A year after Mississippi ICE raids, chicken plants face few penalties as families suffer

Adelaida Gabriel, of Forest, still wearing an ankle bracelet on from the August 2019 ICE raids, goes through the line for a school supply distribution with her son at Trinity Mission Center in Forest, Miss., Saturday, July 11, 2020.
Adelaida Gabriel, of Forest, still wearing an ankle bracelet on from the August 2019 ICE raids, goes through the line for a school supply distribution with her son at Trinity Mission Center in Forest, Miss., Saturday, July 11, 2020.

Hours after immigration agents arrested about 680 Mississippi poultry plant employees in the largest single-state worksite raid in the country’s history, U.S. Attorney Mike Hurst had a message for employers.

“To those who take advantage of illegal aliens, to those who use illegal aliens for a competitive advantage or to make a quick buck, we have something to say to you. If we find that you have violated federal criminal law, we’re coming after you,” Hurst said in a news conference on Aug. 7, 2019.

One year later, attorneys and advocates say there is a grave imbalance. The consequences for workers, their families and communities have been devastating and could last for years. In contrast, the top executives at the chicken processing companies targeted in the raids have yet to face penalties for their role in hiring hundreds of undocumented workers and profiting from their labor.

On Aug. 6, Hurst held a news conference at the federal courthouse in Jackson, Miss., to announce the unsealed indictments of four managers at two of the seven chicken processing plants that federal agents raided one year prior. Hurst did not announce any charges against company owners.

Three weeks prior to the news conference, Hurst sat down for a one-on-one interview to discuss the progress of the investigation and why, at that time, no managers at the chicken plants had been charged with any crimes.

Hurst said the investigation — slightly delayed by COVID-19 — was still ongoing as federal agents were combing through millions of pages of documents and terabytes of data seized from the companies.

“Let me be clear: We don’t have any hesitation to bring charges against anyone," Hurst said in an interview on July 17. "There’s not going to be any inside or outside influence that either pressures us to prosecute or pressures us not to prosecute.”

Still, many have been critical of how federal agents carried out the raids and the continued absence of prosecution for owners of chicken processing companies.

Among them is Cliff Johnson, director of the Roderick and Solange MacArthur Justice Center, who had previously worked as an assistant U.S. attorney during the Clinton administration and helped represent workers in the aftermath of the August raids.

“The government must not ignore the behavior of corporate fat cats while zip-tying and locking up more than 600 workers making less than $15 an hour. Selective prosecution of the poor and vulnerable is repugnant and does not reflect the values of this country as I understand them,” Johnson said in early July.

During a news conference at the Thad Cochran U.S. Courthouse in Jackson, Miss., Thursday, Aug. 6., 2020, U.S. Attorney Mike Hurst announces four indictments of managers, supervisors and human resources personnel at companies where search warrants were executed in during the August 2019 ICE raids.
During a news conference at the Thad Cochran U.S. Courthouse in Jackson, Miss., Thursday, Aug. 6., 2020, U.S. Attorney Mike Hurst announces four indictments of managers, supervisors and human resources personnel at companies where search warrants were executed in during the August 2019 ICE raids.

Hurst has defended the process and maintains that his office's primary goal is to ensure law and order. Plant employees who worked under stolen identities will be treated no differently than anyone else who breaks the law and is brought to justice, he said.

When the evidence shows that the companies knowingly hired undocumented workers, then Hurst said he wouldn't hesitate to prosecute employers in criminal court — which his office has done successfully on eight occasions in the last 14 years.

If the government starts turning a blind eye to undocumented immigrants, "then you’re not going to have any more respect for the law, and pretty soon you’re not going to have order. We’re going to have chaos," Hurst said.

For hundreds of undocumented Mississippians and their families, the chaos began a year ago.

Employers 'never suffer what we have had to suffer'

The morning after the raids, Ermicenda Perez was released at 4 a.m., with an ankle monitor and the promise that ICE would call her to court for immigration hearings.

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She was arrested while working at PH Food, her employer of eight years and one of two poultry plants in the rural town of Morton, where semi trucks filled with live caged chickens regularly roll past downtown.

Perez broke down as she recalled the raids last year.

