Friday Night at 8: “So you can do whatever you want with me”

I don’t know how to write about this, but I’m going to try anyway.

I’ve been following the discussion on immigration for over a year, and there are a lot of complexities to it and a lot of back story.

But this story is so terrible that I don’t think you need to know all the details of the law or intricacies of how we got to where we are in the United States as far as our broken immigration policies are concerned.

This story is about an essay written by Dr. Erik Camayd-Freixas, a certified Spanish interpreter for federal courts, who was present at the ICE raid in Postville, Iowa.

I found out about this essay in a circuitous way.  I first read the entire essay at The Sanctuary where Duke had it up in its entirety.  Immediately after reading it, I rebooted the essay and found he had removed it … turns out Dr. Camayd-Freixas had asked him to refrain from posting it after finding that the New York Times was going to do a front page story on it.  Duke and other pro-migrant bloggers complied.  Now that the story has been published, the essay is once again up at The Sanctuary.

Today I read the story in the New York Times which, of course, was heavily edited due to space concerns and as a result, the true impact of what happened was highly muted, though it was still an incredibly terrible story.

Dr. Camayd-Freixas was called to Postville to interpret but was not initially told why or what was going to happen.  The ICE, now part of the Department of Homeland Security, had planned this raid on Agriprocessors, Inc. for a long time in utter secrecy.

The essay begins:

On Monday, May 12, 2008, at 10:00 a.m., in an operation involving some 900 agents, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) executed a raid of Agriprocessors Inc, the nation’s largest kosher slaughterhouse and meat packing plant located in the town of Postville, Iowa. The raid …officials boasted… was “the largest single-site operation of its kind in American history.” At that same hour, 26 federally certified interpreters from all over the country were en route to the small neighboring city of Waterloo, Iowa, having no idea what their mission was about.

Dr. Camayd-Freixas’ essay is very long and very detailed, and I can only hope to give a small flavor of what he encountered in Postsville, Iowa.  Better bloggers than I will delve into the repercussions and meanings of what happened on May 12, 2008.

Dr. Camayd-Freixas arrived late and missed the interpreters’ briefing, but was instructed to meet the next morning to go to the National Cattle Congress (NCC), where he ultimately found out that some 400 detainees, undocumented workers, were being held and about to be processed.  The irony of how they were processed at a cattle fairground is a bitter one.

Dr. Camayd-Freixas describes the place:

The NCC is a 60-acre cattle fairground that had been transformed into a sort of concentration camp or detention center.

Fenced in behind the ballroom / courtroom were 23 trailers from federal authorities, including two set up as sentencing courts; various Homeland Security buses and an “incident response” truck; scores of ICE agents and U.S. Marshals; and in the background two large buildings: a pavilion where agents and prosecutors had established a command center; and a gymnasium filled with tight rows of cots where some 300 male detainees were kept, the women being housed in county jails.

Later the NCC board complained to the local newspaper that they had been “misled” by the government when they leased the grounds purportedly for Homeland Security training.

He continues:

Then began the saddest procession I have ever witnessed, which the public would never see, because cameras were not allowed past the perimeter of the compound (only a few journalists came to court the following days, notepad in hand). Driven single-file in groups of 10, shackled at the wrists, waist and ankles, chains dragging as they shuffled through, the slaughterhouse workers were brought in for arraignment, sat and listened through headsets to the interpreted initial appearance, before marching out again to be bused to different county jails, only to make room for the next row of 10.

They appeared to be uniformly no more than 5 ft. tall, mostly illiterate Guatemalan peasants with Mayan last names, some being relatives (various Tajtaj, Xicay, Sajché, Sologüí…), some in tears; others with faces of worry, fear, and embarrassment. They all spoke Spanish, a few rather laboriously.

We all read about this raid, it was in all the papers.  They raided a slaughterhouse and took away hundreds of undocumented workers.  The workers ended up, for the most part, accepting pleas of guilt over identity theft and ended up with mandatory jail sentences before deportation.  Sounds awful enough as it goes.  But the story is far worse and far more chilling than I could ever have imagined.

The town of Postville was devastated.

Postville, Iowa (pop. 2,273), where nearly half the people worked at Agriprocessors, had lost 1/3 of its population by Tuesday morning.

