On August 7 Department of Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) executed early morning raids at seven food processing plants across Mississippi. The raids included three Scott County processing plants and ultimately netted 680 illegal or undocumented employees in the state.
Last week’s raids are one of the largest in the history of the United States. The last raid of this magnitude was conducted in 2008 when 400 illegal immigrant and unauthorized workers were arrested at a meat packing plant in Iowa. In addition to the arrests, federal agents seized company business records at all the seven plant locations.
The Peco Foods in Sebastopol, the Koch Foods plant in Morton and PH Food in Morton were all part of the coordinated raids. All three plants were shut down for the entire day while federal agents from HSI and ICE took illegal immigrants and unauthorized workers into custody and transported them off-site to a processing center.
Peco and Koch resumed business at their plants the following day. PH Food resumed business at the Morton plant on Friday.
At approximately 8:30 a.m. on the morning of the raid, federal agents took control of the plants and instructed employees to leave the premises. After being told to leave the Peco property in Sebastopol, many surprised employees gathered at the convenience store next door to the plant.
One Peco employee said she was told the plant was closing and she had to leave. “I was at my work station and then about 8:20 a.m. they told us the plant is closing for the day and we had to go,” she said. “The next thing I knew there were men with badges and guns and dressed in police gear coming through all the doors around us. I grabbed my stuff and headed for the door as fast as I could because we didn’t know what was going on. When we got to our cars there were even more police and they were looking through the parking lot and directing all the cars out of the plant.”
At 9:00 a.m. that morning the Peco grounds was under the complete control of federal law enforcement and assisted by the Sebastopol Police Department. The exact number of Scott County residents who were arrested has not yet been released, but there were over 300 individuals that were released because they had children.
Many in Scott County and around the nation questioned the timing of the raids. The execution of these raids coincided with local area schools starting their first week of classes. Scott County School District Superintendent Dr. Tony McGee said the timing of the raids was tough.
“The timing of the ICE raids was difficult on the children and the school district,” he said. We have so many children with a language barrier, many were starting a new school or starting school for the first time and then Wednesday morning on the second day of school we had the raids. It was just very difficult timing.
“Early on we saw a direct affect in our schools,” Dr. McGee said “After the raids I spoke directly with the ICE agent in charge to inform them about our children in school and to find out if the parents would be released. We wanted to ensure that none of our children would be in need or without a parent, caregiver or guardian.
“On Thursday we had 154 Hispanic and Latino children absent from school in the Morton area. We immediately started making contact with the families of the absent children to find out if they had needs we could help with,” McGee explained. “Over the weekend school district staff delivered care packages to those affected families in the community, and communicated with them to find out if there was concern about their children getting back to school. We kept in touch with them and by Monday we only had eight children absent.”
Attempts to reach ICE or the agent in charge were unsuccessful, and the calls made by The Scott County Times to the Department of Homeland Security were not returned as of press time on Tuesday.
In a prepared statement U.S. Customs and Immigration Enforcement said, “The raids executed on August 7 have been planned for over a year. This is a criminal investigation with 14 federal warrants issued by a judge, and ICE had to follow through on that. The operation was already planned and in motion.”
ICE reported that the arrested workers were bused to a Mississippi National Guard facility in Flowood where they were interviewed about their immigration status, including whether they already had deportation orders. After the interviews many of the workers were released with ankle monitoring systems and a court date.
Another collateral effect of the ICE raids is that both Peco Foods and Koch Foods are now short of workers in their Scott County plants. Job fairs were held Monday at the Win Job Center and Onin Staffing, both in Forest.
There were a large number of people at the Win Job Center starting at 8:30 a.m. Monday and most were there to apply for the job at Koch Foods. Some were being interviewed by national media outlets that have descended on Scott County in the aftermath of the raids.
Kevin Williams of Forest was one potential employee visiting Win Monday to apply for the open positions. “I heard the plants that got raided need a lot of workers and they need them now,” Williams said. “I was even told that if we apply today it is possible, we can be working by tomorrow, so I got myself down here as soon as I could this morning.”
No Representative from either Peco Foods or Koch Foods responded to multiple telephone calls requesting comment on the raids and the current need for local workers.
Officials from ICE have reported that of the 680 workers arrested 307 of those individuals have been released due to “Humanitarian Issues.”
