Latinos in the Midwest

The Impact of an Immigration and Customs Enforcement Raid on Marshalltown, Iowa

n 119 JAN L. FLORA, CLAUDIA PRADO-MEZA, HANNAH LEWIS, CÉSAR P. MONTALVO, and FRANK DUNN The Impact of an Immigration and Customs Enforcement Raid on Marshalltown, Iowa Early on Tuesday, December 12, 2006, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) entered the Swift & Company pork-processing facility in Marshalltown, Iowa.1 Federal agents blocked the exits and began checking identification, sorting workers into groups of citizens, legal residents, and those without legal documentation . Using handcuffs, they arrested 90 people, loaded them into three buses with opaque windows, and drove them to Camp Dodge, in Johnston, Iowa, a National Guard facility. Families, lawyers, and members of clergy struggled to get straightforward information from ICE officials about detainees’ whereabouts. After 72 hours, the arrested workers were deported or transferred to out-of-state federal detention centers. A few were charged with identity theft, and the majority with being in the country illegally. Five other Swift plants around the nation were raided on the same day for a total of 1,282 workers arrested. It was the largest immigration raid on a single company in U.S. history (Hisey 2006). A Latino leader from Marshalltown remembers that day clearly. Past Christmases were really nice for Hispanics. December 12 was a really big day—it was memorable and a sad day because, in the night, we congregated in the church and 120 n Flora, Prado-Meza, Lewis, Montalvo, and Dunn . . . Oh, my God, the pastor couldn’t speak. Everybody was kind. It was like many people died. Everybody was crying and you saw kids crying and saying, “I want my mama.” They were crying and yelling and you said, “O my God, why did they take them during this season? Why didn’t they come in November or some other day? In other years I’m the one who has done the Posadas. That year, nobody wanted to attend it because everyone was so sad and so mad. . . . I don’t think the people had enough money for Christmas. They had the worst Christmas in their lives. . . . We got presents for kids in the church and we tried to distribute them and we also had a lot of rallies. One Des Moines station came and gave kids presents. The kids were so happy, but later said, “I wish my mom or my dad could be here.” Background on Marshalltown, Meatpacking, and Immigration The meatpacking industry in Marshalltown originated with a small locally owned shop, at the site of the present much larger facility. Today the Marshalltown plant is owned by JBS, a Brazilian company that purchased Swift in July 2007. The plant employs 2,400 workers and slaughters 19,000 pigs a day, according to field notes from an August 2008 tour of the Swift & Company plant by coauthors Lewis and Prado. It is the most significant employer in town. Lennox Manufacturing and Fisher Controls are two other major employers. The growth of meatpacking in Marshalltown and associated growth of the Latino population has been repeated in localities throughout Iowa and the Midwest. The Latino population in Iowa, which was 25,500 in 1980, increased nearly fivefold to 126,500 by 2008 (State Data Center of Iowa 2009). This growth is partly related to changes in the meatpacking industry, which moved its core of operations from former urban hubs like Chicago, St. Paul, and Kansas City, to the rural Midwest, and later began recruiting low-wage workers from Mexico, the Texas border, California, and elsewhere. The restructuring of meatpacking in Iowa originated with the founding of Iowa Beef Packers (IBP) in 1960 (Fink 1998; Broadway 1995). IBP set a precedent for a “new breed” of plant that increased mechanization, deskilled labor, and established an industry standard of packaging cuts of meat in boxes instead of shipping carcasses to retail butchers. This concentrated the work of meat fabrication on assembly lines in large plants, rather than in decentralized butcher shops. IBP is also responsible for the innovation of locating operations near feedlots to save money by purchasing livestock directly instead of through stockyards. Rural plants save the owners money on labor, too, because a rural workforce is less likely than an urban one to be The Impact of a Raid n 121 unionized and more likely to accept lower wages. A series of mergers and buyouts in the 1980s consolidated the transition to this new breed of meatpacking, which is now dominated by such firms as Tyson, Cargill, Smithfield, and JBS. Swift...