Looking Back at the Postville Protests

By Ethan Michaeli

One week has gone by since I saw the protests in Postville, and I can’t forget the tiny woman wearing an electronic monitoring bracelet on her ankle. She was pushing a stroller at the head of a crowd of about 1,000 people marching for immigrant rights and workers rights on Sunday, July 28. The protestors had come from in-state as well as Illinois, Wisconsin and Minnesota, representing Jewish groups, Catholic institutions, Latino organizations and immigration advocates.

She was the focus of the march, even though the protestors couldn’t do anything to help her. The rabbis, priests and activists who swept into Postville were motivated by immigration raids on May 12, when the woman pushing the stroller and 388 others were arrested while they were working at Agriprocessors, the nation’s largest source of kosher meat. Agents of ICE – the eerily appropriate acronym for the Department of Immigration and Customs Enforcement – pounced on Agriprocessors as they have meat processors and other businesses around the country in which illegal immigrants are prevalent.

In a new tactic for the federal government, the illegal immigrants were charged with identity theft, as they had all submitted fake social security numbers to their employer. Under the threat of years in prison, the feds then offered the Agriprocessors workers a plea bargain: If they accepted voluntary deportation, prosecutors would drop the most serious identity theft charges and, after serving a few months for some of the lesser charges, they would be sent home to Mexico or Guatemala.

That’s why the woman in the crowd was wearing the ankle bracelet. She accepted a plea, and had been sentenced to serve a few months in a local jail, but was released with an electronic monitoring device when she revealed that she was a single mother. Forty-one other women were in the same situation, and it seemed that all of them were in the crowd that paraded peacefully through the tiny town that day.

I came to Postville on a bus organized by the Jewish Council on Urban Affairs, one of the protest’s main organizers. I have been involved with JCUA for a decade and am now vice president of the board. JCUA was founded 44 years ago by Rabbi Robert Marx, a veteran of Martin Luther King Jr.’s Civil Rights marches in the South. JCUA’s longtime executive director is Jane Ramsey, a veteran of Chicago Mayor Harold Washington’s administration.

As our bus rolled into town, I saw a tall, crisp looking blonde man grinning with a deranged expression, holding up a hand-lettered sign reading “Ask Me Why You Deserve To Go To Hell.” I couldn’t tell if he was part of the phalanx of counter-protestors, an all-white, angry looking bunch that included a woman done up as an olive green statue of liberty.

Rabbi Marx was one of the featured speakers at St. Bridget’s Church, which was packed to standing-room-only capacity. Outside, hundreds of more people were gathered, talking in huddles or milling about. About a dozen reporters and TV cameras were working the crowd. Even though the counter- protestors were a short distance away, there was no tension. The Postville Police, Iowa State Police and other local law enforcement were out in force, and had even stationed a fire truck between the two camps. It felt like overkill, given that the counter- protesters were outnumbered by about ten to one.

I drifted off toward the dividing line and noticed a large group of people standing in the shade of a local bar, watching both sides. One man, who declined to give his name, said he worked at Agriprocessors: "I got no problem with the Jews," he volunteered. Waving away the counter-protestors across the street with his hand, he said, "None of them are from around here. I’ve lived in this town my whole life and I got no problem with the Latinos neither." He dismissed the identity theft charges, arguing that the workers used social security numbers to open bank accounts and buy cars. He likewise shrugged off the idea that the illegal immigrants were taking jobs from American citizens, noting that the ICE had ignored the pickers at nearby apple orchards. "Nobody messes with them because them apples wouldn’t get picked," he said. "It’s a bad situation. They’re just picking on the Jews because they’re from another country. They’re just against Jews being successful, if you ask me."

The march proceeded in a six-block loop, with a stop for speeches in front of the Agriprocessors site. I noticed a man dressed in Hasidic garb standing at the periphery. A reporter walked up to him, and soon a few more reporters were also interviewing him. I joined them, and learned that the Hasid with the wiry black beard was Getzel Rubashkin, a young member of the family that owned the plant. Though Getzel emphasized that he wasn’t an official spokesperson, he spoke in the plural: “The people that are here about immigration reform and workers rights, there’s no argument. They want to eat kosher. We want to eat kosher. “We don’t have a dog in any fight. We’re just here to do business.” While he spoke, a couple of other Hasidim leaned in to the reporters, gawking at Getzel. Getzel said he sympathized with the protestors’ demands for immigrant justice, but denied that there were worker abuses at the plant. “People are accepting allegations as company policy,” he said.

His comments did seem calibrated, despite his caveats. The protestors were a threat to the business, after all. The kosher food market is not huge and not likely to grow any time soon. Bad press or – God forbid – a rabbinic injunction of some kind could do a lot of damage. The protest ended with a rally in front of St. Bridget’s, where the Postville Mayor Robert Penrod voiced his opposition to ICE and his support for the protestors. “Families caught in the raid have the city’s sympathy,” he told the assembly.

I couldn’t really get a coherent position out of the counter-protestors. They were friendly and peaceful enough, if a little angry and paranoid. They also took great pains to deny that they were racists. As Lester Moore from Riders Against Illegal Aliens told me, “We welcome immigrants as long as they come through the correct channels.”

Conversations like these made me think about globalization and how America is changing. Hasidic butchers and Central American workers – had come to this American town of 2,000 people in the Midwest and it was welcomed. But my thoughts kept returning to the woman in the ankle bracelet. Did she hope that the protesters would be able to keep her in the US? Was she there to advocate for open borders? Or just to vent her anger at the system?

Illegal immigration is not an easy issue for me. My parents and my wife immigrated to this country, but they went through all of the legal procedures. In my professional life, I work mainly with Chicago’s large population of low-income African-Americans, who are competing for low-wage jobs with the city’s huge population of illegal immigrants, mainly from Mexico and Central America. Many low-income blacks, including thousands of black men released from prison each year, are effectively underpriced from jobs in construction, restaurants and factories. It’s been nearly a week since I took the bus ride back to Chicago, but in many ways, I’m still in Postville.

What do you think?