Just who is “illegal” here? House Committee reviews ICE Raid on Postville, IA

Lawyers and professors testified before the House of Representatives Committee on the Judiciary on Thursday, July 24 that the government process used to arrest and convict undocumented workers in Iowa in May was illegal and violated the immigrants’ due process rights, reports Jurist Legal News and Research. On May 12, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials raided an Agriprocessors Inc. meatpacking plant in Postville, Iowa and arrested 389 undocumented workers. Over four days, 270 of those arrested were each sentenced to five months in prison and 27 more received probation after pleading guilty to the use of false immigration documents. Following the sentencing, a New York Times report suggested that it was uncommon for illegal immigrants to face criminal prosecution as opposed to civil charges and deportation. During the Committee hearing Thursday, American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA) vice-president David Wolfe Leopold reiterated the group’s previous criticism of the convictions process, saying:

A prosecutor’s professional, moral, and ethical duty is to do justice, not merely to convict. This cardinal principal was ignored by the government in its zeal to criminalize undocumented workers. In essence, the expedited justice or “Fast Tracking” system concocted by the government, with the willing assistance of the US District Court for the Northern District of Iowa, was a conviction / deportation assembly line which could not be burdened with protecting the fundamental rights of the defendants, mostly poor uneducated Guatemalan farmers.

Interpreter Erik Camayd-Freixas also criticized the system, saying that the immigrants were unable to understand their rights, the charges against them, or the plea bargains to which many finally agreed. The Washington Post has more.

Not surprisingly, representatives from both the Department of Justice (DOJ) and ICE defended the government’s arrest and conviction processes, saying that the immigrants’ constitutional rights were strictly applied. Howeve, the Jurist notes that, in general, US immigration prosecutions continued to increase in March 2008, jumping nearly 50 percent from the previous month and nearly 75 percent from the previous year, according to a report released by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) at Syracuse University. Federal immigration prosecutions have risen since February, when such prosecutions hit a record high. TRAC attributed the increase to Operation Streamline, a joint federal program under which federal prosecutors levy minor charges against illegal immigrants crossing the US-Mexico border.

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