“It’s hard to talk about,” she whispered, lowering her head and fighting back tears.

LOOK BACK: Manager speaks out at plant that lost most employees in ICE raids

As the single mother of two teenage girls, Perez was among about 300 workers released within 27 hours of the raids on humanitarian grounds. While she’s home with her daughters, she hasn’t been able to work and is relying on donations to help cover bills and feed her family.

“It’s hard not being able to do anything,” Perez said. “To go from working, to sitting at home not being able to do anything. It’s hard to bear because I came here to work. ... I was just trying to support my family.”

'DOUBLE TRAGEDY': First ICE raids, now coronavirus: How immigrant families are fighting to rebuild lives

In March, she pleaded guilty to working under a false social security number, court records show. She made up a false social security number to work at PH Food, she said in court documents.

Adelaida Gabriel (center), of Forest, Miss., and her son Alexis, 14 (right), check in with Monica Soto with El Pueblo, a nonprofit specializing in immigration legal services, before picking up school supplies during a distribution at Trinity Mission Center in Forest, Miss., Saturday, July 11, 2020. Gabriel is still wearing an ankle bracelet since the August 2019 ICE raids at local poultry processing plants but she didn't want to talk about the past year when her son asked her. He said she replied, "It makes her sad."

While hundreds of families face housing instability, food insecurity, criminal prosecution, deportation and family separation, history shows that worksite raids are often mere blips in a company’s operations, according to experts interviewed for this report.

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Across the country, most employers are never criminally prosecuted after an ICE raid, said Jessie Hahn, a labor and employment policy attorney with the National Immigration Law Center. Hahn said criminal cases are typically settled in court with the company agreeing to pay a fine and operate under ICE monitoring for several years. Company managers or owners could face jail time, but it’s rare, she said.

POTENTIAL PENALTIES: Mississippi ICE raids: Employers can face civil, criminal charges

One undocumented worker put it this way, according to immigration attorney Amelia McGowan, who works for the Mississippi Center for Justice and helped represent many who were arrested during the raids: “I had to work in terrible conditions, my husband is in jail, I’ve got an ankle monitor. The people who ran these companies are sitting at home and they’re fine. They will never suffer what we have had to suffer and had to suffer for this company.”

El Pueblo, a nonprofit specializing in immigration legal services, is ready with masks and hand sanitizer for people in line for school supplies during a school supply distribution at Trinity Mission Center in Forest, Miss., a Saturday, July 11, 2020. In August 2019, the Latino community was hard hit by ICE raids at local poultry plants. The event was hosted by El Pueblo in cooperation with Sugartown Riders Motorcycle Club from Kosciusko, Miss.

Some workers deported, others fight to stay with families

The ICE operation and investigation, which began 18 months before the raids and continues to this day, cost taxpayers more than $1.3 million, according to ICE officials in November 2019.

A spokesman for the federal agency has declined to provide an updated cost estimate or confirm the number of deportees. McGowan estimates at least 170 workers have been deported.

The majority of workers remained in ICE detention for weeks or months following arrests. It’s unclear how many were able to bond out and how many are still detained in centers, some of which face allegations of lack of food, inadequate medical care, unsanitary conditions and have been the sites of COVID-19 outbreaks.

EXCLUSIVE: Ankle monitors and informants: How ICE chose 7 Mississippi food plants to raid

According to ICE, a total of 126 people have been charged with committing federal crimes, 73 of whom have been convicted. The workers were accused of illegally re-entering the country after a previous deportation, as well as document fraud from working under someone else's name or social security number. The four managers were charged with harboring undocumented immigrants and making false statements to law enforcement, among other crimes.

In November, Congressman Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., held a hearing on the ICE raids to criticize the federal approach to arresting Latino workers who, according to testimony by the sheriff of Scott County, posed no threat to public safety and were valued members of their communities.

At the congressional hearing, Rep. Al Green, D-Texas, criticized law enforcement's lack of action against company leaders.

"You don't have a perp walk for the employers. They don't get arrested. You don't handcuff them and take them away. ... You knew before you came that laws were being broken, but you picked on the undocumented persons," Green said.

