The Chain by Ted Genoways

Author:Ted Genoways
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2014-09-04T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter 11

YOU ARE NOT WELCOME

Shortly after the start of the morning shift on a cold and blustery day in early March 2010, ICE agents from the Omaha Field Office entered the Fremont Beef processing plant, directly across South Platte Avenue from the Hormel plant. Fremont Beef’s President Les Leech was informed that his company was one of a thousand businesses nationwide that had been selected at random and audited against the Federal Trade Commission’s identity theft database. Agents presented him with a list of names, and those employees were summoned to a conference room. Managers did not tell the workers why they were called in, only to cooperate and answer all questions. In the hallway outside, ICE agents—all dressed in civilian clothing, their firearms concealed—divvied up case files. Then they entered the room and began calling names.

David Gran, a special agent with nearly two decades at ICE and the former Immigration and Naturalization Service, took a seat behind the conference table and called the name of Olga Arguelles. A woman rose and came to sit beside him. Gran showed her his agent identification and asked the woman for her true and complete name. “Rosaura Carrillo-Velasquez,” she replied. She told him that she had been born in Guatemala, that she was thirty-two years old, and had been living in a trailer park in Schuyler. She admitted that she did not have immigration papers and had entered the country illegally. Gran informed her that she would be taken into custody on an administrative arrest and transported by van to the detention center in Omaha. He asked if she had any conditions that required the retrieval of medications, or any small children at home who would require caretaking. She did not. Agent Gran then escorted her across the hall to a holding room. Eventually, agents arrested eighteen workers from among Fremont Beef’s dayside crew, roughly half the shift.

To Jerry Hart, the sweep was proof of what he and his fellow petitioners had been saying all along. “To those people who want proof that Fremont has a problem with illegal aliens, here it is. To those that still think that the problem is not that big, think again,” he wrote in an editorial for the local newspaper. “Had the ordinance prohibiting the hiring, renting to or harboring of illegal aliens been in force, these identity thefts might not have happened. It is appalling that citizens have to fight the City of Fremont, have to take the time and effort to circulate petitions to force this city to enforce federal laws. I am enraged that these crimes were committed in Fremont. I am more enraged that this city could have prevented these crimes simply by preventing illegal aliens from being in Fremont in the first place.” Les Leech protested that Fremont Beef, and the Hormel plant directly next door, were already using E-Verify but had been denied access to the FTC database—so they had less information available about their own workforce than ICE did. “This

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