Businesses were empty, amid looming concerns that if the plant closed it would become a ghost town. Beside those arrested, many had fled the town in fear.

Several families had taken refuge at St. Bridget’s Catholic Church, terrified, sleeping on pews and refusing to leave for days. Volunteers from the community served food and organized activities for the children.

At the local high school, only three of the 15 Latino students came back on Tuesday, while at the elementary and middle school, 120 of the 363 children were absent. In the following days the principal went around town on the school bus and gathered 70 students after convincing the parents to let them come back to school; 50 remained unaccounted for.

Some American parents complained that their children were traumatized by the sudden disappearance of so many of their school friends. The principal reported the same reaction in the classrooms, saying that for the children it was as if ten of their classmates had suddenly died.

Counselors were brought in. American children were having nightmares that their parents too were being taken away.

Imagine going to school and finding that your classmates, your friends, had simply vanished.  During the raid, many children were left alone for up to 72 hours as their parents were taken away.  The trauma from this alone devastated the entire community and that is not even mentioning the economic damage that will close down many businesses as a result of this action.

But what is chilling is the legality of this raid, how hundreds of human beings were stampeded through the system, charged with a crime that in no way applied to them, and railroaded into not only deportation, but jail sentences that had so many of them in tears at the thought of how their families would survive without them.  They pleaded to just be allowed deportation, as they could not take care of their children if they were in jail.  But that was not an option.

I was about to bear the brunt of my conflict of interest. It came with my first jail interview. The purpose was for the attorney to explain the uniform Plea Agreement that the government was offering.

The explanation, which we repeated over and over to each client, went like this. There are three possibilities. If you plead guilty to he charge of “knowingly using a false Social Security number,” the government will withdraw the heavier charge of “aggravated identity theft,” and you will serve 5 months in jail, be deported without a hearing, and placed on supervised release for 3 years.

If you plead not guilty, you could wait in jail 6 to 8 months for a trial (without right of bail since you are on an immigration detainer). Even if you win at trial, you will still be deported, and could end up waiting longer in jail than if you just pled guilty. You would also risk losing at trial and receiving a 2-year minimum sentence, before being deported.

Some clients understood their “options” better than others. That first interview, though, took three hours. The client, a Guatemalan peasant afraid for his family, spent most of that time weeping at our table, in a corner of the crowded jailhouse visiting room. How did he come here from Guatemala? “I walked.” What? “I walked for a month and ten days until I crossed the river.”

We understood immediately how desperate his family’s situation was. He crossed alone, met other immigrants, and hitched a truck ride to Dallas, then Postville, where he heard there was sure work. He slept in an apartment hallway with other immigrants until employed. He had scarcely been working a couple of months when he was arrested. Maybe he was lucky: another man who began that Monday had only been working for 20 minutes.

“I just wanted to work a year or two, save, and then go back to my family, but it was not to be.” His case and that of a million others could simply be solved by a temporary work permit as part of our much overdue immigration reform. “The Good Lord knows I was just working and not doing anyone any harm.”

This man, like many others, was in fact not guilty. “Knowingly” and “intent” are necessary elements of the charges, but most of the clients we interviewed did not even know what a Social Security number was or what purpose it served.

fThis worker simply had the papers filled out for him at the plant, since he could not read or write Spanish, let alone English. But the lawyer still had to advise him that pleading guilty was in his best interest.

He was unable to make a decision. “You all do and undo,” he said. “So you can do whatever you want with me.”

These human beings were essentially processed like meat, under false charges dredged up by an ICE who needed to fulfill its giant budget and did so by picking the lowest hanging fruit, allowing the owners of these businesses to get off free or, if charged, have their good defense lawyers work hard for them.  Not so for these workers.

These folks were faced with a no-win situation.  And even one of the judges Dr. Camayd-Freixas spoke with saw through the sham illegality of what was happening, but whose hands were tied when it came to sentencing.

After accepting the Plea Agreement and before imposing sentence, the judge gave the defendants the right of allocution. Most of them chose not to say anything, but one who was the more articulate said humbly: “Your honor, you know that we are here because of the need of our families. I beg that you find it in your heart to send us home before too long, because we have a responsibility to our children, to give them an education, clothing, shelter, and food.”