Last year, lines of manacled men and women shuffled into federal courtrooms in Jackson. They conferred in hurried whispers with their attorneys through interpreters. Some faced the judge with stony faces, others wiped away their tears.

THE CHILDREN: Where are Mom and Dad? School on standby to help children in aftermath of ICE raids

Watching the hearings unfold, it struck Federal Public Defender Omodare Jupiter that he had never seen so many young mothers brought into court before. The defendants had fled abuse and poverty in their home countries so they could work in “terrible conditions for very little pay in just in hopes of trying to give their children a better life,” Jupiter said.

“To use the criminal justice system to prosecute people in those types of circumstances, to this day I don’t understand it,” he said. “I don’t understand it at all.”

Critics: Raids part of escalating immigration enforcement

The ICE operation in Mississippi was the largest in a series of escalating worksite raids in recent years, said Wendy Cervantes, director of immigration and immigrant families at the Center for Law and Social Policy, who researched the impacts of raids in Mississippi and other states.

Cervantes and other immigrant advocates have criticized how federal agents executed the raids in Mississippi. She described the raids as “aggressive and militaristic” and Mississippians she interviewed likened it to a terrorist attack, Cervantes said.

“The cruelty with how individuals were treated seemed completely unnecessary. I talked to one mother who didn’t have an opportunity to use the bathroom or clean herself for more than two days. She was suffering from infection,” Cervantes said.

Hahn said the raids were carried out in a way “intentionally to terrorize immigrant workers and their communities while employers have faced minimal consequences.”

A woman, detained and later released in the Wednesday, Aug. 7, 2019, raids by U.S. immigration officials at the Koch Foods plant in Morton, Mississippi, waits on Thursday, Aug. 8, 2019, with others hoping to find out information about her husband who was also taken. According to a translator, the woman heard her husband had been put on a bus headed to Louisiana. There were 680 people detained in seven raids across the state on Wednesday.

Hurst said that’s an “absolute falsehood.”

He said federal agents went to “extraordinary measures to try to make sure that families were minimally disrupted” by checking if children at home had at least one parental caretaker and dropping off workers where they were arrested after release.

“This really was the most compassionate execution of criminal search warrants I’ve ever seen involving immigration violations,” Hurst said. “I know people are going to disagree with that and that’s fine. But we did ... put a lot of thought into making sure that people were treated humanely, and with respect.”

Hurst points to history of prosecuting employers

Hurst disagrees with those who cast families impacted by the raids in a sympathetic light. The same kind of attention isn’t paid to the hundreds of other defendants prosecuted by his office any given year, Hurst said.

“It really bothers me there’s a double standard just because this is a hot political issue, just because people don’t agree necessarily with our immigration laws,” he said.

Focus instead on the U.S. citizens whose identities were stolen and social security benefits were interrupted, Hurst urged. ICE found at least 400 stolen social security numbers related to the ongoing criminal investigation, spokesman Bryan Cox said.

Victims of identity fraud aren’t the only ones that have benefited from the arrests of undocumented immigrants, Hurst said.

“I think all the American citizens who flooded into these companies, applying for jobs that were opened up are better off," he said. "I think we’re all better off because at least in the state of Mississippi, employers want to think twice now about trying to hire illegal aliens."

NOW HIRING: More than 200 applied for chicken plant jobs after Mississippi ICE raids

Hanging on the chainlink fence surrounding Koch Foods in Morton, Mississippi, is a banner advertising "Now hiring." Koch was one of seven locations hit by U.S. Immigration and Customs officials across Mississippi Wednesday, Aug. 7, 2019, detaining 680 people.
Hanging on the chainlink fence surrounding Koch Foods in Morton, Mississippi, is a banner advertising "Now hiring." Koch was one of seven locations hit by U.S. Immigration and Customs officials across Mississippi Wednesday, Aug. 7, 2019, detaining 680 people.

Hurst said his office “probably has prosecuted more employers for criminal immigration violations per capita than any other non-border state in the nation.”

According to a list provided by Hurst, since 2006, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Mississippi has prosecuted a manager or owner in eight cases against employers ranging from small family-owned restaurants to one of the biggest employers in the state.

