Yesterday 160 immigration agents arrested 167 workers at the Del Monte plant in Portland, Oregon, charged them all with being illegal aliens, detained most of them and shipped them off to Tacoma, Washington (about 130 miles away) where the government's has an immigration jail.
Del Monte didn't actually employ these people, or so they claim, even though they worked at Del Monte's plant, cutting up and packing Del Monte's product, under the supervision of Del Monte's managers. Instead, these minimum wage workers were "actually" employees of American Staffing Resources.
And guess what? American Staffing Resources is linked Bu$hCo. First Brother Marvin "Savings & Loan Bailout" Bush was on the board of Directors until 2002, and right now, John H. Dalton, former Secretary of the Navy under Clinton, one of Washington's made men, (and also deeply involved in the S&L fiasco by the way), is still on the board.
Below the fold, I explore this a bit further give you personal observations of the wreckage this raid left behind.
This raid happened at the exact same time that Bu$hCo was having lunch with members of Congress about immigration reform. According to local ICE (that's cop talk for Immigration and Customs Enforcement) this was "purely a coincidence." Maybe, but raids involving 160 agents have to be planned at very high levels.
Of course, ICE (you know, the Homeland Security people) couldn't keep this under their hat, and word started leaking out a few days beforehand that something was afoot. (See the Oregonian's excellent coverage here for details.) Your diarist received an e-mail warning on June 11, the day before, that an "industry-wide" raid was coming this week.
The local office of ,Catholic Charities immigration legal services a splendid organization, set up a community meeting at St. Andrews Church the same day to help the family members of those arrested. (This location was necessary as a matter of safety, as ICE policy bars arrest of aliens in churches.) Catholic Charities put out the call for local immigation lawyers to come and give free legal consultation to the people at the church, and your diarist, the Cartoon Peril, went to do his bit.
When I got there, I saw hundreds of people, in many cases families (minus an arrested parent) with small children. All were confused and frightened. The leaders of Catholic Charities legal services were magnificient in guiding the people and reassuring them the best they could. I did my little bit with five other lawyers giving what advice I could to the people who wanted it.
I thought "what the hell kind of government are we running here" that has to effectively make orphans out of all these children? When I read the Oregonian's series, I started to get something of a clue, which I follow up here:
American Staffing Resources, according to its
website is:
American Staffing Resources is one of the largest privately held, full-service commercial staffing firms in the country with more than 250 staffing professionals serving over 3,500 customers through 56 branch operations across the United States.
American Staffing Resources maintains a core focus on temporary, temp-to-hire, direct- placement and vendor-on-premise/managed services, primarily for the light industrial and clerical markets.
Not quite the real picture at Del Monte in Oregon, which according to Willamette Week article published just before the raid, was being run in the good old fashioned screw the workers style. Safety issues and so forth were secondary, as workers were routinely fired for complaining about them. Of course, the fact that they were mostly illegal made this all the easier.
The Oregonian also points out that Del Monte is a giant corporation, which is owned by a "wealth Arab family" (which the Oregonian does not name) and based in the Cayman Islands.
If you're curious to know what it apparently takes to create this wealth, I offer the following personal transcript from the meeting at the church last night. A little girl wandered by, she was perhaps four years old. I'll call her Mary:
Cartoon Peril: Hello.
Mary: Hi.
Cartoon Peril: Where's your mom?
Mary: She's over there. My dad's in a cage.