Offices at the Del Monte plant featured in a May 2 WW cover story, “Chop Shop” were raided this morning by federal immigration officials.
Stephen Manning, a local lawyer with the Immigration Law Group, estimates 200 people were detained this morning after the raid at the North Portland plant.
A statement from Portland Mayor Tom Potter’s office estimates the number at about 150 people.
Potter, an ex-police chief, says in the press release that he can “certainly understand why federal officials executed criminal warrants against three individuals who stole and sold Social Security numbers. But to go after local workers who are here to support their families while filling the demands of local businesses for their labor is bad policy.”
Lorie Dankers, public information officer for the Oregon office of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, says final numbers of those taken into custody are not available yet because the operation is still ongoing.
However, Dankers says a six-month investigation into reports of widespread ID theft, social security fraud and undocumented workers resulted in today’s raid.
Manning tells WW that lawyers are working to free those eligible for release.
For photos, go to KATU.
Thank you Willammette Week! Your stupid ass article will get over a hundred people deported, separating families, and costing taxpayers hundreds of thousands of dollars detaining and prosecuting. Great job. Me cago en tus muertos.
Interestingly enough – but not surprising, there is no word about arresting and/or fining any Del Monte hiring officials. That’s where the problem is. I’ll bet that in about three weeks, Del Monte will have replaced every deportee with “similarly documented” immigrants. If you hire them, they will come. Your next article should focus on those hiring officials.
The illegals that stole or used false SSN’s need jail first – along with the people that gave them / supplied them the information. Then deport them all. Insist that our country build a wall that cannot be breached – or we will no longer have “our country.”
They are criminals. What part of “illegal” can you not understand ?
Great job. I am so tired of pandering to the illegals and this mayor is a real one-sided jerk. Deport them and keep them out. They cost us much more in actual taxpayer’s money than they earn. The US is not equipped to support the whole world.
Your May article completely lacked any journalistic ethics. Your reporter got to play at being a factory supervisor for a little while, gained people’s confidence under false pretenses, and completely turned them over to the authorities. It’s disgusting. I hope people will ask their favorite local businesses to pull their ads from your sorry little paper.
Eduardo,
There are three people under arrest already for supplying false documents. Historically many false documents have been forged by illegal aliens for illegal aliens. Whether that is the case here is yet tobe determined.
Regardless, the people supplying false documents should be prosecuted, jailed, and deported if they are illegally here AND the people using the false documents should be prosecuted, jailed, and deported if they are illegally here. Pretty simple really.
Eli, how could families be separated? Are you going to tell me that illegal immigrants, that we have been told ad nauseum are very family-oriented, would leave their children behind if they are deported? What kind of lousy parent would one have to be to travel to a foreign country with an unknown chance of returning, and leave your children behind?
Surely not the kind of folks we want here.
Buh-Bye!
Thank you Willammette Weekly for exposing the illegals and thanks to ICE for nailing them. Let’s hope it continues.
Plenty of valid studies have shown that undocumented workers overall contribute more to our overall system than the benefits that they and their families are able to take advantage of. For example, if they used fake social security numbers, that means that money they earned was contributed to the system, but they won’t ever be able to claim it, since they are not really the people attached to the numbers.
It’s unfortunate that people have to break the laws to make a living for themselves and their families. If you want to say they should “go back to Mexico” and get a job there, then you need to investigate the situation there, and specifically the way that their economy has been damaged by our policies like NAFTA, and subsidies for American farmers that make it quite difficult if not impossible for traditional Mexican farmers to make a living there.
As Martin Luther King Jr. said in his Letter from Birmingham Jail, if there is a conflict between the laws of man and the laws of God, you have to stand and act on the side of the laws of God until the laws of mankind reflect principles of true justice.
No one is suggesting that the US open borders to an unlimited number of people, but the fact that there are jobs for these people in tough circumstances of trying to get here and work around the system clearly shows us that we do need these additional workers.
Anyone paying attention to how many native-born Americans are in the baby-boom generation and are retiring? We actually need a good number of immigrants for our economy to even sustain itself, not to mention grow in a healthy way.
Let’s be open-minded and find a way for our society to integrate hard-working people who want to be here and have already proven themselves to be valuable members of our society.
By the nature of the comments in response to the article, I’m guessing that they must have been written by people native to the Americas, and surely not by anyone, or the descendent of anyone, who immigrated to the United States hoping to improve the lives of their families. And if they were not written by Native Americans, then I fail to see how they have the right to determine who has the right, or the privilege to be here. Our society is full of judgement, and short of compassion.
