44. The Raid (Agriprocessors)

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Speaker 1 Just wanted to give you a quick heads up that this episode contains some graphic descriptions of butchering and the meat packing process, as well as some horrific treatment of animals and people.

Speaker 1 So, you might want to hold off on this one, at least until you finish your lunch. Listener discretion is advised.

Speaker 3 The Swift meat packing plant near Cactus is effectively shut down tonight.

Speaker 4 A fallout continues in Worthington after Tuesday's raid on a meat packing plant.

Speaker 5 Swift and Company owns the plants where nearly 1,300 employees were arrested in six different states.

Speaker 6 Over 200 who were taken into custody remain in detention centers here in Colorado.

Speaker 6 Their families and friends who've been completely in the dark about their loved ones' whereabouts since the raid yesterday morning.

Speaker 1 For the 13,000 employees of the Swift and Company meatpacking plants, Tuesday, December 12th, 2006 was supposed to be just another day.

Speaker 1 Show up to work, punch the time clock, butcher some animals, go home to the family, have some dinner, maybe watch a little TV,

Speaker 1 put the kids to bed, fall asleep, and then do it all over again the next day.

Speaker 1 But it became very apparent early in the morning shift that Tuesday, December 12th was going to be different.

Speaker 1 At about 8 a.m., fans and buses containing 1,000 immigration and customs enforcement agents, backed by local police units and riot gear, simultaneously descended upon six different meat packing plants in Colorado, Texas, Nebraska, Minnesota, Utah, and Iowa.

Speaker 1 They formed a perimeter around the factories, blocked all the exits, and then stormed through the doors, weapons raised, shouting orders.

Speaker 1 Activity on the plant's kill floors and assembly lines came to a halt.

Speaker 1 The employees were rounded up and taken to a central area, like a cafeteria, where they were separated on the basis of their skin color. Light-skinned to the left, dark-skinned to the right.

Speaker 1 That way, the ICE agents could more quickly decipher which workers were in the country illegally.

Speaker 1 Those that tried to resist were sprayed with some kind of chemical weapon. Everybody else was handcuffed with plastic until ICE were able to confirm their citizenship.

Speaker 1 Those that could prove their legal status were free to go home. Those that could not would be detained and deported.

Speaker 1 The entire process lasted about six to eight hours. And judging by the descriptions of ICE's treatment of the workers that surfaced afterwards, it was anything but friendly.

Speaker 1 A factory worker in Minnesota named Veronica told the Star Tribune, quote, truthfully speaking, they treated us like trash.

Speaker 1 Another worker named Anna spoke with the Herald Journal. She recalled agents throwing food on the ground and making the detainees pick it up.

Speaker 1 Anna also claimed that a group of 40 workers were sharing one toilet between them and that it was prevented from flushing.

Speaker 1 Quote, they closed the water off so that we couldn't flush the water, because they said they were going to punish us because we kept crying and talking.

Speaker 1 And they didn't give us any toilet paper.

Speaker 1 Apart from the intimidation tactics employed by ICE during the raid, there was a reason the workers were crying. For many of them, this was the end of the line.

Speaker 1 They knew that they would be bussed away to God knows where. They knew that they might never see their families again.
And many of them wouldn't.

Speaker 1 At the end of the day, across the six raids named Operation Wagon Train, in total, almost 1,300 Swift and Company employees were arrested and transported to various detention centers out of state.

Speaker 1 From there, almost all of the detainees were deported to their home countries, mostly Mexico and Guatemala.

Speaker 1 The families left behind were given a 1-800 number to call and nothing else.

Speaker 1 It's disgusting.

Speaker 1 That's how I'm feeling right now. Disgusting.

Speaker 3 All these people are hard workers.

Speaker 9 The least they should do is let the families know where they're at and where they're going and what's going to happen with them.

Speaker 6 What is my baby supposed to do without a dad?

Speaker 1 Many of the communities affected by the raids were appalled. Swift and company officials, the workers' union, and religious leaders denounced the federal government's actions.

Speaker 1 Children were left without fathers or mothers, sometimes both. Breadwinners had vanished overnight.
Families had been destroyed.

Speaker 1 Many of the remaining immigrants found help and shelter at their local churches.

Speaker 1 Some fled the country on their own accord while others went into hiding, fearing that the long arm of the law would soon return for them. It was abject terror.
Mission accomplished, I guess.

Speaker 1 Meanwhile, others in the community felt that the raids were justified. Just aggravates me when they say, oh, we're not illegal or we're not illegal for a human.

Speaker 1 Well, yeah, you're human, but if you're here illegally, you are a criminal.

Speaker 1 So, they don't need to be here.

Speaker 1 You heard the man. You weren't lucky enough to be born on this side of the imaginary line.
Time for you to go. I'm sorry.
Don't cry. It's not your fault.
It's not something that you can control.

Speaker 1 In fact, the gentleman in that clip had no control over where he was born either, either, even though it appears to be what he is most proud of.

Speaker 1 To be honest, it's probably the only thing he has to be proud of. So cut him some slack, will you? And heed his advice.
You're a criminal.

Speaker 1 Take your hungry baby back to wherever it is you came from and find a different way to feed it. It's not his problem.

Speaker 1 Oh, and don't you even think about taking his job again, even though it's not a job he would ever want. Not in a million years.
Not for what you're getting paid at least. Are you kidding?

Speaker 1 This man is a red-blooded, God-fearing American. The only time he is interested in handling cheap food is when he is shoveling it into his mouth.

