ICE is an outfit bearing ever greater resemblance to Hitler’s Gestapo, and New York gubernatorial candidate Cynthia Nixon, the Ohio Student Association and other activist groups have called for the agency’s outright abolishment.
“[ICE] has become an unaccountable paramilitary force whose main goal seems to be executing violent attacks upon the most vulnerable members of our society,” the Ohio Student Association said in its release condemning the recent Ohio raids.
Two of ICE’s largest crackdowns at U.S. job sites in nearly a decade occurred within a 90-minute drive of Cleveland: at Corso’s Garden Center in Sandusky earlier this month, and at the Fresh Mark meatpacking location in Salem, Ohio — between Canton and Youngstown — last week.
The Salem raid, which resulted in the arrest of 146 undocumented workers, primarily from Guatemala, surpassed the roughly 120 arrests made in Sandusky.
It is as of yet unknown how many of the most recent arrests will result in deportations, but the workers were bused to a Brooklyn Heights facility for processing late Tuesday night and will likely be held in detention facilities throughout Ohio and Michigan, including the Seneca and Geauga County jails, and the Calhoun County Jail in Michigan.
In a news release, ICE said that some of those arrested in the Salem raid had been released for “humanitarian reasons,” likely because of dependent family members or serious health conditions of their own. The number of those released has not been specified. (In Sandusky, for comparison, 13 of the 119 total arrested workers were released.)
Salem’s First Christian Church, which has been raising money for the affected families, told Scene that to their knowledge, all 50-60 children with arrested parents were now safe and secure.
“All of the kids have been placed into safe and caring hands until they can be reunited with their families,” posted FCC’s Lead Pastor, Leonard Moore, to Facebook. “Please pray that this can happen as soon as possible.”
But much like Fresh Mark itself, local faith groups and volunteer organizations — to say nothing of Columbiana County’s Department of Job and Family Services — had no time to make provisions for emergency childcare. The raid was executed by ICE agents with no prior notice and was reportedly the culmination of a yearlong investigation. It was a similar story in Sandusky, where even the local police were unaware of the ICE raid until it occurred.
Fresh Mark is a family-owned company, based in Massillon, with more than 1,000 employees across its multiple locations. It provides bacon, sausage, hot dogs and lunch meats — including the Sugardale brand locally — to grocery stores, delis and stadiums across the country.
Fresh Mark claims to have been the first Ohio company to participate in ICE’s voluntary IMAGE program, (ICE Mutual Agreement between Government and Employers). Under that program, Fresh Mark participates in the Department of Homeland Security’s e-verify program and submits to regular inspections of tax forms, provisions designed to ensure a “lawful workforce.”
The undocumented workers are presumed to have been using fraudulent identification, including the social security numbers of dead people.
One sinister side effect of the workplace raids, according to Christine Owens, the Executive Director of the National Employment Law Project, is that workers will now be too intimidated to speak up about hazardous workplace conditions.
Owens said this is acutely true in dangerous industries like meatpacking, and at companies like Fresh Mark, where an employee was killed on the job and two suffered “serious amputations” in the past six months alone.
“Rather than hold employers accountable for violating basic worker protections simply to inflate profits and undercut competitors,” Owens said in a statement, “this administration has chosen to target and arrest the workers. This strategy can only drive other immigrant workers subjected to substandard conditions further into the shadows and further deteriorate working conditions across already low-wage industries across this country.”
The Fresh Mark conditions aren’t terribly unlike Corso’s Garden Center, where one worker told Scene that she had worked 13-hour days six or seven days per week during peak times for three seasons.
At a Norwalk trailer park, where families of those arrested in the Sandusky raid now live in constant terror and grief, another tragedy struck in the days following the raid.
Nurses from a small Tiffin-based medical company volunteered to provide basic medical care for the families in the trailer park. They first examined Carmen, a woman whose 20-year-old daughter, Fabiola, was being detained in Michigan after the raid.
Just one day earlier, Carmen’s son Silvano died suddenly. Carmen told Scene that her son became listless and pale after learning his sister was detained. He stopped eating. The two siblings were extremely close; Silvano often wouldn’t start a meal until Fabiola was at the table, Carmen said.
It’s not clear if Silvano, who was 24 years old, had a medical condition that contributed to his death. Carmen said she had taken him to the hospital in Norwalk months before, but doctors didn’t find anything wrong with him.
Now Carmen faces a terrible choice: either return to Mexico with her son’s remains, or stay close to her daughter. But like all undocumented mothers in the United States in this grim new era, Carmen understands a harsh reality: It is she, not the Statue of Liberty, who is a mother of exiles, and she is no longer welcome here.
This article appears in Jun 20-26, 2018.
fascists never like their fascism thrown in their face
Sam,
I know of at least two Ohio communities that have established crisis management protocols if ICE is spotted.
Jeff Hess
Bend over Commy Alert and take it up your ass like a good fascist. What you fail to realize is that honest Americans are detained unlawfully in these raids, and that your fucking trump humping, dogshit for brains, make fun of the disabled degenerate friends won’t take the jobs because they are too fucking lazy and they want Union wages. Fuck You hypocrite.
WINGNUT BUSTER, it’s obvious you are user Grizz65 with another login. The “wingnut” gave you away, you triggered old commy.
All of the local anarchist/communist/loser groups have posted this article to their Facebook pages (thats real anarchy there). They are salivating over the opportunity to spread more dischord for the sake of a communist dystopian future and will use the fake news driven protests to do it.
Keep all of those wet backs out of our state
So, Mb, you’re fine with going hungry and having Ohio farmers go bankrupt because they have no one to harvest their crops and slaughter their livestock?
