What Happened at Koch Foods

Koch Foods processes chickens for fast food restaurants across the Southeast. Koch Foods was being investigated for federal crimes including encouraging, inducing or harboring illegal aliens. Federal agents pulled 161 suspected illegal aliens from Koch Foods Tuesday, but did not find all of them. US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents seized documents and other materials at the Koch Foods plant in southwest Ohio and at Koch Foods Inc.

Immigration agents raided a poultry packaging facility in Fairfield, Ohio, yesterday morning and arrested scores of illegal immigrants at the Koch Foods. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) was established in March 2003 as the largest investigative arm of the Department of Homeland Security. Immigration spokesman Richard Rocha said the operation was the end result of a two-year investigation. Immigration agents surrounded the chicken processing plant where Danny Alvarez-Reyes works, he did the only thing he could think of: he gave his coat to a scared friend determined to hide in the walk-in freezer. The attorney for Koch Foods has issued a statement regarding the immigration actions at the Fairfield plant on Tuesday. The statement says that the company is fully cooperating with Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, and furthermore that the company is complying with all immigration laws and looking to resolve the current matter quickly.

Moskowitz said employees faced a range of charges including illegal reentry to the United States, identity theft, document fraud, social security fraud and forgery. The raid was the latest targeting businesses employing illegal workers. "Unlawful employment is one of the key magnets drawing illegal aliens across our borders," said Julie L. They knew those were illegal criminal aliens they were hiring. There are 12-20 million illegal aliens presently in the country. Lawsuits and Department of Labor enforcement actions aimed at illegal pay practices in the meat and poultry processing industries are quite common.

The 700 poultry workers here, most of them Mexicans, might seem ripe for organizing, but labor's efforts at resurgence face daunting obstacles. That pace means that many workers make 18,000 cuts during their eight-hour shifts as they prepare breasts, wings, tenders and cutlets for restaurants and consumers. Smith said she and the two other workers in her unit often could not go to the bathroom for hours at a time because the pace was so demanding and there was nobody to replace them. Back in Morristown, the Koch poultry workers are so united behind a union and have generated so much community support that they persuaded Koch to pledge not to mount an anti-union campaign. 'While rumors flew among Hispanics that some had been hurt or even frozen to death during the raid, ICE spokesman Greg Palmore said there were no significant injuries and that workers who hid in freezers had quickly been found. Palmore said everything possible had been done to ensure children would not be left unattended if parents had been arrested, and ICE officials said some workers may be released for humanitarian reasons if caregivers could not be found. Interviews with the owner of the plant that is now complaining that there are no workers to do the jobs (left unsaid, at the wages he is willing to pay).

Butler County Sheriff Richard Jones has been one of the country's most outspoken opponents of illegal immigrants and employers who use them, and has lobbied Washington for better enforcement and deportation of undocumented workers. "THESE RAIDS ARE AN OUTRAGE," advocates for immigrants said the raid was an arbitrary and unfair action that hurts immigrant families and does nothing to solve fundamental flaws in American immigration law. "Deportation is a revolving door," said Elias Bermudez, the founder of Immigrants Without Borders, an advocacy group which works with thousands of illegal immigrants in the border state of Arizona. Some town leaders say such immigrants account for most of those seeking work. Nearly 2 million jobs that are important to [California] are held by illegal immigrants. All but four of the 29 illegal immigrants arrested last week in a raid targeting workers at the world’s largest hog processing plant had stolen the identities of American citizens, federal prosecutors said Tuesday as they announced identity theft charges. Twenty of the 161 suspected illegal immigrants that federal agents detained after raiding a poultry packaging plant in Fairfield are in jail today on charges of falsifying identities.

Koch Foods will face federal charges for crimes of inducing, encouraging and harboring illegal aliens, among others. Koch Foods said it was cooperating with Federal agents in the investigation. The actions come after a two-year ICE investigation yielding evidence suggesting Koch Foods may have knowingly hired illegal workers at its poultry processing and packaging plant, according to an ICE statement.

Will Giuliani Deport Illegal Immigrants?

Clearly a political move, but also frustrated with the way illegal immigrants are taking over certain sectors of the country, former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani shot back at former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney who claimed a week ago that Giuliani was weak on illegal aliens.

Presidential hopefuls have more than a plateful with the economy, the war in Iraq, and a country overrun by illegal immigrants seeking Green Cards. But what can illegal aliens expect?

Should a Republican win, an illegal immigrant can expect a hard road ahead. Giuliani told an audience in Aiken, South Carolina, Tuesday morning, "We can end illegal immigration. I promise you, we can end illegal immigration." So how's he going to do that?

Giuliani said he's going to secure the borders and identify every non citizen in the USA. It's one of his "12 commitments" to the American people. He knows there are now more than 12 million illegal aliens walking within the borders.

Giuliani said if he'll catch the illegal immigrants by deporting them when they commit a felony. But that's not all. Giulini claims he will build a high-tech invisible and a physical fence. He'll deploy a bigger and better-trained border patrol. There will be a tamperproof ID card for ALL foreign workers, and students, and a single national database to track non citizens.