Speaker 1 All the while ignoring the fact that it is his demand for that cheap food and your employer's demand for cheap labor that requires your presence in his country in the first place.

Speaker 1 But he doesn't want to think about it like that. It makes his brain hurt.
So just get out. Go back to your country.

Speaker 1 So that this man can go back to supporting the troops who have sacrificed everything for these sweet American freedoms that are, unfortunately, not afforded to you.

Speaker 1 Those are his freedoms, and he will continue getting angry when his fellow citizens exercise those very same freedoms. No kneeling on the football field, please.

Speaker 1 It's disrespectful to the flag, he screams, in between sips of an American flag-themed Budweiser can while he remains seated in his favorite recliner during the national anthem.

Speaker 1 What time does the game start again?

Speaker 1 Even if that's how everyone felt, and it wasn't.

Speaker 1 Even if many of the workers were illegal, and they were.

Speaker 1 Many onlookers felt that the Swift raids had been needlessly callous.

Speaker 1 Just a month earlier, as part of the same operation, ICE agents had calmly walked into a Louisville meat packing plant owned by the same company and apprehended four four suspects without flexing a muscle.

Speaker 1 It all just seemed so unnecessary.

Speaker 1 But according to the Secretary of Homeland Security at the time, Michael Chertoff, it wasn't.

Speaker 1 Because Operation Wagon Train was targeted at a massive use of document fraud to support illegal work in the workplace.

Speaker 11 The investigation began in February of this year. The evidence we uncovered indicates that hundreds of SWIFT workers illegally assumed the identities of U.S.

Speaker 11 citizens using stolen or fraudulently acquired Social Security numbers and other identity documents, which they used to get jobs at SWIFT facilities.

Speaker 1 Apparently, Swift and Company was a giant hotbed of identity theft.

Speaker 1 Some workers have been using the social security numbers and birth certificates of unsuspecting American citizens to gain employment. No doubt a serious offense.

Speaker 1 and one that should be actively pursued. But how many of the 1,282 workers who were were arrested on administrative immigration violations were also charged with identity theft-related crimes?

Speaker 11 Of the 1,282 workers who were arrested on administrative immigration violations, approximately 65 were also charged with identity theft-related charges. Those are criminal charges.

Speaker 1 65 across six states. That's a A number that kind of undermines the Department of Homeland Security's stated purpose of the coordinated raids and fails to justify such elevated actions.

Speaker 1 Later, the ICE director at the time, Julie Myers, offered some additional insight.

Speaker 1 Quote, the action should send a clear message to employers. Hiring illegal workers is not acceptable.

Speaker 1 Fair point, except no charges were filed against Swift for hiring illegal workers because the company had acted by the book, even going so far as to participate in the Bush administration's basic pilot program that checked the validity of social security numbers for prospective employees.

Speaker 1 In fact, Swift and Company had been conducting more thorough checks of its Latino hires years earlier, but was slapped with a fine by the Justice Department for digging too deep and running afoul of anti-discrimination laws.

Speaker 1 The company also knew the raids were coming and never tipped off its employees per request from the feds. What else were they supposed to do?

Speaker 1 A year after the raids, after struggling to replace the 10% of its workforce that had been lost, Swift and Company was sold to a Brazilian firm, and many of the illegal workers who were deported had already snuck back into the United States and found different jobs.

Speaker 1 Back to square one.

Speaker 1 So remind me again, what was the point? Why did this happen?

Speaker 1 Robert McCormick, an immigration attorney in Greeley, Colorado, told The Nation magazine why he thought that this had happened.

Speaker 1 Quote, Quote, this is indeed a declaration of war on the immigrant community. This is about Republicans trying to appease their core block of supporters.

Speaker 1 Yeah, some people got a big kick out of this, but I think most Americans were revolted by it.

Speaker 1 Here in town, a lot of people have said they want no part of it, and others, I assure you, are going to wind up very ashamed of it.

Speaker 1 Operation Wagon Train and the Swift Raids ushered the United States into a new era of immigration enforcement. A new era that was less about law and order and more about politics and pandering.

Speaker 1 Less about negotiation and more about punishment. More raids and more violence, with no solutions to the underlying causes.
The broken system remained in place, and the worst was yet to come.

Speaker 1 A massive immigration raid on a kosher meatpacking plant in Iowa devastates a small community and uncovers more than just undocumented workers. On this episode of Swindled,

Speaker 12 they bribed government officials to find accounting.

Speaker 8 Dumping up the tenants and records into high public health.

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Speaker 5 Rolling into Postville with its fewer than 2,500 people, it seems like any other small eastern Iowa town.

Speaker 5 But a look down Lawler Street with its Mexican restaurant, kosher grocery, nearby Guatemalan store, and more reveals why it's called hometown to the world.

Speaker 1 Diversity is probably the last thing you expect to find in northeastern Iowa, but it did exist in a small town named Postville, thanks to a unique resident business named AgriProcessors.

Speaker 14 AgriProcessors is a kosher meat packing plant that started in 1987

Speaker 14 and they first of all had many people from the Ukraine, from Russia working there, and then gradually people from Mexico and Guatemala came in.

Speaker 1 Not only did the low-skilled jobs at the slaughterhouse attract immigrants looking for opportunity, but because of the kosher nature of the business, Postville became home to a relatively large community of Hasidic Jews, many of which had come from New York in the late 80s after a well-respected grocery store owner from Brooklyn named Aaron Raboshkin purchased the dormant slaughterhouse that eventually became Agri-Processors, which eventually became Postville's largest employer.

