On Monday, May 12, as diaried here by isucyclones94, the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raided the Agriprocessors packing plant in Postville, Iowa, arresting hundreds of workers suspected of being in the country illegally. While most of the media have reported on the raid and its associated processes purely in terms of immigration enforcement, the Waterloo Courier has at least broached another subject surrounding the situation - that various supervisors or managers were running a racket wherein they sold automobiles to the workers and assisted them in getting titles, licenses and registration. Waterloo Courier article here.
More, over the hill ........
From the article, you can see that the emphasis is still on how the supervisors may have been harboring the workers illegally. But buried within those facts is also the exploitation of the workers. It is reported that
Investigators also talked with an illegal worker at the plant in 2006 who said a supervisor had approached him about buying a vehicle from him. When the worker declined, the supervisor refused to transfer him to a more favorable job at the plant, records state.
In other words, buy it from me or you will wish you had. While the article does not describe why the supervisor would make such a demand, there are a limited number of reasons that would be of sufficient concern to the supervisor that s/he would apply pressure to retain the sales.
Moreover, the supervisors alleged actions would be in violation of Iowa's Automobile Dealership law, which requires dealers to be licensed.
Here are the links to court documents, in three parts, including the search warrant and supporting affidavit
Part I
http://images.bimedia.net/...
Part II
http://images.bimedia.net/...
Part III
http://images.bimedia.net/...
(Thanks to nchristine for the links.)
In addition, it was reported in the original affidavit that 90% of the sales of the Cedar Rapids car dealership with whom the supervisor was working were involved in this racket. Kind of a sweet deal, eh? The information on the auto sales aspect begins at Page 5 of the Part III link. After laying out the information, it is summarized in Paragraph 105:
In this case, as outlined in paragraphs 86 through 98 above, there is probable cause to believe that an Agriprocessors supervisor has assisted, for a cut of the proceeds, illegal aliens in obtaining false documentation in relation to purchasing vehicles, and thereby has aided in harboring the illegal aliens. The supervisor has also required illegal aliens to purchase vehicles through the supervisor in an attempt to secure better working conditions, as indicated by Source #15.
The reason they were suspicious of the car deals in the first place? Besides any information from inside the plant, there were suspicions at least as far back as 2005:
Postville is located in Allamakee County, while Des Moines County is situated on the southeastern tip of Iowa, about 200 highway miles away, where Burlington is the seat.
In September 2005, officials with the Iowa Department of Transportation began investigating why so many vehicles registered to Burlington residents were renewing their registration in Allamakee County, according to court records.
While the Courier has not gone into depth about this angle, the court affidavit used to obtain the search warrant for the raid does provide more details. It seems that the supervisor running the scam had a connection in Burlington who would process the titles and registrations for him and send them back to him by mail.
And the auto sales racket was not the only way the supervisors were making money off of the workers. In addition, in different sections of the affidavit, it was at least strongly implied that workers were directed to rent housing from specific landlords and them those landlords would often raise the rent. The inference I drew was that the same sort of pressure was being put on the workers to rent from certain parties, and then the rent was periodically raised so as to take more and more of the workers' income. Of course, there would be no lease - and even if there were, the workers were in no position to use the court system to enforce any lease.
Admittedly the information about the rental issues is less clear from the documents than the auto sales scam and ICE does not specifically allege a rental scam as part of its "harboring" evidence.
In plain language: ICE alleges that the employees were required to buy their vehicles from the supervisor in order to keep from being assigned the crappiest work or hours or being fired, and the supervisor was taking a cut. ICE did not specifically allege, but it seems likely from the information that the employees were also required to rent from the designated landlords, and that there rent was raised at unreasonable intervals in a similar manner.