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RABBI ARTHUR SEGAL:AGRIPROCESSORS:WHEN KOSHER IS TRAIF:HEKSHER TZEDEK'S NEED
"I like my job. I like my work. I like it here in Iowa," said Escobedo , 38, an illegal immigrant from Yescas , Mexico, who has raised his three children for 11 years in Postville . "Are they mad because I'm working?"
Monday's raid on the Agriprocessors plant, in which 389 immigrants were arrested and many held at a cattle exhibit hall, was the Bush administration's largest crackdown on illegal workers at a single site. It has upended this tree-lined community, which calls itself "Hometown to the World." Half of the school system's 600 students were absent Tuesday, including 90 percent of Hispanic children, because their parents were arrested or in hiding.
"They don't go after employers. They don't put CEOs in jail," complained the Postville Community Schools superintendent, David Strudthoff , 51, who said the sudden incarceration of more than 10 percent of the town's population of 2,300 "is like a natural disaster -- only this one is manmade."
He added, "In the end, it is the greater population that will suffer and the workforce that will be held accountable."
Congressman Bruce Braley (D-Iowa) said enforcement efforts against corporations that commit immigration violations have "plummeted" under the Bush administration. "Until we enforce our immigration laws equally against both employers and employees who break the law, we will continue to have a problem," he said.
Julie L. Myers , assistant homeland security secretary for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), said that to the contrary, the agency has seldom been so aggressive, including opening criminal investigations of company officials. While cases have netted only a handful of sentences for low-level managers so far, Myers said, such white-collar crime investigations typically take years to develop.
"Can we really execute a search warrant without taking any action against [illegal employment] that we know is taking place?" she asked. "Or will just taking business records through a search warrant cause illegal aliens to leave, and then we're not fulfilling that part of the mission, as well?"
Lobbyists and former officials say that in unleashing ICE, the administration is trying to "turn up the pain" to motivate businesses and Congress to support the comprehensive immigration changes sought by President Bush , such as a temporary-worker program and earned legalization. If the existing legal tools are too blunt, they said, Congress should create a fairer system.
But the pressure on employers -- whose wages and hiring practices have lured illegal workers to both large cities and small towns -- has mostly been indirect and economic: While workplace arrests have risen tenfold since 2002, from 510 to 4,940, only 90 criminal arrests have involved company personnel officials.
So far, no officials at Agriprocessors have been charged. The company, founded by Aaron Rubashkin , has a storybook history whose recent chapters have turned murky. After some of Rubashkin's Lubavitch Hasidic family moved here from Brooklyn in 1987, the firm became the nation's largest processor of glatt kosher beef, the strictest kosher standard. It produces kosher and non-kosher beef, veal, lamb, turkey and chicken products under brands such as Iowa Best Beef, Aaron's Best and Rubashkin's.
According to an affidavit filed by an ICE agent in conjunction with this week's arrests, 76 percent of the 968 employees on the company's payroll over the last three months of 2007 used false or suspect Social Security numbers. The affidavit cited unnamed sources who alleged that some company supervisors employed 15-year-olds, helped cash checks for workers with fake documents, and pressured workers without documents to purchase vehicles and register them in other names.
In addition, the affidavit alleged that company supervisors ignored a report of a methamphetamine drug lab operating in the plant. It also cited a case in which a supervisor blindfolded a Guatemalan worker and allegedly struck him with a meat hook, without serious injury.
Now while the above would make anyone with any Talmudic sense realize that any meat coming from this plant is traif, just as a cow killed humanly and by kosher laws, on Shabbat is traif, this is not Agriprocessor's first bit of trouble.
An animal-rights group released grisly undercover videotapes in 2004 showing cows in a major kosher slaughterhouse in Iowa staggering and bellowing in seeming agony long after their throats were cut.
The plant, run by Agriprocessors Inc. in Postville, Iowa, is being denounced as inhumane by the group, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, and by several experts on animal science and kosher practice.
But the plant's supervising rabbi said the tapes were "testimony that this is being done right." And representatives of the Orthodox Union, the leading organization that certifies kosher products, said that while the pictures were not pretty, they did not make the case that the slaughterhouse is violating kosher law.