Speaker 1 Aaron's son, Shalom Raboshkin, was placed in charge of the factory's daily operations in 1992.

Speaker 1 Shalom and his other family members that worked at the plant ensured the agro-processors adhered to the laws of kosher outlined in the Torah.

Speaker 1 For one, only land animals that chew their cud and have cloven hooves are permitted for consumption. That means no meat from hares, pigs, or camels.
And two,

Speaker 1 the Torah forbids the consumption of meat that is, quote, torn by beast.

Speaker 1 which means the animals must be killed in a ritual slaughter by a pious Jew of good character, usually a rabbi.

Speaker 1 With a large, razor-sharp knife, the rabbi makes a single cut across the throat of the animal, which is supposed to result in instant death and allow it to bleed out without any unnecessary suffering.

Speaker 1 Results may vary.

Speaker 1 AgriProcessors was successful almost immediately. Every week the factory was shipping more than one and a half million pounds of cattle, chicken, lamb, and turkey to grocery stores across the U.S.

Speaker 1 The company became the largest kosher meat packing plant in the nation. Annual sales topped $300 million,

Speaker 1 accounting for more than 60% of the entire niche market.

Speaker 1 As a result, the town of Postville was thriving. Thanks to the Raboshkins and agri-processors, the population of Postville had almost doubled seemingly overnight.

Speaker 1 There were a few growing pains, as to be expected, in such a sudden and drastic clash of cultures.

Speaker 1 But over time, the native Iowans, the Guatemalans, the Mexicans, and the Orthodox Jews were embraced by the community and made themselves at home.

Speaker 1 Iowa proved to be the ideal location for a slaughterhouse. The land was cheap, so were transportation costs.
The cows were nearby.

Speaker 1 and there were fewer unions and government watchdogs looking over your shoulder.

Speaker 1 However, in 2004, agri-processors did land on the radar of one animal rights group, the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, better known as PETA.

Speaker 1 An undercover investigator for PETA had infiltrated agri-processors for seven weeks and released a secret video recording of the company's supposedly more humane kosher way of butchering.

Speaker 1 Again, I'm warning you, this is not an easy listen.

Speaker 1 In the four-minute video, which was released on PETA's website in December 2004, cattle are seen stumbling around in their own blood with their throats cut, slamming their heads into the wall after being dumped onto the kill floor by the restraining device that held them in place for the ritualistic slice.

Speaker 1 You can see the cows attempt to bellow as factory workers began ripping out their tracheas and esophagi with meat hooks and knives. Some of the animals remained obviously conscious.

Speaker 1 desperately trying to stand up for almost three minutes while the dismemberment was taking place.

Speaker 1 One especially large piece of shit factory worker is shown in the video kicking blood in the face of a dying cow.

Speaker 1 These acts of extreme cruelty caught the attention of rabbis, scholars, and animal welfare experts. Even Dr.

Speaker 1 Temple Grandin, the world's foremost expert on slaughter methods, told Iowa's Globe Gazette, quote, I thought it was the most disgusting thing I'd ever seen. I couldn't believe it.

Speaker 1 I'd been in at least 30 other kosher slaughter plants, and I had never seen that kind of procedure done before. I've seen kosher slaughter really done right.

Speaker 1 So the problem here is not kosher slaughter. The problem here is a plant that is doing everything wrong.
They can do wrong.

Speaker 1 All the while, the independent in-house federal inspectors who could have interfered were asleep at the wheel. Literally, an internal report from the U.S.

Speaker 1 Department of Agriculture revealed that government inspectors at agri-processors had been found sleeping at work, playing video games, and accepting meat bribes from plant managers to look the other way.

Speaker 1 Ultimately, the USDA determined that agri-processors had engaged in, quote, acts of inhumane slaughter and ordered the plant to immediately put a stop to certain procedures.

Speaker 1 But other than that slap on the wrist and the boycott of Raboshkin meat from a small group of conservative Jews, nothing came of the controversy. Nobody was fired.
Nobody was meaningfully disciplined.

Speaker 1 Business continued as usual. For a while, at least.

Speaker 1 Less than a year and a half later, even more disturbing revelations about agri-processors surfaced.

Speaker 1 On May 26, 2006, the Jewish Daily Forward published a report detailing the horrors of the working conditions for the humans at the plant.

Speaker 1 Immigrant employees were working 10 to 12 hour shifts, six days a week for as little as $6.25 an hour, the lowest pay of any slaughterhouse in the nation.

Speaker 1 Not to mention a complete lack of health care options.

Speaker 1 But that doesn't mean there weren't career growth opportunities available at AgriProcessors. Oh, contraire.
For better shifts and higher pay, supervisors were open to accepting bribes.

Speaker 1 Female workers had additional options.

Speaker 1 They were given the opportunity to provide sexual favors to their bosses, which would often take place at work in the supervisor's office, which, to be honest, doesn't sound very kosher to me.

Speaker 1 Especially after it was revealed that many of the workers at the plant were underage,

Speaker 1 some as young as 14 years old.

Speaker 1 Agri-processors apparently had no qualms hiring children, giving them very little in terms of safety training, and then tossing them the keys to the meat grinder, which to no surprise resulted in numerous and and significant injuries.