When I first saw the headline in the Oregonian about the Del Monte raid, I thought, “…The Willamette Weekly article has come home to roost” It’s an interesting turn of events for a newspaper bent on exposing injustice and wrongdoing. It’s now time to expose yourselves–be brutally honest please, as you are with other offenders. A few candid photos of the author of the article would be good fodder.
great job—I can only hope for many more raids and I hope they start deporting all of them
Illegal aliens who come here break many laws. They use stolen SSN’s and commit tax fraud. Most of them claim 8 or 9 phony dependents so little income tax is deducted from their paychecks. They don’t file tax returns. Unemployed relatives of illegals sell drugs and steal to make money.
Mayor Potter has broken his oath of office to uphold the laws of Oregon and the United States. He needs to resign or be recalled. He is an American Traitor.
It works like this KP, the winner gets to make the rules. The Europeans defeated the natives and took possession of the land. Just as one tribe of Indians defeats other tribes and then takes their land. If the Indians were better able to protect their borders, the rest of us wouldn’t be here. Let’s learn from their failure and defend the borders so that we won’t end up on reservations or be kicked out.
I was going to comment on the large number of things I absolutely hated about the WW article, but then came across the lovely troll comments and changed tact. So…
A few honest questions for the “Deport Them All” crowd:
1. According to news reports, it took approximately 160 ICE officers several hours to arrest approximately 160 illegal aliens after six months of investigation. There are an estimated 12 million illegal immigrants. Do the math. How do you propose we “deport them all”?
2. You raid a workplace unannounced without any prior investigation. How would you seperate the undocumented immigrants from those here legally and from citizens? What do you suppose will happen when ICE accidently “deports” a US Citizen?
3. Let’s say a wall really did effectively keep all new illegals out after deporting the ones already here (and we’ll forget for a moment that a large number of undocumented immigrants legally enter the country on tourist and student visas), who would fill the jobs these folks currently fill? Those who are currently unemployed? Your meth-addicted neighbor? The unemployment rate is this country is under 5%.
Ya, I know, if you pay them more, then Americans would take the jobs. Yep, well educated Americans are just itching to pick berries and work in freezing factories on overnight shifts, if only it paid a bit more.
4. Are you willing to pay substantially more for food, travel, services, and pretty much everything else in exchange? Do you really think your taxes will go down?
Barbara — Jun 13th, 2007 7:28pm had some very good points but what’s missing I believe in all conversations on undocumented workers is the exploitation. I fault the employees very little as they are just trying to make ends meet as we so often tell them to do… but the companies that know full well what they are doing so they can pay little, use intimidation to keep unions out, have deplorable conditions (and break safety and labor laws) only to profit more while putting money in suit pockets via Wall Street so hands that haven’t likely “labored” a day pull our riches out of us.
I think the original story which oddly I had been reading for the first time that very morning (never having known what was hidden in my own city) was trying to show the exploitation to some extent. Could the conditions have been worse there? Yeah, sure… just like they are now 100 years after the publication of The Jungle for meatpackers which for a short while was one of the higher paying jobs for the working class and is now a horrific job that no one wants to do… because it’s not worth it considering the low pay, horrid conditions and horrible life altering injuries one is likely to suffer working for a monopoly of four Meat Kings in collusion now in this country.
But as long as we say these jobs are jobs Americans won’t do… then we give these companies a pass to not make them jobs Americans will and can do. Nobody whether American or undocumented should be subjected to these low-paying, often dangerous, intimidation filled methods of being able to eat themselves while making piss poor food “valu-added.”
Calling for punishment of the employees while decrying the business losses of national companies which are at most mildly inconvenient (why don’t their clients have employees cutting fruit up?) is ridiculous. If corporations are persons then they should be punished for breaking the laws of hiring which much like Wal-Mart did with janitorial workers, putting a staffing company in between is only admitting to knowledge of and attempting to cover while legally distancing themselves from what they are going to do anyway.
Frankly cutting up the fruit is just the end of the long line of exploitation of people in this story.
Dear anti-immigrant reactionaries:
“Deport them all” is not an intelligent solution to the obvious problems with our immigration system–not even close. I’m sorry our educational system has failed you to the point that you can neither forsee the huge host of negative consequences for all Americans that policy would have, nor the obvious connection between today’s Latino immigrants and your own ancestors.
Solving very complex problems takes very well thought out plans. You don’t begin fixing 20 years of failed immigration policy by raiding every business that employs illegal immigrants and deporting those workers found to be here illegally.
The fact is, we must fix this deeply flawed immigration system of ours. I am all for reforming it. But we must do it with our eyes fixed firmly on what is moral, just, realistic, and what is best for America. Your rhetoric–speaking of fellow human beings with such bitter contempt–is none of those things.
I can assure you that America is not run by people like you, nor will it be anytime soon. People who have experience solving complex problems by applying their intelligence to the facts on hand will be the ones crafting the solutions to our immigration mess. You can stand on the sidelines shouting your hate-speech, but your bitter screed will only emphasize how foolish your position was to begin with.