U.S. officials arrest hundreds of poultry workers

CHICAGO (Reuters) - U.S. immigration agents arrested about 400 workers on Wednesday at five Pilgrim's Pride Corp chicken plants from West Virginia to Texas as part of an ongoing probe into identity theft and other crimes, company officials said.

Government officials put the arrest total at 280, but a spokeswoman for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement said "the numbers are changing and could go higher."

Indictments that led to Wednesday's arrests were handed down by a federal grand jury on April 1 and alleged those arrested used Social Security account numbers of others to gain employment at Pilgrim's Pride, the U.S. Department of Justice said in statement Wednesday afternoon.

If convicted, those charged could receive up to five years in federal prison and fined up to $250,000, it said.

Some victims of the thefts were denied medical and social services and had damage to their credit ratings, the Justice Department said.

So far, no civil or criminal charges have been filed against the company, and it cooperated with the investigation, company and immigration officials said.

The approximately 400 taken into custody were hourly, non-management employees at Pilgrim's Pride processing facilities in Batesville, Arkansas, Chattanooga, Tennessee, Live Oak, Florida, Moorefield, West Virginia, and Mt. Pleasant, Texas.

As part of its cooperation, Pilgrim's Pride said it had notified federal authorities after it discovered an identity theft situation at the Batesville plant.

Pittsburg, Texas-based Pilgrim's Pride, the nation's largest chicken producer, said because it had been working with immigration officials it knew that arrests going to be made on Wednesday.

There are an estimated 12 million illegal immigrants in the United States, mainly from Mexico, with others from Central America, Asia, Europe and Canada.

Finding suitable labor to staff chicken plants has been an ongoing problem for the industry and many of those employed cutting up and packaging the meat are immigrants who are legally in the country, said Bill Roenigk, director of research for the National Chicken Council.

In December 2006, immigration agents arrested hundreds of employees at meat plants owned by Swift & Co in one of the country's biggest raids regarding identity theft. The company is now JBS-Swift and owned by the Brazilian meat company JBS

S.A.

(Editing by Christian Wiessner)

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