Speaker 1 Some of the workers were missing fingers, some were missing hands, others entire arms, and yet many of them returned to the factory floor because as one employee told the forward, he was quote, hoping to collect enough to pay off his debts back home.

Speaker 1 Outside of the factory, the workers were living in squalor, huddled together in mobile homes and tiny apartments owned by the Raboshkin family that featured plumbing and heating that was non-operational.

Speaker 1 Another perk of working for AgriProcessors is that the company provided access to automobiles that the employees could basically rent to own.

Speaker 1 Of course, by the time the note was paid off, the employee had paid hundreds, if not thousands of dollars more than the vehicle was worth. But who's counting?

Speaker 1 The Forward compared the environment at AgriProcessors to the world Upton Sinclair wrote about in his seminal work, The Jungle, and referred to the semi-indentured employees as, quote, the impoverished humans who do the factory's dirty work.

Speaker 1 Mark Gray, a professor at the University of Northern Iowa, expressed his concerns about the working conditions at the plant to the publication: quote: The bottom line here is that I'm not sure these devout Jews are using Jewish ethics to treat their workers.

Speaker 1 And the truth was that those workers had nowhere to turn and no one to talk to about the mistreatment and exploitation because a large percentage of them were undocumented.

Speaker 1 Efforts to unionize had failed due to fears of being fired or deported.

Speaker 1 And a little dissuasion from Postville Mayor Robert Penrod, who allegedly accepted some kind of payment from Shalom Raboshkin, certainly didn't help their cause.

Speaker 1 On March 20, 2008, The Iowa Occupational Health and Safety Agency cited agri-processors with 39 new health and safety violations for the plant's poor working conditions.

Speaker 1 The proposed fine for all 39 violations totaled $180,000.

Speaker 1 For a company of its size, the penalty was the equivalent of a minor traffic citation.

Speaker 1 But AgriProcessors wasn't entirely in the clear.

Speaker 1 That same month, the Social Security Administration delivered a stack of no-match letters to AgriProcessors, alerting the company's managers that the Social Security numbers reported by some of their employees did not match the people they were actually paying.

Speaker 1 To put it another way, the federal government was aware that there was a high probability that AgriProcessors was employing illegal and underage workers.

Speaker 1 What happened next was something that the town of Postville would never be able to forget.

Speaker 1 Support for swindled comes from Simply Safe. If you could actually stop someone from breaking into your home before they got inside, why wouldn't you want to? That's the idea behind Simply Safe.

Speaker 1 Real security that can stop a crime before it starts. Traditional systems wait until it's too late, but Simply Safe's active guard outdoor protection is proactive.

Speaker 1 Their AI-powered cameras detect suspicious activity, and real live agents step in.

Speaker 1 They actually talk to potential intruders while they're still outside, trigger sirens, flash spotlights, and let them know the police are on the way. It's wild to watch.

Speaker 1 I've used SimplySafe for years and I trust it to protect everything that matters to me, even when I'm not home.

Speaker 1 It's reliable, simple, and honestly, kind of satisfying to know someone else is watching when I can't.

Speaker 1 Our listeners get exclusive early access to SimplySafe's Black Friday cell, where you can save 60% on any new system. This is their biggest deal of the year.

Speaker 1 There will never be a better time to get real security for your home. Go to simply safe.com slash swindled.
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Speaker 1 on any new system.

Speaker 15 For years and years, meat packing plants like AgriProcessors have been hiring thousands of undocumented workers. It's been one of the worst kept secrets in the state.

Speaker 15 All the prospective employee needed to do was show up at the employment window with a fake social security card, and he'd be working on the kill floor within hours.

Speaker 15 Politicians, managers, owners, workers, locals all knew this.

Speaker 15 The only way the meatpacking industry could operate in Iowa was this way, since fewer and fewer Iowans want to work for minimum wage, doing such backbreaking work with such few benefits, if any.

Speaker 15 The question wasn't whether the raids were going to happen. It was when.

Speaker 1 For the 800 employees of the AgriProcessors meat packing plant in Postville, Iowa, Monday, May 12th, 2008 was supposed to be just another day.

Speaker 1 Show up to work, punch the time clock, butcher some animals, go home to the family, have some dinner, maybe watch a little TV, put the kids to bed, fall asleep.

Speaker 1 and then do it all over again the next day.

Speaker 1 But at around 10 a.m., the townspeople of Postville saw something they were not accustomed to seeing in their neck of the woods. Blackhawk helicopters circling above.

Speaker 1 Fans and buses containing 600 ICE agents outfitted with combat fatigues and automatic weapons speeding down the road.

Speaker 1 Almost 400 employees of agriprocessors were led out of the plant into waiting buses.

Speaker 1 290 Guatemalans, 93 Mexicans, two Israelis, and four Ukrainians were transported to the fairgrounds at the National Cattle Congress in nearby Waterloo, where a makeshift courtroom had been constructed on the dance floor of the Electric Park ballroom.

Speaker 1 In groups of 10, the detainees appeared in front of a judge where they faced charges related to identity theft. Most pleaded guilty and were sentenced to five months in a U.S.

Speaker 1 prison before deportation.

Speaker 1 Juveniles, adults with disabilities, and single mothers were released back into Postville with ankle monitors tracking their every move.

Speaker 4 It was the largest single immigration raid in the country. 700 warrants, 300 arrests, agriprocessors, a kosher meatpacking plant lost three-quarters of its workforce.
And tiny Postville, Iowa.

Speaker 1 Postville, Iowa was no longer the hometown to the world.

