Postville raid facts for kids
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| Date | May 12, 2008 |
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| Venue | Agriprocessors, Inc. kosher slaughterhouse and meat packing plant |
| Location | Postville, Iowa |
| Type | Raid |
| Participants | U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement |
| Arrests | 398 |
| Convicted | 300 |
| Charges | Conspiracy to harbor illegal immigrants, aggravated identity theft, and child labor law violations |
| Sentence | Between 60 days and 41 months |
The Postville raid was a raid at the Agriprocessors, Inc. kosher slaughterhouse and meat packing plant in Postville, Iowa, on May 12, 2008, executed by the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) division of the Department of Homeland Security together with other agencies.
On that day, ICE deployed 900 agents and arrested 398 employees, 98% of whom were Latino. According to reports at the time, "agents used presumed race/ethnicity to identify suspected undocumented immigrants, allegedly handcuffing all employees assumed to be Latino until their immigration status was verified". Men were detained at the National Cattle Congress in Waterloo, Iowa, women were detained in county jails, and detainees were chained together and arraigned in groups of 10 for felony charges of aggravated identity theft, document fraud, use of stolen Social Security numbers, and related offenses.
Some 300 were convicted on the document fraud charges within four days as part of a plea bargain. In total 297 of them served a five-month prison sentence before being deported. The Supreme Court later ruled that undocumented workers cannot be charged with aggravated identity theft unless it was established that they knew that they had used an authentic Social Security number, prompting calls by some immigration attorneys and members of Congress to dismiss previous convictions against immigrants for aggravated identity theft and consider dismissing the guilty pleas sought against the Postville workers.
Several employees and lower and middle level managers were convicted on charges of conspiracy to harbor illegal immigrants, aggravated identity theft, and child labor law violations, among others, serving prison sentences between 60 days and 41 months. Neither the owner, Aaron Rubashkin, nor his sons Sholom and Heshy, who were in charge of the management of Agriprocessors, were convicted of immigration or labor law violations, although both Aaron and son Sholom were initially charged with 9,311 counts of child labor law violation, for which they could have faced over 700 years in prison if found guilty. All charges against Aaron were dropped right before the trial was scheduled to begin, and after a five-week trial Sholom was acquitted on all charges of violating child labor laws. His case was later completely expunged from Iowa state records. Financial irregularities brought to light by the raid and subsequent investigations led to a conviction of the plant's chief executive Sholom on bank fraud and related charges.
He was sentenced to 27 years in prison, but this led to an outcry by a bipartisan group of more than 100 former high-ranking and distinguished Department of Justice (DOJ) officials, prosecutors, judges, and legal scholars who expressed concern with the evidentiary proceedings in his case as well as with the severity of his sentence. On December 20, 2017, then-President Donald Trump commuted his sentence to time served, and his trial on immigration charges was canceled.
In film
The consequences of the raid for undocumented workers and their families, many of whom were from Guatemala and Mexico, were documented in AbUSed: the Postville Raid, a 2011 documentary film by Guatemalan film director Luis Argueta.
See also
In Spanish: La redada de Postville para niños