Jeff Hess
Have Coffee Will Write
It’s interesting to see a left-leaning publication like Scene publishing content that is both anti-labor and pro-exploitation.
Employers who hire illegal aliens do so to avoid paying competitive/prevailing wages to employees. In many cases, they can (and are) even paid less than minimum wage.
“One sinister side effect of the workplace raids, according to Christine Owens, the Executive Director of the National Employment Law Project, is that workers will now be too intimidated to speak up about hazardous workplace conditions. “
Ms. Owens erroneously assumes that illegal aliens using forged/stolen identities would have ever known about or availed themselves to these worker protections prior to the raids. The simple fact is, these employees are hired in part BECAUSE the employer knows that these workers won’t cause trouble out of fear of consequences stemming from their illegal status. These raids merely confirmed the risk those illegals knew was real.
Often, the defense of using illegal aliens for labor is that “farmers will go bankrupt” or “nobody else wants to do these jobs.” As an employer in NE Ohio, I find these statements laughably false, and borderline offensive. If there are job vacancies and employers are having trouble filling them, the logical market response would be to increase the pay for that position. Use of illegals to fill these jobs hurts ALL workers, and is just as exploitative as for-profit prison labor. Furthermore, farming is an industry that is already incredibly heavily subsidized, so forgive me if I don’t shed a tear for the plight of them not being able to continue paying artificially suppressed wages to their work force.
ICE was right to make these arrests. My only complaint is that the management and ownership of the companies were not also arrested.
Hess using the same arguments the Confederate Democrats used to justify bringing in more African slaves. Thanks Jeff Hess, we don’t need another wave of slaves to replace the African American decendents brought here to harvest the crops and slaughter the livestock of the elite. Back to your coffee social justice warrior.
Oh come on , Mb, I know that hiding behind an anonymous moniker make sniping easier, but you can do better than that.
Michael 1
That’s true, you’re absolutely right. I grew up in rural Southeastern Ohio where summer jobs hoeing rows, picking produce and bucking hay bales payed less than a dollar an hour in the late ’60s/early ’70s. That was better than the prevailing minimum age at the time and the work was great for your tan but hell on your back.
We don’t need to go back that far however, just look at what happened as a result of Georgia’s HB 87 back in 2011. The anti-immigration law forced migrant workers out of the state and farmers lost millions in unpicked crops. The unfortunate truth is that Americans won’t do the work for the prevailing wage and if farmers pay a fair wage and pass along the cost to consumers, Americans won’t buy the produce. Ban immigrant labor and food either rots in the fields or in the produce department.
Americans would buy American picked produce (and buy American made goods) if they weren’t trying to live on real wages that been in decline for nearly 50 years.
A return of strong unions is a large part of the solution. As Henry Ford learned a hundred years ago, if you pay workers a fair wage then they’ll have the money to buy your products. We now live in essentially a dystopian non-union economy where workers don’t make enough to feed the economy.
Shift the wealth from the 1 Percent—who do very little to support local economies—to workers—who are largely responsible for locally circulating dollars—and we’ll begin to see the middle class grow again.
Unions, as they did in the ’50s, can make America’s Economy Great Again.n
Jeff
CABAL CONTRACTORS removed from any govt audits or even criminal oversight by law in Congress in 2002. These children often end u with them who also are the international military force of G4S and other names implicated in some not so good acts. They work as sanctions now and hold UN contracts. And since 2002 too often these contractors illegally impersonate they are govt phone numbers, addresses and employees who are still accountable to the laws of the ,and,,, THESE BEAST SYSTEMIS NOT TO ANY> HITLER YOUTH were the army indoctrinated young for no good. And studies done show that our own military would never turn on their own people ..THE ARMY OF SATAN IS BEING CREATED and NO PRESIDENT has authority to stop it as cannot spend any budget to do so.. WHERE ARE THE CHILDREN UNDER THESE CABAL CRACTORS WHO CONYROL MOST OF EVEN STATE AND LOCAL CONTRACTS? Our named boss Lynn Blodgett’s brother Tom was in South and Central America just before things went from bad to worse and had been ruling EU before. Virtually all of health are in their control and Medicare being looted since 10/6/16 at insiders say s a billon dollars a day as card holders Id sand claims get turned into multiples which patients f=heirs inherit overpayment Lynn Blodgett et al and Bill etc. and as of 12/16 can seize assets and they control access to even agency judges as they ‘prepare who gets a hearing , He can pull the bank account of every medical provider in USA in minutes for overpayments done in their names. Its in the contracts that no govt has authority over and Congress will not out back the simple oversight any govt should maintain of peoples rights under laws for all and NOT HAVE THE PUBLIC TREURY BE ROBBED with none allowed to stop it . Worse is 2no meds made now that are safe for 20 million plus or 49% f asthmatics and hear similar going on in other disease groups. ITS WHY I BEGAN LOGGING IN !@?)* to warn what was already going on AND TIME TO VOTE FOR THSE WHO SERVE US AND NOT THEM of any party or none 95% voting for a decade in all elections. and do not vote to reelect those who do not serve us. as any can add an amend to every bill to put the oversight back to spend existing budget on otherwise THERE IS NONE AND NOMATTER HOW GOOD THE LAW IT WILL NOT HAVE TO BE OBETED AND MONIES NOT DISAPPEAR, is what Michael Horowitz told me in 2014 ,,just before AG Eric Holder limited what OIG Directors in all agencies can do, who used to be more active in prosecution ‘teams.’ The children should not be assumed as OK under the unfettered control of this cabal…..LINDA JOY ADAMS