Speaker 1 Postville, Iowa was now home to the single largest immigration raid in United States history.

Speaker 16 This morning at 10 a.m., agents from U.S.

Speaker 16 Immigration and Customs Enforcement, with assistance from federal and state agencies, entered AgriProcessors Incorporated in Postville, Iowa as part of an ongoing investigation involving employees at AgriProcessors Incorporated.

Speaker 16 Those agents are executing a criminal search warrant for evidence relating to aggravated identity theft,

Speaker 16 fraudulent use of social security numbers, and other crimes, as well as a civil search warrant for people illegally in the United States.

Speaker 1 Families of the deportees were left without answers, without spouses, without parents.

Speaker 1 Those that weren't too afraid to show their faces in public found solace at their houses of worship where they were provided a hot meal and an opportunity to plead with their God.

Speaker 1 Sister Mary Macaulay from the St. Bridget Catholic Church in Postville was one of the first to arrive at the scene of the raid that day and one of the first to open her doors to those affected.

Speaker 14 I always say to people, we saw that evening humanity at its best and we also saw it at its worst because we saw what happens when the law of the land does not keep up with the need of the land.

Speaker 14 And so we saw families separated. We saw people

Speaker 14 fearing that they would never again see their mother or father or a spouse, thinking they will never again see their spouse or little children.

Speaker 1 For others like Dawn Hernandez, who was inspired by the raid to run for Postville City Council, there are some images from that day that are simply unshakable.

Speaker 17 There was a five-year-old little girl. She was a kindergartner and it was her birthday that day.

Speaker 17 She had on her little happy birthday hat and her little backpack on her back and was just sitting there.

Speaker 17 And that's the most painful memory for me to this day, even though it wasn't family, just that image of a five-year-old child not knowing if she had parents to go home to on her birthday.

Speaker 1 The entire community was in shock. While some Postville residents stayed behind to lend a helping hand, others took to the streets to voice their frustration

Speaker 13 and concern.

Speaker 3 For the raid that took place today in Postville, the National Cattle Congress behind me is the intake point. Everyone arrested is brought here to get their photograph taken and get fingerprinted.

Speaker 3 Now, to show their dislike of today's events, about a hundred people gathered with signs and flags around eight o'clock this evening.

Speaker 3 What was supposed to be a silent vigil quickly turned into a very loud, but for the most part, very peaceful protest.

Speaker 3 Protesters chanted things like, Ice go home, we need our parents, and shame on you.

Speaker 3 We saw people of all ages out here tonight voicing their frustration at what they call a misconception that all illegal immigrants are Mexican or that all Mexicans are.

Speaker 1 Although support for the undocumented workers was felt throughout the entire community, when the dust settled, it became clear that not everyone in Postville shared that opinion.

Speaker 1 This is a local radio host, Jeff Abbas.

Speaker 18 But we were getting emails along the lines of, you can't expect to bring these people in from another country, put them together, put them all to work at the plant, and then walk down the street together singing kumbaya.

Speaker 18 threatening emails. You know, you keep feeding these people, we're going to come in and burn that place down.
And the sad part of that is it's my generation that made it

Speaker 18 so intolerant and so

Speaker 18 this word is horrible and I hate to use it, but ignorant is basically what it is because there is an ignorance of the world around you.

Speaker 18 And until you can become aware of that world around you and your effect on that world by the actions that you either do or do not do,

Speaker 18 you're affecting everybody.

Speaker 1 But even those who were in support of the raid could not ignore the toll that the workers' absence was taking on the city of Postville.

Speaker 1 Businesses were closing, homes were foreclosing, population was dwindling, poverty was skyrocketing, and property values were plummeting.

Speaker 19 We can't even measure the amount of damage that we see. When I sit across the table from people,

Speaker 19 People that have been used to working

Speaker 19 for everything they had

Speaker 19 are all of a sudden having to sit across the table from someone who has to give them a handout.

Speaker 19 I can't believe that a government or a government agency that can create this much damage and not really be concerned about it.

Speaker 1 Many residents of Postville point their finger at the federal government for destroying their peaceful little town. But there was plenty of blame to go around.

Speaker 1 This is Father Paul Outerkirk, a retired priest from St. Bridget's, discussing the role that the Raboshkins and agri-processors played in Postville's demise.

Speaker 20 This has not created anything good for the community. It's created division, hurt, harm.
It was the dirtiest, unsafest plant I've ever been in. We're dealing with them.
We've seen

Speaker 20 the kid without the three fingers and the one with his hand missing.

Speaker 20 And when I was a pastor here, I took how many people to the doctor because of cuts. They have a responsibility to this whole

Speaker 20 community that they never really lived up to. They painted a good picture with words, but their actions spoke a different story.

Speaker 1 Shalom Raboshkin had his defenders as well.

Speaker 1 In fact, two weeks after the raid, A pro-agriprocessor's website named Postville Voices was created to defend the company's hiring practices, to set the record straight, to counteract some of the false narratives about the Raboshkins that the media was circulating.

Speaker 1 A few weeks later, it was discovered that Shalom Raboshkin's 24-year-old son Goetzel had created the website without publishing his name.

Speaker 7 A lot of the stuff is allegations that have yet to be proven. A lot of the stuff is rumor, outright lies.
There's a lot of stuff out there just floating around.

Speaker 1 Shalom's wife, Leah Raboshkin, also remained by her husband's side.