The plant is the country's largest producer of meat certified as glatt kosher, the highest standard for cleanliness under kosher law. (Glatt means smooth, or free of the lung blemishes that might indicate disease.) Employing 600 people and selling under the popular Aaron's Best brand, it is the only American plant allowed to export to Israel.
On the 30-minute tape, each animal is placed in a rotating drum so it can be killed while upside down, as required by Orthodox rabbis in Israel. Immediately after the shochet, or ritual slaughterer, has slit the throat, another worker tears open each steer's neck with a hook and pulls out the trachea and esophagus. The drum rotates, and the steer is dumped on the floor. One after another, animals with dangling windpipes stand up or try to; in one case, death takes three minutes.
In most kosher plants, animals are tightly penned while their throats are slashed, and the organs are not torn; tearing by the shochet is forbidden under Jewish law. In nonkosher plants, animals by law must be made unconscious before they are killed.
Virtually all defenders of kosher slaughter, called shechita, insist that the prescribed rapid cut with a razor-sharp two-foot blade is humane because it causes instant and painless death. Jewish law also forbids killing injured or sick animals, so they may not be stunned first, either with clubs as in ancient times or with air hammers, pistols or electricity today.
Federal law considers properly conducted religious slaughter to be humane, and so allows Jewish as well as Muslim slaughterhouses to forgo stunning. But federal rules outlaw leaving animals killed that way conscious "for an extended period of time."
Rabbi Chaim Kohn, of the Agriprocessors plant, says the cows feel nothing, even as they struggle on the floor and slam their heads into walls. "Unconsciousness and the external behavior of the animal have nothing to do with shechita," he said. Because the throat-tearing happens after the shochet's cut, he said, it does not render the animal nonkosher.
Other experts in kosher law were divided on the issue.
Rabbis Menachem Genack and Yisroel Belsky, the chief experts for the Orthodox Union, which certifies over 600,000 products as kosher - including Aaron's Best meats - said the killings on the tape, while "gruesome," appeared kosher because the shochet checked to make sure he had severed both the trachea and esophagus.
Scientific studies, Rabbi Belsky said, found that an animal whose brain had lost blood pressure when its throat was slit felt nothing and any motions it made were involuntary.
"The perfect model is the headless chicken running around," said Rabbi Genack.
Both rabbis said they were willing to revisit the plant and study whether tearing the throat or letting steers thrash on the ground violated Talmudic proscriptions against cruelty to animals.
The union, they said, prefers a type of pen designed by the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, in which steers are killed standing up with their weight supported. They were designed in the 1950's so American kosher plants could stop killing live animals suspended on chains, which was seen as both cruel and dangerous to the slaughterer.
But a spokesman for Shechita UK, a British lobbying group that defends ritual slaughter against the protests of animal-rights activists, said after watching the tape with a rabbi and a British shochet that he "felt queasy," and added,"I don't know what that is, but it's not shechita."
The spokesman, Shimon Cohen, said that in Britain an animal must be restrained for 30 seconds to bleed, and no second cut is allowed. Done correctly, he said, a shochet's cut must produce instantaneous unconsciousness, so Agriprocessors' meat could not be considered kosher.
Asked how prominent authorities could disagree over such a fundamental issue, he replied: "Well, we don't have a pope. You do find rabbis who interpret things in different ways."
Dr. Temple Grandin, a veterinarian at Colorado State University who designs humane slaughter plants, viewed the tape last week without knowing the location. She called it "an atrocious abomination, nothing like I've seen in 30 kosher plants I've visited here and in England, France, Ireland and Canada."
She said the throat-tearing violated federal anti-cruelty law. "Nothing in the Humane Slaughter Act says you can start dismembering an animal while it's still conscious," she said.
A spokesman for the Department of Agriculture, which also certifies the plant, said it had not received the tapes yet and had no comment.
Rabbi Kohn, of Agriprocessors, said the throat-tearing was done only to speed bleeding. Recent Federal rules for slaughterhouse inspectors do recognize "the ritual cut and any additional cut to facilitate bleeding" as different from skinning or butchering, which is forbidden "until the animal is insensible."
