Lladi Ambrocio-Garcia is free. Rep. Bennie Thompson had been among the voices calling for the release of the former food plant worker, who had been detained for more than eight months in several abusive immigration detention facilities, Mississippi Free Press reports.
Ambrocio-Garcia had initially been detained and deported following retaliatory workplace raids in Mississippi in 2019. She was again detained after reentering the U.S. to reunite with loved ones, and moved to facilities in Georgia and Arizona as her advocates pleaded for her release. Ambrocio-Garcia had suffered from COVID-19 and multiple kidney infections while detained.
“I am immensely happy to be free,” she said in the report from Mississippi Free Press. “With all my heart, I thank those who signed the petition, my sister, and all my family, and all the people who supported me through everything I was going through.”
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Thompson had in April urged the Biden administration to release Ambrocio-Garcia, who had been working at Koch Foods for several months when federal immigration agents raided the plant and swept up hundreds of workers. Thompson noted that while the Biden administration said it would stop mass workplace raids like those that targeted the food plants, individual workers like Ambrocio-Garcia were still being targeted.
She then won support from civil rights advocates in the state, who noted the unjust circumstances around her detention.
“Let’s be clear, [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] ICE deliberately targeted poultry factories where workers have denounced, and labor officials have confirmed, rampant abuse taking place,” including “sexual harassment and racial discrimination,” NAACP Interim Executive Director Charles Taylor said in a Mississippi Free Press report earlier this month.
Example: Plant workers were punished through detention, family separation, and deportation as a total number of zero high-level executives faced charges.
Ambrocio-Garcia during this second detention was moved from the deadly Stewart Detention Facility in Georgia, to the COVID-filled Eloy Detention Center in Arizona. Mississippi Free Press reports more than 16,000 people signed letters urging Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas to release her.
The report said that Ambrocio-Garcia was finally freed from Eloy on May 20. Immigrant Alliance for Justice and Equity spokesperson Jess Manriquez told Mississippi Free Press that Ambrocio-Garcia hopes to gain a work permit, but must first take some time to recover from her inhumane detention.
“She’s been in detention for a long time, and she needs to recuperate her health,” Manriquez said in the report. “And she needs basic necessities like clothes and food; that’s what we’re working on currently with her, is getting her basic needs met now that she’s out of detention.”
Mississippi Free Press reports that the Immigrant Alliance for Justice and Equity and National Day Laborer Organizing Network called her release “a crucial first step in repairing the damage done to hundreds of families after the horrific 2019 ICE raids that targeted plants where workers successfully sued their employers for sexual harassment and racial discrimination.”
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