Speaker 21 To tell you the truth, basically this whole story has destroyed him, has wiped his name off the face of this earth. He's destroyed my kids.
I mean, this whole story has

Speaker 21 destroyed our kids. When you read the media reports, you're like, is this the same person that I've been living with for the last 28 years? But it's really hard.
It's really hard.

Speaker 21 We're doing the best we could do, you know, we're trying to stay focused.

Speaker 21 And instead of, you know, just lying in bed and groping around in the misery of it, the whole business, I mean, we have nothing financially.

Speaker 21 His name is mud. What else do we need to experience here? The stuff that has happened has brought a lot of pain to a lot of people.

Speaker 21 And

Speaker 21 our hope is that we can

Speaker 21 pick up the pieces and move on. The full story

Speaker 21 will eventually get out there.

Speaker 1 And through it all. Agri-processors continued operating normally, or at least they tried to.
At first, the company attempted to replace their half-deported workforce through a Waterloo staffing firm.

Speaker 1 But when the agency's workers reported back about the numerous safety hazards they had encountered at the facility, they were pulled from duty.

Speaker 1 At one point in September 2008, Aaron Ruboshkin, the patriarch and owner of AgriProcessors, even found a replacement for his son Shalom as CEO of the company.

Speaker 1 But even then, the business and the town continued to struggle.

Speaker 22 The Postville mayor says the agri-processors plant needs workers in order to stay open. And if it closes, he fears Postville will become a ghost town.

Speaker 22 Nearly every Hispanic business in that community was closed down yesterday, and owners told us their customers have simply disappeared. That could be many of them aren't going to open again today.

Speaker 22 People usually pack this diner here for lunch, but workers say the owner didn't even see a point of opening.

Speaker 23 And then, less than a month later, the largest employer in this small small yet diverse Iowa town has been forced to file for bankruptcy protection, blaming its financial problems on a May immigration raid on its Iowa plant in which nearly 400 people were arrested.

Speaker 1 Not only did AgriProcessors as a business come to an end in October 2008, so too did the investigation that spawned the initial raid.

Speaker 1 On October 30th, Shalom Raboshkin was arrested for intentionally helping illegal workers obtain false documentation.

Speaker 1 He was charged with harboring undocumented immigrants and aiding and abetting aggravated identity theft.

Speaker 1 Shalom's arrest happened just the day after the Iowa Labor Commissioner fined AgriProcessors $10 million for wage violations, such as shorting workers' pay and not paying overtime.

Speaker 1 An undercover agent had actually worked at AgriProcessors for months before the raid.

Speaker 1 He or she witnessed how the company helped the undocumented workers avoid detection, such as paying them from a different bank account and avoiding use of security clearance items, such as biometric devices.

Speaker 1 The informant also reported an incident where a supervisor at the plant had duct taped the eyes of one undocumented worker and hit him repeatedly with a meat hook.

Speaker 1 That worker told the informant that he would not report the abuse for fear of jeopardizing his job.

Speaker 1 Another witness, a former supervisor at AgriProcessors, told authorities that he had lost his job after discovering a meth lab in the plant.

Speaker 1 Of course, Shalom Raboshkin claimed ignorance of every accusation lobbied at the company he had been in charge of overseeing for the past decade.

Speaker 1 He claimed the undocumented and underage workers provided the false documentation when they were hired, and those safety violations and workplace injuries, just the grim reality of a dirty industry.

Speaker 1 Shalom Raboshkin was released on $1 million bond the same day he was arrested. He walked out of jail with a tracking device around his ankle.

Speaker 1 Raboshkin was to stay put in northern Iowa until he had his day in court.

Speaker 1 But soon, none of the current allegations would even matter. The bankruptcy of agri-processors had set off an entirely different chain of events.

Speaker 1 First Bank Business Capital had loaned the company $35 million.

Speaker 1 And when the news of AgriProcessors' bankruptcy reached the ears of the right suit, the bank came to collect its principal.

Speaker 1 One little problem. There was nothing to collect.
Millions of dollars at AgriProcessors was unaccounted for.

Speaker 1 In fact, the collateral that served as the basis for the loan from First Bank did did not even exist.

Speaker 1 Fake accounts receivables, fake bills of lading, fraudulent inventory, two sets of books, separate payrolls.

Speaker 1 The entire financial side of the business had been operated like an elaborate shell game in order to inflate the value of the company to qualify for additional loans.

Speaker 1 Money from legitimate invoices was used to pay fake invoices.

Speaker 1 Cash was funneled through secret bank accounts and laundered through separate Raboshkin ventures in Postville, like the kosher grocery store and Jewish Elementary School.

Speaker 1 And even though agri-processors never missed an interest payment during the entire life of the loan, prosecutors were alleging that the bank suffered a loss of more than $26 million as a result of the scheme.

Speaker 1 Messing with human lives is one thing, but playing with the bank's money, that's just asking for trouble.

Speaker 1 Shalom Raboshkin was arrested again on November 13, 2008, on 91 federal charges, including bank fraud.

Speaker 1 He was denied bail because the arresting officers had discovered a bag in his possession that contained $20,000 cash, silver coins, and his passport.

Speaker 1 Taking into consideration Israel's law of return, which grants automatic citizenship to any Jew upon immigration, The judge had determined that Shalom was a flight risk.

Speaker 1 That ruling was eventually overruled due to concerns that the law of return could be used to deny bail to every Jew who appears before a judge.