The plant is at the center of a 2000 book, "Postville: A Clash of Cultures in Heartland America," by Stephen G. Bloom, which described the tensions in the tiny farming town between residents and Hasidic Jews from Brooklyn who took over its defunct slaughterhouse in 1987.
People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, known as PETA, posted the tapes at GoVeg.com today and demanded that the plant be prosecuted for animal cruelty and decertified by kosher authorities. While the group advocates vegetarianism, it accepts that shechita can be relatively painless, said Bruce Friedrich, a spokesman.
Mr. Friedrich said that after two fruitless years of pressing Agriprocessors to improve conditions, PETA sent a volunteer to the plant with a hidden camera for seven weeks last summer.
The cameraman, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said he had no trouble being hired (he was assigned to the sausage department) or filming during his lunch hours and on days he called in sick.
"I'm glad I did it," said the young man, who became a vegetarian and volunteered for undercover work two years ago after seeing a PETA videotape. "I wish people who eat meat could stand where I did and see the things I saw."
Meat from the Agriprocessors plant can end up in any market or restaurant. Because Jewish law requires that the sciatic nerves and certain fats be cut out, which tears up the meat until it can only be sold as hamburger, the hindquarters of virtually all kosher-killed steers are sold as conventional meat.
PETA claims the video, posted on its Web site shows repeated acts of animal cruelty at AgriProcessors Inc. in northeastern Iowa. The organization filed a complaint with the U.S. Department of Agriculture that alleged improper slaughtering practices.
"They're ripping the tracheas and esophagi out of fully conscious animals, dumping them out of pens into pools of their own blood. The animals stand and bellow and attempt to escape for up to three and even four minutes in some cases," Bruce Friedrich, a spokesman for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, said .
But Rabbi Chaim Kohn, the plant's supervising rabbi, told The New York Times that the tapes were "testimony that this is being done right." In kosher slaughter, the animals' throats are sliced with a razor-sharp blade, intended to cause instant and painless death. Jewish law forbids stunning them first.
Federal law considers properly conducted religious slaughter as humane, and allows Jewish and Muslim slaughterhouses to forgo stunning. But the rules outlaw leaving animals killed that way conscious for an extended period of time.
The PETA Web site describes the videos as showing AgriProcessors workers ignoring "the suffering of cows who are still sensible to pain after having their throats slit by the ritual slaughterer."
In it's complaint, PETA said its investigator filmed the slaughter of 278 animals, 25 percent which remained conscious "for a significant period of time."
"I think we should attempt to ponder how we would feel in similar situations. The level of cruelty is absolutely outrageous," Friedrich said.
PETA told the Times that a volunteer was hired at the plant last summer and used a hidden camera to obtain the footage.
A man who answered a phone call from The Associated Press at AgriProcessors said media questions would be answered the following morning and hung up. The plant is the world's largest glatt kosher slaughterhouse and the producer of Rubashkin's and Aaron's Best meats. Glatt, under kosher law, means that the animals are free of certain physical defects.
A telephone message left after business hours for the Orthodox Union, a major supervisor of kosher food in the United States, was not immediately returned.
In May 2003, PETA wrote to officials at AgriProcessors and asked them to investigate and take steps to make certain that cruelty was not occurring there.
According to the PETA Web site, AgriProcessors attorneys wrote back saying "Kosher slaughter is being conducted in accordance with the letter and spirit of Jewish law, which prescribes the most humane treatment of animals that has been known throughout human history."
Friedrich said kosher slaughter is more than twice as well regulated as conventional slaughter, being overseen by both the USDA and the Orthodox Union, and is widely believed to be more humane. "What this case indicates is that anybody who is eating meat is supporting horrific cruelty to animals," Friedrich said.
Immigration officials lined up illegal immigrants on Thursday at the National Cattle Congress grounds in Waterloo, Iowa. Missing in the line are the owners of Agriprocessors.
The prosecutions, which ended Friday, signal a sharp escalation in the Bush administration's crackdown on illegal workers, with prosecutors bringing tough federal criminal charges against most of the immigrants arrested in a May 12 raid. Until now, unauthorized workers have generally been detained by immigration officials for civil violations and rapidly deported.
