News Reports

August 6 - State labor investigators have identified 57 under-age workers who were employed at a kosher meatpacking plant in Postville, Iowa, and have asked the attorney general to bring criminal charges against the company for child labor violations, Dave Neil, the Iowa Labor Commissioner, said on Tuesday.

“The investigation brings to light egregious violations of virtually every aspect of Iowa’s child labor laws,” Mr. Neil said in a statement announcing the results of a seven-month investigation at Agriprocessors, the nation’s largest kosher meat plant.

In a raid in May, 389 illegal immigrant workers were detained there in the largest immigration enforcement operation ever at a single workplace.

Program Has No Immediate Takers 

CHICAGO, Aug. 6 - Federal immigration officials in Chicago and four other cities Tuesday launched a self-deportation program for immigrants who don't have legal status in the U.S. and want to turn themselves in.

The offer had no immediate takers in Chicago, Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials said.

The "Scheduled Departure" program allows immigrants who have been ordered to leave the U.S. but have no criminal history to return to their home countries without first being arrested or detained, though participants may have to wear tracking devices or check in at offices until they go.

DES MOINES, Jul. 31 - The ACLU is raising questions about documents given to defense attorneys and workers who were arrested in an Immigration raid at an Iowa meatpacking plant.

The documents include scripts for judges and defense lawyers as well as waivers of rights and other documents.

The American Civil Liberties Union charged that the packets show a disregard for due process and proof that the U.S. Attorney's office put pressure on workers to quickly plead guilty. The ACLU obtained the documents from public defenders in Iowa.

WASHINGTON, Jul 31 -- President Bush signed a sweeping measure Wednesday that provides $48 billion to combat AIDS and other diseases globally and that also ends a long-standing U.S. ban on foreign visitors and immigrants who are HIV-positive.

The travel ban, approved in 1993, was seen by opponents as an anachronism from a period of hysteria surrounding gays. Its repeal, however, does not remove all U.S. travel impediments.

POSTVILLE, Iowa -- About 1,000 people, including Hispanic immigrants, Catholic clergy members, rabbis and activists, marched through the center of this farm town on Sunday and held a rally at the entrance to a kosher meatpacking plant that was raided in May by immigration authorities.

The march was called to protest working conditions in the plant, owned by Agriprocessors Inc., and to call for Congressional legislation to give legal status to illegal immigrants. The four rabbis, from Minnesota and Wisconsin, attended the march to publicize proposals to revise kosher food certification to include standards of corporate ethics and treatment of workers.

POSTVILLE, Iowa - When federal immigration agents raided the kosher meatpacking plant here in May and rounded up 389 illegal immigrants, they found more than 20 under-age workers, some as young as 13.

Now those young immigrants have begun to tell investigators about their jobs. Some said they worked shifts of 12 hours or more, wielding razor-edged knives and saws to slice freshly killed beef. Some worked through the night, sometimes six nights a week.

CINCINNATI, Jul 23 - U.S. immigration agents raided eight Mexican restaurants in northern Ohio on Wednesday and arrested 58 employees as part of a criminal operation against illegal immigrants, federal authorities said.

All those arrested were citizens of Mexico and working at Casa Fiesta, a chain of Mexican restaurants in Ashland, Fremont, Norwalk, Oberlin, Oregon, Sandusky, Vermillion and Youngstown, Ohio, Immigration and Customs Enforcement said in a statement.

It said the raid was the culmination of more than a yearlong investigation.

JULY 23 - It started when Juana Villegas, an illegal immigrant from Mexico who was nine months pregnant, was pulled over by a police officer in a Nashville suburb for a routine traffic violation.

By the time Mrs. Villegas was released from the county jail six days later, she had gone through labor with a sheriff’s officer standing guard in her hospital room, where one of her feet was cuffed to the bed most of the time. County officers barred her from seeing or speaking with her husband.

LINCOLN, July 22 - State and local laws on illegal immigration must be "careful and measured," or they could drive large employers out of rural Nebraska, the chairman of the Legislature's Judiciary Committee said Monday.

Also on Monday, Attorney General Jon Bruning stood by a 1997 opinion that suggests Fremont would face legal problems in trying to penalize businesses that hire illegal immigrants.

State Sen. Brad Ashford of Omaha, who heads the Judiciary Committee, offered no specific comment about an ordinance being considered by the Fremont City Council. He said each community needs to handle the issue in its own way.

CHICAGO, July 17 - People awaiting trial here at the Cook County Jail, one of the nation’s largest local jails, have endured vastly inadequate medical care, beatings at the hands of jail workers and dilapidated, dangerous building conditions often left unrepaired for months, federal authorities said on Thursday.

Grim images peppered 98 pages of federal findings from a sweeping 17-month investigation about the jail, a West Side complex of buildings, the oldest of which once housed Al Capone, that is now temporary home to about 9,800 men and women.