BorderStat is the new system Giuliani proposes based on his CompStat program from New York City. BorderStat, like CompStat should reduce illegal aliens as it did crime in New York. So, BorderStat will weigh which things are working in the system, and which are not.

With the election in 2008, the illegal immigration issue is one of the Republican voter hot-buttons. They opposed the Immigration Bill that President Bush and Senator John McCain, R. Ariz., so vigorously supported. Because of this, McCain is having a tough run on the campaign trail. Not good - but we know how Republicans feel.

Now, with Giuliani's immigration policy coming a week after Romney told the country that New York City was "at the top of the list" of cities that offer services like public schools and hospitals to illegal immigrants. Romney said that New York City did little to have a police force enforce current Immigration Laws.

But wasn't it in 1996, when he was mayor, that Giuliani sued the federal government for provisions in the federal immigration laws that would encourage government employees to turn in illegal aliens seeking benefits from New York City? Now, he's changed his position.

Sanctuary Cities they are called; those cities that provide public services for illegal immigrants. While Romney was governor of Massachusetts, three cities declared that they were Sanctuary Cities. So you see, there is inconsistency on both sides.

Deportation Separates Families

The number is astounding, but not impossible to fathom, given the degree most aliens want documentation to stay in America. Around 1.6 million children and spouses, according to Human Rights Watch, have been separated from their family. Why?

The 1996 immigration laws are to blame. Not many outside consider the loss of homes, businesses, and finances when deportation occurs. Alison Parker, a senior researcher with Human Rights Watch says it has been devastating to American families.

Congress toughened the law back then making "aggravated felonies" part of the list of reason for deportation. Why this is a bad thing? Because families should stay together. But instead, only the offender is deported.

The law in 1996 was made retroactive, meaning even those who had served their time in jail were caught for deportation. They did not consider hearings in which judges could consider an immigrant's family. Nor did they think of their community standing, military service or what might happen once they got back to their native country.

And since then, 672,593 immigrants have been deported for crimes - this according to the Citizenship and Immigration Services, now part of the Homeland Security Department. What the Human Rights Watch did was combine numbers from CIS and Census data from foreign households here and came up with their statistics on how many have been left behind.

ICE - Immigration and Customs Enforcement tells us that 64.4 percent of immigrants that were sent back in 2005 were convicts - of non-violent crimes. Around 20.9 percent were sent home for crimes that were violent.

Parker submits that it is hard to tell a child that his father has been sent thousands of miles away because he was caught forging a check. The answer might be to deport the whole family.

Texas Representative Lamar Smith, the ranking Republican on the House Judiciary Committee, has said that immigrants who break the law forfeit their right to be in the U.S. And Steve Camorata may have the solution - a research director at the Center for Immigration Studies - Steve says the family CAN leave with the deported person. He claims that children constantly bear the consequences of their parents' poor decisions.

But some have tried to leave to no avail.

Wayne Smith and Hugo Armendariz, immigrants, have filed a complaint against the U.S. government because they were ordered deported. The filing, through the Inter-American Commission for Human Rights, has a hearing this Friday.

The Human Rights Watch report can be found at http://hrw.org/reports/2007/us0707/

Can I Be Deported?

Immigration officers come to a home at a time when they suspect the illegal alien will be there. For example, a case in Miami of a Colombian illegal found officers knocking at her door at 6 AM. Yes, they can come at any hour - if you have a deportation order, or are suspected of some crime. In America, you will NOT find people stopping you or knocking on your door without cause.

The Colombian woman had deportation papers already filed against her. The Immigration officers were simply doing their job to detain her and send her back to Colombia. However, she never opened the door, and immediately went into hiding with her husband and two children. There are more than 500,000 illegals hiding who are in the deportation process. So why couldn't the officers simply bust in and catch her?

Again, they can't, but even so it is difficult keeping up with so many illegals set for deportation. Since the Senate immigration bill did not go through - the bill that would have given assistance to millions of undocumented immigrants to get their Green Cards, and given a shot in the arm for enforcement - some $4.4 billion was on the slate, immigration rights advocates claim raids are going to skyrocket.

Homeland Security and police will head this up, they say, but the numbers show that there is probably little risk of getting deported. There were 17,817 deported in 2006. There are 632,190 fugitives of the deportation system identified. This doesn't take into account the thousands of others that are deported by immigration judges. This is simply the number for those already tagged as deportable. Which means - it would take over 20 years at the current enforcement for the 600 thousand to be sent home.

The proceedings take too long, say some, and there aren't enough officers to work the task. The way it is wired today, it's impossible. And some have criminal records here. So deporting them would be difficult.

So can you be deported? The answer is YES, if you are here illegally. And reentry into the United States is next to impossible via any normal gateway where a passport and visa are required.

The Miami office is getting better at deporting. Over 35,000 cases have been resolved recently. With the new Fugitive Operations Support Center in Burlington, Vermont, more leads with better ways to track them have come in. Since February in Miami-Dade alone, 53 teams have been assigned to track down deportation-ordered fugitives and there are more teams to come.