The convicted immigrants were among 389 workers detained at the Agriprocessors Inc. plant in nearby Postville in a raid that federal officials called the largest criminal enforcement operation ever carried out by immigration authorities at a workplace.
Matt M. Dummermuth, the United States attorney for northern Iowa, who oversaw the prosecutions, called the operation an "astonishing success."
Claude Arnold, a special agent in charge of investigations for Immigration and Customs Enforcement , said it showed that federal officials were "committed to enforcing the nation's immigration laws in the workplace to maintain the integrity of the immigration system."
The unusually swift proceedings, in which 297 immigrants pleaded guilty and were sentenced in four days, were criticized by criminal defense lawyers, who warned of violations of due process. Twenty-seven immigrants received probation. The American Immigration Lawyers Association protested that the workers had been denied meetings with immigration lawyers and that their claims under immigration law had been swept aside in unusual and speedy plea agreements.
The illegal immigrants, most from Guatemala , filed into the courtrooms in groups of 10, their hands and feet shackled. One by one, they entered guilty pleas through a Spanish interpreter, admitting they had taken jobs using fraudulent Social Security cards or immigration documents. Moments later, they moved to another courtroom for sentencing.
The pleas were part of a deal worked out with prosecutors to avoid even more serious charges. Most immigrants agreed to immediate deportation after they serve five months in prison.
The hearings took place on the grounds of the National Cattle Congress in Waterloo, in mobile trailers and in a dance hall modified with black curtains, beginning at 8 a.m. and continuing several nights until 10. On Wednesday alone, 94 immigrants pleaded guilty and were sentenced, the most sentences in a single day in this northern Iowa district, according to Robert L. Phelps, the clerk of court.
Mr. Arnold, the immigration agent, said the criticism of the proceedings was "the usual spate of false allegations and baseless rumors."
The large number of criminal cases was remarkable because immigration violations generally fall under civil statutes. Until now, relatively few immigrants caught in raids have been charged with federal crimes like identity theft or document fraud.
"To my knowledge, the magnitude of these indictments is completely unprecedented," said Juliet Stumpf, an immigration law professor at Lewis & Clark Law School in Portland, Ore., who was formerly a senior civil rights lawyer at the Justice Department. "It's the reliance on criminal process here as part of an immigration enforcement action that takes this out of the ordinary, a startling intensification of the criminalization of immigration law."
Defense lawyers, who were appointed by the court, said most of the immigrants were ready to accept the plea deals because of the hard bargain driven by the prosecutors.
If the immigrants did not plead guilty, Mr. Dummermuth said he would try them on felony identity theft charges that carry a mandatory two-year minimum jail sentence. In many cases, court documents show, the immigrants were working under real Social Security numbers or immigration visas, known as green cards, that belonged to other people.
All but a handful of the workers here had no criminal record, court documents showed.
"My family is worried in Guatemala," one defendant, Erick Tajtaj, entreated the federal district judge who sentenced him, Mark W. Bennett. "I ask that you deport us as soon as possible, that you do us that kindness so we can be together again with our families."
No charges have been brought against managers or owners at Agriprocessors, but there were indications that prosecutors were also preparing a case against the company. In pleading guilty, immigrants had to agree to cooperate with any investigation.
Chaim Abrahams, a representative of Agriprocessors, said in a statement that he could not comment about specific accusations but that the company was cooperating with the government.
Aaron Rubashkin, the owner of Agriprocessors, announced Friday that he had begun a search to replace his son Sholom as the chief executive of the company. Agriprocessors is the country's largest producer of kosher meat, sold under brands like Aaron's Best. The plant is in Postville, a farmland town about 70 miles northeast of Waterloo. Normally it employs about 800 workers, and in recent years the majority of them have come from rural Guatemala.
Since 2004, the plant has faced repeated sanctions for environmental and worker safety violations. It was the focus of a 2006 exposé in The Jewish Daily Forward and a commission of inquiry that year by Conservative Jewish leaders.