Speaker 1 So instead, Shalom Raboshkin was released on $500,000 bond with tight restrictions. His trial was scheduled for a year later in November 2009.
This is Shalom's attorney.

Speaker 24 There was no purpose other than publicity in arresting Mr.

Speaker 24 Raboshkin precipitously, and AgriProcessors is confident that when all the the facts are known and presented in a public trial, the company and Mr.

Speaker 25 Raboshkin will be vindicated.

Speaker 26 Thanks, Phil. Back to our breaking news tonight.

Speaker 26 A jury has reached a verdict in the case of former Iowa Kosher slaughterhouse manager Shaloom Rabashkin, who has been charged with 91 counts of financial fraud.

Speaker 26 Action news anchor Brian Allen joins us live on the phone. Brian.

Speaker 27 Katie, it is 86 guilty verdicts out of 91 possible charges of federal financial and bank fraud.

Speaker 27 Federal prosecutors made an argument, 91 charges worth, that Raboshkin had engaged in bank fraud, financial fraud, that he had violated federal payment laws requiring payments to be made to cattle producers within 24 hours.

Speaker 27 Again, the verdict, 86 out of 91 charges, guilty verdicts.

Speaker 1 On November 12th, 2009, Shalom Raboshkin was convicted of 86 counts of federal financial fraud charges related to the first bank loan.

Speaker 1 However, Raboshkin would never have to answer for the host of federal immigration charges levied against he and his father's company, because those charges were dismissed after a jury found him guilty of the financial crimes.

Speaker 1 That also meant that former workers of agri-processors would never get a chance to testify in court about the alleged abuses they had suffered under Mr. Raboshkin's watch.

Speaker 1 However, state charges related to child labor violations were still pending, so there was still a chance that Shalom Raboshkin would be punished for his crimes against humanity.

Speaker 1 Not that it would affect his time spent behind bars. He was already facing a very lengthy sentence.

Speaker 28 Raboshkin was found guilty of 86 charges of financial fraud earlier this month. He has been in jail ever since, facing possible sentencing of 1,200 years.

Speaker 1 1,200 years.

Speaker 1 Yikes,

Speaker 1 even I must admit that seems a bit egregious.

Speaker 1 After Shalom Raboshkin's conviction, a campaign began to limit his time in prison. Six former United States Attorneys General, as many as 17 former U.S.

Speaker 1 prosecutors, as well as dozens of sitting and former members of Congress on both sides of the aisle, including Nancy Pelosi, wrote letters to Judge Linda K.

Speaker 1 Reed, urging her to exercise a sentence that was, quote, sufficient but not greater than necessary.

Speaker 1 One of Raboshkin's attorneys, Eliza Lewin, pleaded their client's case, quote, our sense is that the call for a life sentence is completely disproportionate. This is a first-time non-violent offender.

Speaker 1 He has 10 children. One of them is severely Autistic.
He has done tremendous charitable work.

Speaker 1 To suggest that his activities warrant life in prison, where you put murderers, people who represent an ongoing threat to society, it makes no sense.

Speaker 1 The prosecution rejected the notion that Shalom Raboshkin was a sympathetic figure. Bob Tigg, a spokesman for the U.S.

Speaker 1 Attorney's Office, told ABC News, quote, there seems to be an orchestrated effort to spread misinformation and raise people's concerns falsely about this case. We're seeing thousands of emails.

Speaker 1 We've seen recent letters by former congressmen. There's an insistent thread of misinformation that runs through all of it.

Speaker 1 Looking at the facts of this case and then applying those guidelines to those facts, it appears his advisory guideline range would be in a range of life in prison, just because the facts are so egregious.

Speaker 1 Judge Linda Reed agreed. On June 22, 2010, Shalom Mordecai Raboshkin was sentenced to 27 years in prison and was ordered to pay back nearly $27 million in restitution.

Speaker 1 The 27-year sentence was two years longer than prosecutors had asked for.

Speaker 1 Raboshkin began serving that sentence on August 3rd, 2010, with a scheduled release of some time in 2033.

Speaker 1 Upon his release, Shalom Raboshkin would be 75 years old.

Speaker 1 Raboshkin's defense team and supporters were devastated with the outcome.

Speaker 25 For the first time in the history of the United States, somebody was criminally prosecuted under the Packers and Stockyards Act of 1921, and that's a reason for sending somebody off to jail and seeing that he gets 27 years in jail.

Speaker 1 It's crazy.

Speaker 29 In my opinion, this is the second raid on Postville. The first one destroyed the community.

Speaker 30 And now, by giving him a sentence that has absolutely no relation to the truth,

Speaker 8 they've reopened the wounds.

Speaker 29 They've divided us again. Because now, you stand up for Shalom.
Some people want to think you're standing up for somebody who broke the law.

Speaker 1 This is Shalom's wife, Leah.

Speaker 31 Our reaction is outrageous. Our reaction is:

Speaker 31 why does Shalom need to be treated differently than any other person in the United States of America?

Speaker 31 Why, unlike other white-collar criminals, does he deserve to get a life sentence?

Speaker 1 I'll let the U.S. Attorney's Office answer that one.

Speaker 32 It's hard to get up to a 27-year sentence for white-collar crime. It is very difficult.
And the only way he did that was by

Speaker 32 committing a $26 million fraud, having a sophisticated fraud scheme, committing money laundering that was sophisticated, by getting others involved in his crimes.

Speaker 32 The defendant isn't the victim in this case, and that's the thing we want to make very

Speaker 1 However, the case did take a weird turn about six months later.

