Full Citizenship Rights for All Immigrants! No Prosecutions! No Deportations!

Down With Feds’ Anti-Immigrant Raids!

Break with the Democrats! For a Class-Struggle Workers Party!

At ten in the morning on May 12, the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (I.C.E.) brought in over 200 federal, county and local police agents in helicopters, buses and vans, swarming the Agriprocessors kosher meatpacking plant in Postville, Iowa. More than 10 percent of Postville’s population was detained in what was the largest immigration raid in U.S. history. I.C.E. rounded up nearly 400 workers, most of them from Guatemala and Mexico. So many people were arrested or fled in fear that half the local school district’s students were absent the next day.

The detained immigrants were packed into a cattle exhibition hall, where for four days groups of detainees shackled ten at a time were hauled before a judge in the Feds’ makeshift courtroom, charged with being in the U.S. illegally and “identity theft” because they had supposedly used fake documents. Facing the prospect of at least two years in prison, most of the arrested pled guilty and were sentenced to five months in prison, to be followed by deportation. One immigrant pleaded to a judge: “I ask that you deport us as soon as possible, that you do us that kindness so we can be together again with our families” (New York Times, 24 May).

This raid was part of a nationwide campaign of anti-immigrant repression by the federal government. In May alone, 905 immigrants were detained in raids at homes and workplaces in California, and 39 were detained in Arizona. And it is not just the Feds: I.C.E. has trained cops from 37 jurisdictions nationwide to round up immigrants. In Arizona’s Maricopa County, Sheriff Joe Arpaio, infamous for his use of chain gangs, organized a 160-man posse that swept through Latino neighborhoods.

Immigrant detention is the fastest growing form of incarceration in the U.S. In 2007, over 276,000 people were deported and more than 280,000 detained, some for nothing more than asking for political asylum. Many are imprisoned in the 18 for-profit hellholes operated by the Corrections Corporation of America. The Iowa raid came after the New York Times (5 May) ran an exposé on deaths in these detention centers, including of immigrants who were denied urgent medical care and left to die without anyone even notifying their relatives. No prosecutions! No deportations! Free the detainees now! (read on)