In Postville, workers from the plant, still feeling aftershocks from the raid, said conditions there were often harsh. In interviews, they said they were often required to work overtime and night shifts, sometimes up to 14 hours a day, but were not consistently paid for the overtime.
"We knew what time we would start work but we did not know what time we would finish," said Élida, 29, a Guatemalan who was arrested in the raid and then released to care for her two children. She asked that her last name not be published because she is in this country illegally.
A 16-year-old Guatemalan girl, who asked to be identified only as G.O. because she is illegal and a minor and was not involved in the raid, said she had been working the night shift plucking chickens. "When you start, you can't stay awake," she said. "But after a while you get used to it."
The workers said that supervisors and managers were well aware that the immigrants were working under false documents.
Defense lawyers, who each agreed to represent as many as 30 immigrants, said they were satisfied that they had sufficient time to question them and prepare their cases. But some lawyers said they were troubled by the severity of the charges.
At one sentencing hearing, David Nadler, a defense lawyer, said he was "honored to represent such good and brave people," saying the immigrants' only purpose had been to provide for their families in Guatemala.
"I want the court to know that these people are the kings of family values," Mr. Nadler said.
Judge Bennett appeared moved by Mr. Nadler's remarks. "I don't doubt for a moment that you are good, hard-working people who have done what you did to help your families," Judge Bennett told the immigrants. "Unfortunately for you, you committed a violation of federal law."
After the hearing, Mr. Nadler said the plea agreements were the best deal available for his clients. But he was dismayed that prosecutors had denied them probation and insisted the immigrants serve prison time and agree to a rarely used judicial order for immediate deportation upon their release, signing away their rights to go to immigration court.
"That's not the defense of justice," Mr. Nadler said. "That's just politics."
Christopher Clausen, a lawyer who represented 21 Guatemalans, said he was certain they all understood their options and rights. Mainly they wanted to get home to Guatemala as quickly as possible, he said.
"The government is not bashful about the fact that they are trying to send a message," Mr. Clausen said, "that if you get caught working illegally here you will pay a criminal penalty."
Robert Rigg, a Drake University law professor who is president of the Iowa Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, said his group was not consulted when prosecutors and court officials began to make plans, starting in December, for the mass proceedings.
"You really are force feeding the system just to churn these people out," Mr. Rigg said.
Kathleen Campbell Walker, president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, said that intricate issues could arise in some cases, for example where immigrants had children and spouses who were legal residents or United States citizens. Those issues "could not be even cursorily addressed in the time frame being forced upon these individuals and their overburdened counsel."
Linda R. Reade, the chief judge who approved the emergency court setup, said she was confident there had been no rush to justice. In an interview, Judge Reade said prosecutors had organized the immigrants' detention to make it easy for their lawyers to meet with them. The prosecutors, she said, "have tried to be fair in their charging."
The immigration lawyers, Judge Reade said, "do not understand the federal criminal process as it relates to immigration charges."
If the cows were killed as swiftly as these workers were arrested, prosecuted, sentenced and deported, there might not have been a problem to begin with.
The Los Angeles Jewish Journal voiced its concerns.
Grocers fear a shortage of kosher meat as a result of the raid on Agriprocessors last week that sharply cut the plant's production.
As federal hearings began this week involving hundreds of employees netted in a government raid on the nation's largest kosher slaughterhouse, some rabbis and consumers adopted a "wait-and-see" attitude before making any judgments -- about the company's practices or the impact of the arrests on the kosher market.
But for those already concerned about earlier allegations of animal cruelty and worker mistreatment at the Agriprocessors plant in Postville, Iowa, the latest legal turmoil is providing fresh ammunition for tough action against the company, including a potential boycott.
On a practical level, some kosher butchers worry that production slowdowns at the plant, which saw about one-third of its workforce arrested on charges related to misuse of social security numbers and faking their identities in employment documents, will lead to a shortage of kosher meat and poultry -- and a resultant price increase.
Agriprocessors, which markets its products as Aaron's Best and Rubashkin's, provides an estimated 60 percent of the nation's kosher meat and 40 percent of its kosher poultry.
Albert Zadeh, the owner of Pico Glatt in Los Angeles, says he is already feeling the effects of the work slowdown.
