Raids at enterprises: almost 700 illegal immigrants arrested in Mississippi

Federal agents raided several companies throughout the Mississippi. Checks took place on Wednesday, 7 August.

In an agreed manner, more than 600 agents from the Immigration and Customs Service came to the sites with federal warrants, which allowed them to search the premises. As a result, about 680 immigrants who worked without legal documents were detained. After the arrest, they were taken away by bus.

Lindsay Williams, an agency spokesman, said federal agents raided the US Mississippi District Attorney’s office.

The operation was the culmination of a year-long investigation and unfolded just a few hours before President Trump arrived in El Paso.

Recent raids have become the largest since Trump came to power and the largest since December 2006, when more than 1200 people were arrested in several units of the meat processing company.

On Wednesday, three poultry farms owned by Peco Foods in three cities and a fourth owned by Koch Foods in Morton, Mississippi, came under inspection.

Immigrants with Koch Foods were taken by three buses to the base of the National Guard.

One woman, who was a lead worker at Koch Foods, said ICE agents entered the building and ordered employees to line up and go outside.

Other women said they were worried about the 12-year-old girl whose mother was being interrogated.

Photographs and videos show how people wave their hands when buses leave. Others wiped away their tears or held onto a metal gate outside the Morton factory, watching the officers conduct the operation.

Men and women walked with their hands clasped behind their backs. Other detained workers were sitting on the grass or next to large white silos owned by the company.

“We are officially back in the era of mass workplace raids,” said Ali Noorani, executive director of the National Immigration Forum, an advocacy organization.

“The end result will be immigrant workers driven underground, families torn apart and local economies destroyed. American workers and their families are losing their neighbors, co-workers and friends,” he added.

For a long time, poultry farming relied on the work of immigrants who cut, cleaned, deboned and packed chicken in cold, sometimes dangerous conditions.

In their statements, both poultry processing companies said they used E-Verify, a state-owned electronic system designed to confirm that employees are eligible to work in the United States.

Immigrants have traditionally used fake social security numbers and green cards to get a job. But those do not pass E-Verify. Thus, in recent years, more and more immigrants have resorted to using United States legal residents ID cards, dead citizen ID cards, or their American-born Social Security numbers to go through an electronic verification program.

After the NY Times last December reportedthat at Trump's golf resorts undocumented immigrants workTrump Organization has laid off dozens of workers and said it has begun using E-Verify.

Peco Foods, based in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, positions itself on the website as a “fully integrated producer, processor, and seller” of poultry products. According to the website, the 80-year-old company belongs to the family.

In a statement, the company confirmed that three of its Mississippi facilities — in Bay Springs, Canton and Sebastopol — were raided. The company wrote that it followed all local and federal laws and used E-Verify to vet its new hires.

Koch Foods, one of the country's largest poultry processing enterprises with annual sales of more than 3 billion US dollars, as well as factories across the country, employs more than 10 000 people.

Coordinated sweeps on Wednesday recalled large-scale meat factory raids during President George W. Bush’s administration.

In one famous case in Postville, Iowa, in May 2008, agents supported by aviation and ground support raided a meat processing plant called Agriprocessors and arrested about 400 workers.

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