Swift has played by the rules and relied in good faith on a program explicitly held out by the president of the United States as an effective tool to help employers comply with applicable immigration laws," said Rovit, whose company reported $9.4 billion in sales in 2006. "Swift believes that today's actions by the government . . . raise serious questions as to the government's possible violation of individual workers' civil rights."

Rovit cited promises made by the government to protect employers who voluntarily submit information about workers to a federal program called Basic Pilot, which confirms the authenticity of Social Security numbers against federal databases. Swift has run all new U.S. hires through the program since 1997.

Studies show that Basic Pilot suffers from data errors, has an unacceptably high false-alarm rate and cannot detect fraudulent use of borrowed or stolen Social Security numbers. Congress is hoping to expand the program as part of beefed-up enforcement.

More on Basic Pilot here.

Michelle Malkin, of course, never fails to leap on the immigrant bashing wagon, dismissively labeling concerns over these stormtrooper tactics as "whining."

The New York Times, like many other outlets, runs a large photo of arrested workers' families in tears. Not pictured are any of the hundreds of American victims of illegal alien identity theft whose Social Security numbers were stolen to enable the illegal alien workers to work.

Who will tell their stories?

Well, Michelle... how about you? Why don't you drop the smug sneering and actually prove that this identity theft is a bigger problem than legal immigrants being rounded up, stripped of their identification, and detained who knows where? And while the "hundreds of victims" are not pictured, that horrible, terrible New York Times does say in the very article you link to:

In a new enforcement tactic, federal officials said they planned to bring criminal charges against some of the immigrants accused of using stolen identities. They said the raids were tied to complaints from United States citizens who discovered that their names were being used by Swift plant workers.

“There are several hundred Americans who were victimized,” said Marc Raimondi, a spokesman for the immigration agency, known as I.C.E.

[...]

Illegal immigrants frequently use false Social Security cards or residency documents known as green cards when they apply for jobs. I.C.E. officials said the operation focused on immigrants who had obtained documents with identity information corresponding to that of United States citizens, in some cases by buying them from underground organizations that traffic in false documents.

Yeah, no one's talking about that.

You know what I don't see? I don't see you providing any examples of this so-called "whining." Other than, you know, people wondering what the abandoned children are going to do now. Of course, serious discussion might back you into a corner, so I suppose I shouldn't be surprised.

(Nobody backs cross-post into a corner)