Judge Linda Reade’s husband
bought more prison stock five days before one of the nation’s biggest
immigration raids.
By Samantha Michaels, Mother
Jones
August 24, 2017
It was almost lunchtime inside
the country’s largest kosher slaughterhouse in Postville, Iowa, on May 12,
2008. The meatpackers, mostly migrants from Guatemala and Mexico, wore earplugs
to block out the noise of the machinery and couldn’t hear the two black
helicopters hovering overhead or the hundreds of armed federal immigration
agents closing in around them until the production line stopped. One worker
tried to flee with his knives, stabbing himself in the leg when he was pushed
to the ground. “They rounded us up toward the middle like a bunch of chickens,”
a 42-year-old Guatemalan worker later recalled. “Those who were hiding were
beaten and shackled.”
Postville after the 2008 workplace raid. Photo: Stephen Mally/NY Times |
Nearly 400 workers were arrested
in the bust, which cost $5 million and was then the biggest workplace
immigration raid in US history. They were driven to the National Cattle
Congress, a fairground in Waterloo, where several federal judges would handle
their cases over nine business days. Hearings were held in trailers and a dance
hall. Cots were set up for the defendants in a nearby gymnasium. At the time,
undocumented immigrants caught in raids like this were usually charged with
civil violations and then deported. But most of these defendants, shackled and
dragging chains behind them, were charged with criminal fraud for using
falsified work documents or Social Security numbers. About 270 people were
sentenced to five months in federal prison, in a process that one witness
described as a “judicial assembly line.”]…]
http://www.motherjones.com/crime-justice/2017/08/a-federal-judge-put-hundreds-of-immigrants-behind-bars-while-her-husband-invested-in-private-prisons/
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