US to pay more than $1 million to plaintiffs of Bean Station slaughterhouse raid lawsuit

Four years after federal agents swarmed a Bean Station slaughterhouse and detained all its Hispanic employees, a milestone settlement of more than $1 million has been reached in a federal case alleging multiple civil rights violations.

In the proposed settlement agreement filed late Wednesday, the U.S. government will pay $475,000 to be split between six individual plaintiffs. An additional $550,000 will be paid into a class settlement fund for approximately 100 Hispanic workers also detained that day. The attorneys for the plaintiffs will be paid $150,000.

The April 2018 raid by the IRS and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement on the Southeastern Provision slaughterhouse in Bean Station upended the lives of nearly 100 workers and drew national attention to East Tennessee's immigrant community. The roundup marked the nation's largest workplace raid in a decade at the time.

A year after the raid, 73 men and women still were waiting to learn whether they face deportation as undocumented immigrants. Most came to the U.S. from Mexico or Guatemala and had lived here at least a decade.

Thirteen former workers gave up the fight and agreed to be removed; others were ordered deported by a judge.

But six of the former workers — including one who was in the U.S. legally — sued the ICE agents who conducted the raid, claiming agents cursed, shoved and punched them during the raid.

"When a raid of this scale happens in a community, it's like a bomb goes off," Stephanie Teatro, executive co-director of the Tennessee Immigrant and Refugee Rights Coalition, said at the time. "These people showed up for work as they did every day, and ICE agents came and ripped them from their families and their community."

What happened that day?

Agents of ICE and the IRS raided the Southeastern Provision meatpacking plant on Helton Road in Bean Station in April 2018 and rounded up 97 undocumented immigrants. At least one worker had legal immigration status but was handcuffed and held against his will for more than two hours, even after he produced his papers, according to the lawsuit.

No agent asked anyone about their immigration status until after handcuffing them, loading them into a van and hauling them to the National Guard armory in nearby Russellville, while families waited for word of their loved ones, according to the lawsuit.

The raid set off a wave of protests statewide and led to failed attempts by state legislators to stiffen penalties for employers who knowingly hire undocumented workers. Most of the workers had been toiling in dirty, dangerous conditions for wages as low as $6 per hour with no overtime pay, a Tennessee Occupational Safety and Health Administration probe found.

Agents did not have warrants for the arrest of any of the workers — only to search the business for tax violations, according to the lawsuit.

"What happened ... was illegal," said Meredith Stewart, a senior attorney with the Southern Poverty Law Center, a civil-rights advocacy group. "These ICE agents engaged in racial profiling and illegal search and seizure in violation of the Fourth and Fifth amendments. This was law enforcement overreach, pure and simple."

Workers arrested in the raid have complained of being manhandled and threatened at gunpoint while white workers were allowed to go free. One agent even posed for mocking selfies with those arrested while another told them they were "going back to your (expletive) country," according to the lawsuit.

What happened to the slaughterhouse owner?

The slaughterhouse owner, James Brantley, pleaded guilty in July 2019 to federal charges of tax evasion, wire fraud and employing unauthorized immigrants.  He was sentenced to 18 months in prison.

Brantley admitted he'd been hiring undocumented workers for 20 years, paying them in cash and encouraging applicants to turn in fake Social Security numbers. At least 10 of the workers rounded up in the April 2018 raid had been deported before.

Brantley's business strategy allowed him to dodge nearly $1.3 million in payroll taxes, according to court records, while paying wages of $6 to $10 per hour. State inspectors fined Brantley more than $41,000 after the raid for forcing workers to toil in dirty, dangerous conditions.

Brantley eventually agreed to shell out $610,000 to his employees for back pay and damages in 2020. He signed a consent order to bring the Labor Department case to an end. It required Southeastern Provision to pay about 150 current and former employees a total of $610,000 over three years.

What are the details of the proposed settlement?

Of the original seven named plaintiffs in the suit, one was dismissed from the case. The proposed settlement calls for $475,000 to be paid to the remaining six plaintiffs; of those, two are named as class representatives and will receive nearly $37,000 each.

The settlement still will need to go before a federal judge for a final approval hearing at least four months out. That hearing has not yet been scheduled.

Those six plaintiffs also will receive some improvement in their immigration status, with their removal proceedings being dismissed or being deferred in some cases.

The Southern Poverty Law Center and the National Immigration Law Center will split the $150,000 in counsel fees. The settlement notes that is a minute portion of the estimated $375,000 in expenses and more than $2 million in hours that could have been billed.

The $550,000 that will go to the class settlement will be distributed to the nearly 100 workers in the class action. Each class member will receive an estimated $5,000 to $6,000, the settlement stated. If there are unclaimed funds in an amount less than $40,000, that money will be awarded to the McNabb Center.

This article originally appeared on Knoxville News Sentinel: Bean Station workers win suit after Grainger County ICE raid in 2018