"If you order five cases of meat, you might get two cases," he said.
Yuval Atias, the owner of Oakland Kosher in that California city, said he expected to be "short on chickens this week." He hoped to compensate by ordering more from Empire Kosher, the nation's second-largest producer of kosher poultry.
Murry Weltz, the co-owner of Park East Kosher in New York City, insisted it's "too early to tell" whether the plant's troubles will hurt the nation's kosher meat supply.
"They have a week to two-week supply," he said. "People won't start feeling it for a couple of weeks, and anyone who tells you otherwise is full of it."
Kosher industry promoter Menachem Lubinsky, the organizer of the annual KosherFest trade show in New York City, predicted that any shortfall will be short-lived. Even if Agriprocessors shut down tomorrow, he said, other kosher entrepreneurs would be ready to step in.
Lubinsky said that most of what Agriprocessors has on the market isn't coming from Postville but from some of its smaller North American plants or South American operation.
"This is a company that has many resources," he said. "I don't see a crisis."
There may, however, be a crisis of a different kind looming.
The Conservative movement, which condemned Agriprocessors last week as bringing "shame upon the entire Jewish community," may call for some kind of limited boycott later this week.
There is "talk of it," said Rabbi Joel Meyers, the head of the Conservative movement's Rabbinical Association, adding that it is a "divisive issue."
But some Conservative rabbis are wary of calling for an all-out boycott that might discourage Jews from keeping kosher, Meyers said. In some communities, the only available kosher meat comes from Agriprocessors.
Some Conservative rabbis say that's no excuse.
Arthur Levinsky of Beth El Congregation in Phoenix urged congregants in his sermon last Saturday to find alternatives to Agriprocessors.
"This scandal, on top of the earlier ones, may be the catalyst needed to get the Jewish community to find sources of kosher meat that are not tainted by cruelty to animals or human beings," he said. "If ever I've considered vegetarianism, it's now."
Despite the company's dominance of the market, some kosher consumers are actively seeking alternatives.
Sandy Gruenberg, the Judaic studies coordinator at the Solomon Schechter Day School of Westchester in White Plains, N.Y., has been "very concerned" about the allegations against Agriprocessors since first hearing about them last year.
"Buying kosher is something I've done my whole life, but the animals have to be treated properly," she said. One of her friends, who also keeps kosher, has become a vegetarian because of the case.
"The people who run Agriprocessors are supposed to be the most observant, and the fact that this does not figure into their consideration is very bothersome to me," Gruenberg said, adding that she would be willing to pay more for kosher meat produced under ethical conditions.
The reaction in the Orthodox world is much more muted.
Rabbi Menachem Genack, the CEO of the Orthodox Union's kosher division -- the main kosher certifier of the Chasidic-owned Agriprocessors -- refers reporters to the O.U. policy of leaving work conditions, environmentalism and animal welfare in the hands of the appropriate state and federal agencies.
The O.U.'s mandate is to ensure that the meat is kosher according to Jewish law, he said.
Genack said, however, that if a company is convicted of a felony, the O.U. would withdraw its kosher certification. Agriprocessors and its officials have not been charged with any crime, and say they are cooperating with the government's investigation.
Agriprocessors' dominance of the market is not incidental, Genack said. Most of the small and medium-sized kosher slaughterhouses in the United States have closed since the 1970s and '80s. The O.U. is talking to Empire about increasing its poultry output for the near future, but there is no real substitute when it comes to meat.
"Agriprocessors is an important source of meat for the kosher world," he said. "Finding other sources is not trivial."
Rabbi Edward Davis of the Young Israel of Hollywood-Fort Lauderdale, in southern Florida, said that virtually all the kosher meat and poultry in his area comes from Agriprocessors. Some local butchers tried to break the company's monopoly but failed.
While Davis is concerned about the federal allegations, and said the company "will have to take its lumps," he's taking his cue from New York.
"We'll wait for the big boys to make the decision," he said.
Referring to the family that owns the Iowa-based business, he added, "There was a world before Rubashkin, and there will be a world after Rubashkin."