The largest case was that of electrical transformer plant Howard Industries, which resulted in the arrests of nearly 600 workers in 2008. The company was sentenced to one year probation and required to pay a $2.5 million fine. A human resources manager, Jose Humberto Gonzalez, was sentenced to six months house arrest and ordered to pay a $4,000 fine.

PAST RAIDS: Undocumented workers busted. Employers often not. What we learned from 6 ICE raids in U.S.

Hurst said he has a long-held belief that the government must go after employers who violate federal criminal laws.

“Jobs are a magnet of those who want to come into our country illegally,” Hurst said. “If you do not (prosecute employers), that magnet is only going to grow stronger and individuals are only going to want to come in here in larger droves illegally for those jobs.”

Chicken plants not likely to see long-term impact from raids

The day after the raids, PH Food manager Jun Liang showed a reporter around the silent and near-empty plant, and reflected on the arrests of about 80 of his workers.

"To me, it's not logical that they've done this. What about (the immigrants') families? They have to make a living, they have kids. Right?" Liang said. "They didn't do anything bad, they just want to make money, raise their kids."

Reached by phone nearly a year later, Liang declined to talk, citing advice from his attorney. Other poultry companies didn’t respond to requests for comment.

There’s no doubt the companies suffered a staffing shortage after losing hundreds of workers to the raids. Just five days later, Koch Foods held a job fair in Forest, where a few dozen prospective workers showed up to learn more about how they could be paid $12 an hour to kill and process chickens.

It’s unlikely that chicken plants will be impacted in the longterm, said Angela Stuesse a professor of anthropology at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, who spent years living in Mississippi and researching Latino immigration and the poultry industry.

“We know that this industry is really very sophisticated at figuring out how to locate and tap into the most exploitable work forces,” Stuesse said. “They’ve shown historically they can very quickly replace even very large segments of the workforce that they lose.”

However, new hires don’t necessarily stay employed long term, Johnson said.

“I’ve been told stories about new workers appearing on the job and leaving before the end of the day due to the difficulty of the work and the unpleasant realities of processing thousands of chicken each shift,” Johnson said.

Who replaces the new hires after they leave? Hahn and community advocates have said in some cases, the same people who were arrested one year ago are re-hired into the plants. Though these assertions are anecdotal and have not been independently tracked or confirmed.

“I have heard in Mississippi ... the (undocumented) workers are absolutely going back in — going back in more vulnerable to exploitation than before,” Hahn said.

The same communities devastated by the raids are now among legions of essential workers who continued to march to their shifts even as most of Mississippi’s economy shut down at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Monica Soto of El Pueblo, a nonprofit specializing in immigration legal services, is ready with masks and hand sanitizer for people in line for school supplies during a school supply distribution at Trinity Mission Center in Forest, Miss., Saturday, July 11, 2020. The event was hosted by El Pueblo in cooperation with Sugartown Riders Motorcycle Club from Kosciusko, Miss. In August 2019, the Latino community in Forest was hit hard by ICE raids at local poultry plants. According to El Pueblo's Facebook page, the masks were made by Mujeres Unidas (United Women), in support of poultry factory workers and all essential workers.

Through the raids and now the pandemic, plants continued to churn out millions of chickens to be sent to dinner tables across America.

After learning a nearby chicken plant did not provide adequate personal protective equipment to their workers, a group of women in Forest decided to take matters into their own hands. They took out sewing machines and got to work. They ended up donating close to 1,700 cloth masks to chicken plant workers and a local hospital.

For them, the mission was personal. They were arrested at the same plant last year.

The coronavirus has spread among chicken plant workers and Latinos at high rates. There’s a sad irony, reflected Father Odel Medina, whose parishioners in Carthage were hit hard by the raids, in that chicken plant employees are now considered essential workers by the government.

“You say these people have to go ... because they don’t belong here," Medina said. "When we need them, we tell them they’re essential. That is very immoral."

Contact Alissa Zhu at azhu@gannett.com. Follow @AlissaZhu on Twitter.

Contact Maria Clark on Twitter @mariapclark1 or at mclark@gannett.com.

This article originally appeared on Mississippi Clarion Ledger: Immigrants in Mississippi ICE raids suffer; plants see few penalties