By the Rivers of Babylon: Blueprint for a Church in Exile

An Exilic Landscape

1 An Exilic Landscape Postville, Iowa To be a diaspora church means that there is no longer any discernible difference between missiology and ecclesiology. –Daniel L. Smith-Christopher1 In June 2010, on the way home from a denominational meeting in Minneapolis, I decided to make a short detour to Postville, Iowa, about an hour or so north of our home in Dubuque. I wanted a firsthand look at this otherwise unremarkable town that had become the epicenter of a national debate on the issue of illegal immigration. Almost two years before, on 12 May 2008, Immigration, Control, and Enforcement (ICE) agents descended on Agriprocessors, Inc., in Postville, which at one time served as the nation’s largest supplier of kosher beef. On that day, while black helicopters circled above, ICE used several dozen agents from sixteen local, state, and federal agencies to arrest nearly four hundred undocumented workers, sending the small town into a tailspin from which it has yet to recover.2 The dynamics leading up to this raid go back at least as far as 1987, when Aaron Rubashkin and about two hundred Hasidic Jews moved to Postville from New York, reopening a defunct meatpacking plant with the help of cheap labor imported from all over the globe. Agriprocessors 1. Daniel L. Smith-Christopher, A BIBLICAL THEOLOGY OF EXILE (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2002), 202. 2. Nigel Duara, William Petroski, and Grant Schulte, “Claims of Fraud Lead to Largest Raid in State History,” Des Moines Register, 12 May 2008, http://www.desmoinesregister.com/print/article/20080512/ NEWS/80512012/Claims-ID-fraud-lead-largest-raid-state-history. 13 and its workers helped turn Postville into a veritable Midwestern boomtown, effectively reversing decades-long trends of decline. But like other “boom” economies, this one was also deeply flawed, as later court proceedings would demonstrate.3 At the same time, according to the Des Moines Register, the arrival of Agriprocessors turned this community of just over two thousand people into one of Iowa’s most diverse cities.4 Diversity wasn’t the only thing Agriprocessors brought to Postville: it also thrust Postville into the eye of the national debate about illegal immigration, a debate that reached a dramatic climax with the ICE raid of 2008. The U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Iowa, Matt M. Dumeroth, declared the 2008 raid “the largest operation of its type ever in Iowa.”5 The Postville school superintendent, David Strudthoff, likened the arrest of more than 10 percent of the town’s population of 2,300 to a “natural disaster—only this one [was] manmade.”6 Others, like Antonio Escobedo and his wife, went into hiding, taking refuge inside St. Bridget’s Catholic Church of Postville along with hundreds of other Guatemalan and Mexican families hoping to avoid arrest.7 On the day of the arrests, then mayor Robert Penrod repeated ICE assurances that “kids [of undocumented workers] were going to be taken care of.” Penrod believed that most people in town understood the economic value of Agriprocessors. But, he added, “there’s people who hate the Hispanics, and there’s people who don’t like the Jews and would like to run them out of town.”8 3. Workers alleged a variety of abuses at the plant. At the time of the raid, the Department of Labor was conducting an investigation of labor abuses at the plant. Most of the witnesses for that investigation were arrested and many deported, thus subordinating human rights to legal status (see note note 12 below). One of these abuses included a charge that a supervisor blindfolded a Guatemalan worker with duct tape and hit him with a meat hook. Duara, Petroski, and Schulte, “Claims of Fraud.” See for other examples of exploitation, Julia Preston, “Life Sentence Is Debated for Meat Plant Ex-Chief,” New York Times, 28 April 2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/29/us/29postville.html?_r=0. A follow-up story by Liz Goodwin notes that fifty-seven minors were employed there, one as young as thirteen years of age and “many . . . said they had been physically or sexually abused at the plant.” See Liz Goodwin, “Years after Immigration Raid, Iowa Town Feels Poorer and Less Stable,” Lookout, 7 December 2011, http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/lookout/years-immigration-raid-iowa-town-feels-poorerless -133035414.html. 4. Duara, Petroski, and Schulte, “Claims of ID Fraud.” 5. Ibid. 6. Spencer S. Hsu, “Immigration Raid Jars a Small Town,” Washington Post, 18 May 2008, http...