What the "God fearing" orthodox Jewish owners of Agriprocessors did to God's creatures and to their ''fellows'' who were their abused underpaid employees, is a Chillul Ha Shem, (desecration of God's holy name) but what they caused the entire town of Postville is a major shonda (shame).
The Des Moines Register publishes :
Town of 2,273 wonders: What happens to us now?
The detainees were transported to Waterloo after Monday's raid at the Agriprocessors Inc. plant in Postville.
Federal officials said the number of people detained now totals 390, nearly four times as many as the raid on the Swift plant in Marshalltown 18 months ago.
Those arrested Monday include 314 men and 76 women. Fifty-six detainees - mostly women with young children - have been released under the supervision of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE. Most were required to wear an electronic monitoring device around one ankle.
Officials with ICE and the U.S. attorney's office in Cedar Rapids would not say whether others could face criminal charges.
Those not charged are being held under "administrative arrest" as alleged illegal immigrants. More initial appearances before a magistrate judge are scheduled for today.
Agriprocessors, the nation's largest kosher meat-processing plant, has employed 968 workers. Officials have said they believe as many as three-fourths of the workers were using fraudulent Social Security numbers.
Postville Mayor Bob Penrod said that he and others in town suspected there were illegal immigrants working at Agriprocessors, but that "nobody had any idea it would be that many."
The detainees included 290 who claimed to be Guatemalans, 93 Mexicans, three Israelis and four Ukrainians. Twelve juveniles were among those detained, six of whom have been released, federal officials said.
The 12 juveniles were plant employees, officials said. Of the six who remained in detention, federal agents were seeking "responsible adults" to take custody of them, said Claude Arnold, the ICE special agent in charge.
At a Tuesday morning news conference in Cedar Rapids, U.S. Attorney Matt Dummermuth called the raid "the largest single-site operation of its kind in the country."
Customs and law enforcement agents worked through the night processing the detainees, Arnold said. Those workers who are charged with criminal offenses have been assigned attorneys.
The detainees' initial appearances Tuesday were held in the Electric Park Ballroom, an old-school music hall that has been transformed into a temporary courtroom. A portable trailer will serve as another makeshift courtroom.
"The plans went very well," Arnold said. "As you can imagine, it's a huge undertaking, so it takes a while for people to get into the groove and for things to start rolling. But they were moving along very well."
He did not expect anyone to be detained at the Waterloo fairgrounds past tonight.
Officials say detainees eat Hy-Vee catered meals
Those workers charged with criminal offenses would be transferred to custody of the U.S. Marshals Service, he said. Those believed to be in the country illegally would remain in ICE custody and have a hearing before an immigration judge. Those hearings could take place anywhere in the country, Arnold said.
Asked about rumors that people were being housed in pens in the cattle barns, ICE spokeswoman Barbara Gonzalez shook her head.
"They hold proms here," she said. "This is a place for conferences and other events. Everyone is being treated humanely within the rule of law."
Everyone has three meals a day catered by Hy-Vee plus an evening snack, and access to telephones, medical teams, showers, recreational activities, and a list of free legal services, Gonzalez said.
But immigration rights volunteers, who are keeping a steadfast lookout for any possible problems, said that detainees had not yet had access to lawyers of their choosing, and that they they'd heard some people were not given supper Monday.
Ben Stone, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Iowa, said the organization has gathered information indicating that detainees have not been given adequate time to meet with attorneys "and that defense attorneys are being overwhelmed (with) requests to represent far more clients than is advisable - or perhaps even ethical."
Nationally, ICE agents arrested 863 people on criminal charges in 2007 and detained more than 4,000 people - a tenfold increase from five years earlier, according to the agency's Web site.
A total of 697 complaints and warrants were issued for the Iowa raid, including for aggravated identity theft and unlawful use of a Social Security number. Authorities are still trying to match the people they detained with suspicious documents they discovered during the investigation, some of which includes fictitious names.
Dummermuth declined to comment about possible charges against supervisors, managers or owners at Agriprocessors, citing the ongoing investigation.
Federal papers released Monday detailed several eyewitness accounts of employee abuse.
Company officials could not be reached for comment Tuesday.