The good judge explained that unfortunately he was not free to depart from the sentence provided for by their Plea Agreement.

Technically, what he meant was that this was a binding 11(C)(1)(c) Plea Agreement: he had to accept it or reject it as a whole. But if he rejected it, he would be exposing the defendants to a trial against their will. His hands were tied, but in closing he said onto them very deliberately:

“I appreciate the fact that you are very hard working people, who have come here to do no harm. And I thank you for coming to this country to work hard. Unfortunately, you broke a law in the process, and now I have the obligation to give you this sentence. But I hope that the U.S. government has at least treated you kindly and with respect, and that this time goes by quickly for you, so that soon you may be reunited with your family and friends.”

The defendants thanked him, and I saw their faces change from shame to admiration, their dignity restored. I think we were all vindicated at that moment.

Before the judge left that afternoon, I had occasion to talk to him and bring to his attention my concern over what I had learned in the jail interviews.

At that point I realized how precious the interpreter’s impartiality truly is, and what a privileged perspective it affords. In our common law adversarial system, only the judge, the jury, and the interpreter are presumed impartial.

But the judge is immersed in the framework of the legal system, whereas the interpreter is a layperson, an outsider, a true representative of the common citizen, much like “a jury of his peers.”

Yet, contrary to the jury, who only knows the evidence on record and is generally unfamiliar with the workings of the law, the interpreter is an informed layperson. Moreover, the interpreter is the only one who gets to see both sides of the coin up close, precisely because he is the only participant who is not a decision maker, and is even precluded, by his oath of impartiality and neutrality, from ever influencing the decisions of others.

That is why judges in particular appreciate the interpreter’s perspective as an impartial and informed layperson, for it provides a rare glimpse at how the innards of the legal system look from the outside. I was no longer sorry to have participated in my capacity as an interpreter

I realized that I had been privileged to bear witness to historic events from such a unique vantage point and that because of its uniqueness I now had a civic duty to make it known. Such is the spirit that inspired this essay.

That is also what prompted my brief conversation with the judge: “Your honor, I am concerned from my attorney-client interviews that many of these people are clearly not guilty, and yet they have no choice but to plead out.”

He understood immediately and, not surprisingly, the seasoned U.S. District Court Judge spoke as someone who had already wrestled with all the angles. He said: “You know, I don’t agree with any of this or with the way it is being done. In fact, I ruled in a previous case that to charge somebody with identity theft, the person had to at least know of the real owner of the Social Security number. But I was reverted in another district and yet upheld in a third.”

I understood that the issue was a matter of judicial contention. The charge of identity theft seemed from the beginning incongruous to me as an informed, impartial layperson, but now a U.S. District Court Judge agreed. As we bid each other farewell, I kept thinking of what he said. I soon realized that he had indeed hit the nail on the head; he had given me, as it were, the last piece of the puzzle.

It works like this. By handing down the inflated charge of “aggravated identity theft,” which carries a mandatory minimum sentence of 2 years in prison, the government forced the defendants into pleading guilty to the lesser charge and accepting 5 months in jail.

Clearly, without the inflated charge, the government had no bargaining leverage, because the lesser charge by itself, using a false Social Security number, carries only a discretionary sentence of 0-6 months. The judges would be free to impose sentence within those guidelines, depending on the circumstances of each case and any prior record.

Virtually all the defendants would have received only probation and been immediately deported.

In fact, the government’s offer at the higher end of the guidelines (one month shy of the maximum sentence) was indeed no bargain. What is worse, the inflated charge, via the binding 11(C)(1)(c) Plea Agreement, reduced the judges to mere bureaucrats, pronouncing the same litany over and over for the record in order to legalize the proceedings, but having absolutely no discretion or decision-making power.

As a citizen, I want our judges to administer justice, not a federal agency.

When the executive branch forces the hand of the judiciary, the result is abuse of power and arbitrariness, unworthy of a democracy founded upon the constitutional principle of checks and balances.

To an impartial and informed layperson, the process resembled a lottery of justice: if the Social Security number belonged to someone else, you were charged with identity theft and went to jail; if by luck it was a vacant number, you would get only Social Security fraud and were released for deportation.

