Placating the GOP base or protecting the workplace?

The workers and their attorneys say that in Texas many people were denied due process -- to which even illegal immigrants have the right under the U.S. Constitution. Lawyers who flew to Texas to interview detainees found that 54 people who had signed a waiver saying they would not appeal their deportation did not understand what they had signed. Some believed it was a request to speak to an attorney. One man who had won an order from a federal court temporarily blocking his deportation was deported anyway. An ICE official later said it was a case of mistaken identify.

Afterwards, Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick described the situation in New Bedford as a "humanitarian crisis" and U.S. Sen. Ted Kennedy compared the devastation to the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

"I believe that [ICE] conducts these raids in a way that people are purposefully unable to exercise their rights," says Laura Rotolo, an attorney with the ACLU of Massachusetts who interviewed some detainees at Fort Devens. "They transfer people across the country before they can speak to anybody, and then when they are given a bond hearing in Texas, asking to be released before trial, they must prove they are not a flight risk and that they have ties to the community. Of course they have no ties to the community in Texas."

DHS officials, however, argue that the criticism of the raid is unwarranted and emphasize that 36 people were released from the factory, and 24 from Fort Devens, after agents determined them to have credible family issues. "I strongly reject the argument that we did not make extraordinary efforts on the humanitarian side," says ICE spokesman Marc Raimondi, who declined to provide other ICE officials for interviews. "We take great care in conducting enforcement operations with dignity and respect for those detained." The only way any child would have been left without reasonable adult supervision, he says, while refuting claims that any instances of that occurred in New Bedford, was if a detainee had lied to agents during questioning and denied having children at home.

He also says that his agency worked closely with the Department of Social Services and other state officials prior to the raid, and accuses the DSS of engaging in revisionist history. Plus, he adds, ICE is not concerned about the costs of such raids, though he would not disclose them. "This is about stopping employers from helping to break the laws and holding accountable those that do."

But the owner, Francesco Insolia, never spent a night in jail, and the factory was back in operation the following day. In the weeks that followed, more than 200 workers remained in detention, yet Insolia returned to work and was granted permission to travel to Puerto Rico and Panama. Insolia, who did not return calls from Salon, faces $45,000 in fines for workplace safety violations and a federal charge of conspiring to hire illegal aliens, but he continues to draw profits from his military contracts.

While some elements of Bush's immigration reform plan will come before Congress as individual bills or amendments to other measures, the consensus in Washington is that Congress will probably not consider anything as comprehensive prior to the 2008 election. A question on some people's minds, therefore, is whether the raids will persist. "It'll be interesting to see what happens," says Roy Beck of NumbersUSA. "If the president decides to give up on his efforts to pass amnesty, will the raids continue?"

According to immigration officials, the answer is yes. In 2005, President Bush signed a bill doubling the resources for such measures, and the 2007 fiscal year budget includes funding for more than 20,000 additional prison beds to hold undocumented workers awaiting deportation. "We're going to continue to be tough," says Raimondi. "Worksite enforcement measures are here to stay."

Kennedy, a key proponent of Bush's immigration reform plan, points to the increased number of raids as another example of why Congress needs to continue to rethink our nation's policy. "The raids in New Bedford and elsewhere are merely a stopgap solution that unfairly penalizes vulnerable workers in an already flawed system," Kennedy said in a statement. "There are 12 million undocumented immigrants in the United States. Arresting 300 of them may generate some headlines for DHS, but such raids do not begin to solve the immigration issue."

For people like Juan Tum, the recent collapse of the immigration reform bill was a crushing, and highly personal, defeat. He and 145 others detained at MBI have been released on bail, awaiting their immigration court dates as 137 others -- including Tum's wife -- remain in federal detention centers. But the possibility they will avoid deportation is increasingly dim.

"The thing that everyone is waiting for is immigration reform," Tum says. "We came here to escape poverty, to allow our children to study and become educated ... We are not hiding. We are not trying to not pay our taxes. We are willing to do whatever it takes to comply with the law if we are given the opportunity to do that."

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