The plant appeared to resume limited operations Tuesday morning. A company representative near the entrance could be heard talking about "today's chicken kill."
The man said company executives had no comment. "They don't want to talk to anybody," he said.
The Postville plant opened in 1987 by Hasidic Jews who wanted to move near the product, and remains owned and operated by Aaron Rubashkin and his two sons.
The company processes and packages kosher meat and poultry products under the Aaron's Best brand. Nonkosher meats include the Iowa Best Beef brand.
The plant is one of largest employers in northeast Iowa, and Postville residents attempted Tuesday to assess the social and economic damage to their town, one of the most ethnically diverse in the state.
Christina Drahos, an accountant and president of the Postville Chamber of Commerce, said the town is in fairly good shape economically, because of the meatpacking plant and because farmers are receiving high prices for their crops.
She predicted the town, which has 2,273 residents, would survive. "Postville is a community that comes together, and that probably is our biggest asset," she said.
Some businesses are feeling the raid's effect more than others. The town's largest landlord, GAL Investments, rents 130 apartments, duplexes and houses for about $450 to $800 per month. Almost all of the tenants are Guatemalan or Mexican immigrants who work at the plant, said Theresa Fravel, the office manager.
She worried that even those who weren't arrested will flee. "Some people have actually packed up and left town," she said.
Jeff Abbas, who runs KPVL, a community radio station, said immigrants are vital to the town.
"If you talk to the average Joe on the street who grew up here, they'll say, 'Yeah, they'll be back in a week,' " he said. "But I don't think they'll be back in a week."
Postville's school Superintendent David Strudthoff said about a third of the elementary and middle school's 363 students were absent Tuesday. Most of them are Latino, he said. Only three of the high school's 15 Latino students were in school Tuesday. He said the school district's future is unclear.
"We had 10 percent of our entire community arrested in 12 hours," he said. "We're into new territory here in Postville that's never been seen before. It's just like having a tornado that wiped out an entire part of town."
If Agriprocessors closes its doors, "it'll be a ghost town here," said Penrod, the mayor. "It's not like Swift in Marshalltown. When that happens here, it has a huge, huge impact. We didn't need this. This literally blew our town away."
But not unlike Daniel in the days of old, the handwriting was on the wall. Before 2004 PETA's exposes and 2008's arrest, Steven Bloom wrote a book about Agriprocessors and the town of Postville. Like Daniel's message to Nebedchadnezar it isn't pretty.
POSTVILLE: A CLASH OF CULTURES IN HEARTLAND AMERICA, by Stephen G. Bloom, A Harvest Book, Harcourt, Inc. San Diego New York London, 2001
In the early 1990s, University of Iowa journalism professor Stephen Bloom, feeling alienated in Iowa City, went searching for his Jewish heritage. He thought he could find it in Postville, a small town in northeast Iowa, where he discovered there was an enclave of ultra-Orthodox Jews. This book, framed as both personal journey and examination of cultural clashes in the American experiment of multiculturalism, documents what became his profound shock, and disappointment. In looking for romantic myths and legends of the Jewish past, he found instead a jarring ghost from Jewish history and traditional identity that deeply troubled him.
The story centers upon a band of arrogant, racist, elitist, rude, thieving and separatist [Bloom gives examples of each of these adjectives] band of Chabad Lubavitcher Hasids ("the pious") who in 1987 bought a slaughterhouse in Postville (population: about 1,400), imported hundreds of non-Jewish illegal alien laborers to work for $6 an hour in oppressive conditions, and, since then, have been taking over the town. They also bring pollution to the local river, at least two attempted murders, and Iowa state lawsuits against the company.
No reasoned person who reads this book can fail to understand the hostility of local residents against the invasive Jews who expressly came to condemn, destroy, exploit, and ultimately dominate their town and their values. Bloom concludes the volume with justifiable concern about the future of American multiculturalism and its clash of cultures. The fact that Bloom notes he has received dozens of pieces of "hate mail" from fellow Jews underscores the implicit dangers this book presents to modern Jewish conventions about itself.
RABBI ARTHUR SEGAL
JEWISH RENEWAL:
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