In this manner, out of 297 who were charged on time, 270 went to jail.

…

… with the promise of faster deportation, their ignorance of the legal system, and the limited opportunity to consult with counsel before arraignment, all the workers, without exception, were led to waive their 5th Amendment right to grand jury indictment on felony charges. Waiting for a grand jury meant months in jail on an immigration detainer, without the possibility of bail. So the attorneys could not recommend it as a defense strategy.

Similarly, defendants have the right to a status hearing before a judge, to determine probable cause, within ten days of arraignment, but their Plea Agreement offer from the government was only good for… seven days. Passing it up, meant risking 2 years in jail. As a result, the frivolous charge of identity theft was assured never to undergo the judicial test of probable cause.

Not only were defendants and judges bound to accept the Plea Agreement, there was also absolutely no defense strategy available to counsel.

Once the inflated charge was handed down, all the pieces fell into place like a row of dominoes. Even the court was banking on it when it agreed to participate, because if a good number of defendants asked for a grand jury or trial, the system would be overwhelmed. In short, “fast-tracking” had worked like a dream.

And why is this happening?  Is illegal immigration such a great threat to our national security that we are spending billions of dollars on Halliburton built detention centers and salaries of ICE agents?  No.  It’s because of the money.  The money.

Dr. Camayd-Freixas goes into great detail about this, but I think this bit will explain enough for us to understand what’s going on:

It is no secret that the Postville ICE raid was a pilot operation, to be replicated elsewhere, with kinks ironed out after lessons learned. Next time, “fast-tracking” will be even more relentless.

Never before has illegal immigration been criminalized in this fashion. It is no longer enough to deport them: we first have to put them in chains.

At first sight it may seem absurd to take productive workers and keep them in jail at taxpayers’ expense. But the economics and politics of the matter are quite different from such rational assumptions.

A quick look at the ICE Fiscal Year 2007 Annual Report (www.ice.gov) shows an agency that has grown to 16,500 employees and a $5 billion annual budget, since it was formed under Homeland Security in March 2003, “as a law enforcement agency for the post-9/11 era, to integrate enforcement authorities against criminal and terrorist activities, including the fights against human trafficking and smuggling, violent transnational gangs and sexual predators who prey on children” (17).

No doubt, ICE fulfills an extremely important and noble duty. The question is why tarnish its stellar reputation by targeting harmless illegal workers.

The answer is economics and politics. After 9/11 we had to create a massive force with readiness “to prevent, prepare for and respond to a wide range of catastrophic incidents, including terrorist attacks, natural disasters, pandemics and other such significant events that require large-scale government and law enforcement response” (23). The problem is that disasters, criminality, and terrorism do not provide enough daily business to maintain the readiness and muscle tone of this expensive force.

For example, “In FY07, ICE human trafficking investigations resulted in 164 arrests and 91 convictions” (17). Terrorism related arrests were not any more substantial. The real numbers are in immigration: “In FY07, ICE removed 276,912 illegal aliens” (4). ICE is under enormous pressure to turn out statistical figures that might justify a fair utilization of its capabilities, resources, and ballooning budget.

(emphasis mine)

As I said, I cannot do justice to this essay, but I also can’t keep from trying to get the word out on what is going on in America as far as undocumented workers are being treated.  There is no justification for this.  There is no rationale for this.  It is, plain and simple, human rights abuse.  And why?  So the ICE agents can make their records look good and the department can keep receiving billions of taxpayer dollars to protect us from “terrorists.”

The New York Times article has a must-see video of Dr. Caymad-Freixas.  In closing, I would like to repeat something one of the undocumented workers said:

“You all do and undo,” he said.  “So you can do whatever you want with  me.”

And we have.  We have.

NOTE:  As Duke said in his essay, Dr. Camayd-Freixas says:  “Finally, my new friends from Postville involved in the relief effort inform me that they are still dealing with a very tough humanitarian crisis.  So please, if you have any opportunity for fundraising, this is the address where donations can be sent:

St. Bridget’s Hispanic Ministry Fund

c/o Sister Mary McCauley

P.O. BOx 369

Postville, Iowa  52162

And here’s a video of Sister Mary you may find of interest: