The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) has announced it will represent approximately 50 of the immigrants who were swept up in an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raid of a meatpacking plant in Tennessee earlier this month.
ICE arrested 100 people in “the largest workplace immigration raid since the George W. Bush administration,” leading hundreds of terrified kids to skip Hamblen County schools over the next few days. "There's just fear and sadness written all over their faces," said one teacher.
This was in no way an outlier. In the days following an ICE raid in the New Mexico community of Las Cruces last year, “absences at elementary schools rose by almost a hundred and fifty per cent.” Families have been terrified that they’ll send their kids to school, only for them to come back to an empty home.
SPLC’s action could help keep some of these separated families together, because immigrants facing deportation are more likely to be able to stay when they have legal representation. Immigrants are often left to fend for themselves because, unlike criminal court, immigrants in immigration court aren’t given a lawyer if they cannot afford one.
“The SPLC worked alongside the Tennessee Immigrant and Refugee Rights Coalition (TIRRC) last week,” the group reported, “to gather information from and support family members of those detained, and others affected by the raids.”
“This kind of extreme action by ICE is counterproductive and unconscionable,” said the SPLC’s Michelle Lapointe. “Workplace raids like this one cause a great deal of human suffering by pulling children away from their parents, breaking up families, and splintering communities. The SPLC is preparing to help affected individuals fight for their rights.”