Speaker 33 Yeah, actually, after Mr. Rubashkin was sentenced,

Speaker 33 Freedom of Information Act documents came to light that showed that the judge in the case had met with prosecutors, with Homeland Security, for seven months leading up to

Speaker 29 the raid.

Speaker 33 Of course,

Speaker 33 that's alarming.

Speaker 1 On January 3rd, 2011, new evidence surfaced that Judge Linda Reed participated in numerous meetings with prosecutors before the raid had even taken place, as if she had helped plan the massive bust herself.

Speaker 1 And then for her to preside over the trial of the man she helped arrest.

Speaker 1 Not a good look, to say the least.

Speaker 1 It was also discovered that not only did Judge Reed's husband, Michael Figginshaw, own stock in two of the largest private prison corporations in the United States, it was revealed that Judge Reed's husband had purchased that stock just five days before 400 illegal workers were arrested in Postville.

Speaker 1 With this new highly concerning evidence in hand, Shalom Raboshkin's lawyers appealed for a new trial. But on September 16, 2011, the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals denied his motion.

Speaker 1 Things were looking bleak. for Shalom Raboshkin.
Over the next several years, his lawyers continued to fight for an appeal, but but were blocked at every turn.

Speaker 1 And just as soon as all hope was lost, something happened that nobody saw coming.

Speaker 35 The Fox News decision desk has called Pennsylvania for Donald Trump. This means that Donald Trump will be the 45th President of the United States.

Speaker 1 As soon as Donald Trump won the 2016 presidential election, a man named Charles Kushner began lobbying for the release of Shalom Raboshkin.

Speaker 1 If you don't know, Charles Kushner is the father of Jared Kushner, the weird robot guy that's married to Donald Trump's daughter, Bavanka.

Speaker 1 Charles Kushner is also a convicted felon. In 2005, Charles served 14 months in prison on charges of witness tampering, tax evasion, and illegal campaign contributions.

Speaker 1 Charles is also an observant Jew, and he credits the Chabad-Lubavitch movement, in which the Raboshkin family has tremendous influence for helping him with his religious obligations, such as kosher meals, while he was locked away.

Speaker 1 Finally, with Trump's election, the right pieces were in place to free Shalom.

Speaker 1 And anybody that knows anything about Donald Trump knows that he will do anything for daddy's little girl.

Speaker 4 Said that if Ivanka weren't my daughter, perhaps I'd be dating her.

Speaker 1 On December 20th, 2017, on the last day of Hanukkah, President Trump commuted the 27-year prison sentence of Shalom Ruboshkin.

Speaker 36 President Donald Trump commuted the 27-year prison sentence of Shalom Ruboshkin.

Speaker 36 A statement from the White House said Trump's decision was based on expressions of support from members of Congress and a broad cross-section of the legal community.

Speaker 36 Ruboshkin served more than eight years of his prison sentence. The commutation isn't a presidential pardon and doesn't overturn his conviction.

Speaker 1 A statement released by the president clarified that his action was, quote, not a presidential pardon. It does not vacate Mr.

Speaker 1 Raboshkin's conviction, and it leaves in place a term of supervised release and a substantial restitution obligation, which were also part of Mr. Raboshkin's sentence.

Speaker 1 Nevertheless, Shalom Raboshkin was free to go home.

Speaker 10 And I want to thank everybody for calling and showing me. I've got a lot of letters talking about Rashim.
What we're seeing here tonight, I can't believe. Nobody can believe.

Speaker 10 In the whole jail, nobody can believe that I walked out.

Speaker 10 Mamish, I looked at his people's faces. They were dumbfounded.
They wanted to bury the guy for who knows how many years. And then he walks away.

Speaker 10 He walks high, walks high, walks high, walks high, walks high, walks high, walks high, walks high.

Speaker 1 As for those state charges of child labor violations that were still pending after Raboshkin's federal conviction, well,

Speaker 37 Shalom Raboshkin is not guilty. A Black Hawk County jury returned that verdict today on on dozens of charges of child labor violations.

Speaker 34 The state trial against the former manager of the Agri-Processors meatpacking plant lasted more than a month. The jury returned not guilty verdicts for all 67 counts against Raboshkin.

Speaker 34 Of course, Shalom Raboshkin already found guilty on federal fraud charges, but then to have all of these child labor law, the state case, all just a big acquittal.

Speaker 1 Several low-level managers and supervisors from agriprocessors did serve short sentences for certain labor violations and document fraud.

Speaker 1 But in the end, it seems nobody suffered more damage than the people doing the dirty work on the factory floor, along with the community that supported them.

Speaker 1 Back in Postville, Iowa, things are slowly returning to normal. A company named AgriStar bought the old agri-processors plant.
Jobs are coming back. The local economy is recovering.

Speaker 1 But the townspeople won't ever be able to forget about the raid that day in 2008.

Speaker 1 And they can't help but watch as the federal government continues to treat the symptom of undocumented work rather than the disease that causes it.

Speaker 18 It should work where the job is attractive enough to employ people locally. That's how it should work.
It'll never be that way because the American public wants cheap products.

Speaker 18 As long as that desire for cheap products is there and cheap food,

Speaker 18 then the the need for cheap labor is going to be there as well. And the only way we're going to get cheap labor is to exploit those people who are here

Speaker 18 without a voice.

Speaker 1 Swindled is written, researched, produced, and hosted by me, a concerned citizen, with original music by Trevor Howard.

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