Immigrant nightmare

NCR photos/Pat Marrin: Mary McCauley stands with Juana, one of many American-born children who face deportation to Guatemala.For Mary McCauley, a Sister of Mercy of the Blessed Virgin Mary and pastoral administrator of St. Bridget Church here, the threat of an immigration raid has long hung over this small northeastern town like the ominous spring weather. The tornado siren is at the ready here, loud enough to rattle nerves and windows, like the passing freight trains that roll through town carrying away processed meat from Agriprocessors slaughter facility, the town’s largest employer.

When the raid came May 12, she was unprepared for its scope and ferocity, for the misery it inflicted on the mostly Guatemalan people who work at the plant and on their families. Nor could she foresee that opening the doors of St. Bridget Church to hundreds of frightened women and children would also reopen the debate over sanctuary -- asylum on church property (see sidebar below) -- and the prospects of a future standoff between the Catholic church and federal enforcement of current immigration laws.

These questions were to unfold in the chaos of the ensuing hours and days.

Two months in the planning, the raid involved hundreds of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents operating under Homeland Security. The agents assembled 70 miles away at the National Cattle Congress fairgrounds in the town of Waterloo to conduct “training exercises” while a state-of-the-art detention and processing center, including a temporary courtroom, was being set up. In the early hours of May 12, a large convoy of white buses marked with the Homeland Security logo, led by Iowa State troopers, their lights flashing, sped north and east to tiny Postville.

Agents closed roads, moved into housing areas and surrounded the plant. They came with 700 arrest warrants. Almost 400 workers were rounded up, put on buses and taken back to Waterloo.

Earlier that morning, McCauley said, she was alerted that agents were on their way. Paul Rael, St. Bridget’s Hispanic ministry coordinator, went to pass out fliers informing people of their rights, and at 10 a.m., as helicopters circled overhead, he and McCauley went to the Agriprocessors plant, a facility that describes itself as the largest kosher slaughterhouse in the country. There McCauley met the chief of police, a friend, and said, “If you hear that anyone needs anything, tell them to come to St. Bridget.” The remark foreshadowed a tumultuous day.

Chaos and fear

“By the time we got back to the church, there were already eight to 10 terrified people here, and they asked if others could come. And we said, ‘Anyone can come, all are welcome,’ and soon hundreds had sought safe haven in the church and church hall,” she said. “It was chaotic and the fear was palpable, babies screaming, women in tears, not knowing where their husbands were or if they would see them again.”

Many of the men and women detained at the plant had children at home or in the public school. An ICE spokesperson told the swarming TV film crews and reporters who had come with the convoy that for humanitarian reasons one parent -- mother or father -- would be released to care for dependent children. This would take hours and in some instances, days, as the detainees were first transported to Waterloo, processed and fitted with black GPS ankle bracelets. About 60, mostly mothers, still in shock, eventually rejoined their children at the church. In the days to come, as many as 400 people were fed each day, and at night, too frightened to return to their homes, many chose to sleep on the floors and in the pews of the church.

A woman shows the GPS monitor agents put on her ankle before releasing her to care for two small children.The Red Cross came with food, blankets and pillows, but told McCauley they were limited because they only cover natural disasters, not man-made ones. Volunteers poured in from nearby Luther College in Decatur. Their conference, Evangelical Lutheran Church of America, sent aid pointedly designated as “disaster assistance.” Other volunteers representing the large concentration of Catholic sisters’ communities in the region came bringing their expertise in community networking to widen the circle of support across the nation.

In Waterloo, a second command center was organized at El Centro Latinoamericano, a Hispanic resource center, to monitor the conditions of the detainees at the fairgrounds. By the end of the week, 260 persons had been charged and convicted of criminal use of false IDs and were headed to federal prisons out of state to serve five-month sentences, which would be followed by deportation. Others received lesser sentences.

Ten days into the crisis, mothers wearing the black GPS ankle monitors held infants and toddlers as they waited to speak with lawyers who had come to St. Bridget to help untangle the complex legal issues affecting the detainees, including a sudden ramping-up of civil to criminal charges for this group. Legal critics of the operation, especially of its rapid adjudication process before many of the detainees had any chance to seek their own legal representation, have stirred speculation about the raid’s political purpose -- saying it was to showcase the prowess of Homeland Security and signal a new get-tough approach to enforcement under the Bush administration.

Safe haven or sanctuary?

McCauley described St. Bridget’s role as a “safe haven” in TV interviews, avoiding the term sanctuary. McCauley insisted that the parish had provided only humanitarian aid.

Iowa Catholic Conference director Dave Chapman told NCR that he knew of no understanding between church officials and Immigration and Customs Enforcement about churches as off-limits. “Legally, ICE can go wherever it wants if it has a warrant. It is impossible to give any reassurances. Our commitment is to be there to support people.”

For McCauley, surrounded by the families who have sought refuge at the church with their children, it has been a heartbreaking time. “It’s as if we have experienced 390 deaths, with 300 other people fearing that they might experience this same death in their family. They might be the person,” she said, as she relived some of the worst moments of the past week.

“I can only embrace them and say, ‘I am so sorry for what our country is doing to you.’ They are so humble. Their lives go from one disappointment to the next. Yet their faith is so strong. I was moved as I watched a woman kneel in the center aisle of the church holding a candle, or as another small family stood praying at the statue of our Lady of Guadalupe.

“Symbols become so important at times like this,” she said. “A candle or the stethoscope the health nurse wore around her neck. The mothers knew that if their babies got sick, she would be there. I called Dubuque, where all the priests had gone for a day of prayer the day of the raid, saying to one, ‘Come, they need to see a collar.’ It is an important symbol of the church. When he arrived I asked him to comfort a young boy, both of whose parents were taken.”

McCauley said she had recently talked to graduating seniors at one of the nearby parishes. “I quoted Madeleine Sophie Barat, ‘You say we are weak. Have you considered the strength of God?’ and Psalm 105, ‘Turn to the Lord, your strength, seek his presence always.’ ” Barat founded the Society of the Sacred Heart in France in the 1800s. The order is dedicated to educating young women.

“Only later did I realize that this was God preparing me for what was about to happen,” she said.

Larger questions loom

As the events of May 12 receded, the initial chaos abated into a numbing, surreal calm covering shock, grief and a sense of the inevitable. Most of the nearly 700 Guatemalans in Postville, some residents for almost 10 years, plan to depart -- almost a third of the town’s 2,300 inhabitants and a full three-fourths of the workforce at the plant.

Rael, whom McCauley credits with building St. Bridget’s relationship with the Hispanic community, was at his desk in the parish house as men and women waited for help with passports and birth certificates they will take with them back to Guatemala to show that their children born here are American citizens. He had spent the week negotiating with plant officials to get paychecks to the workers’ families. Without income, some were already being turned out of rental housing.

Two weeks after the raid, news reports indicated that Agriprocessors was still in operation but having difficulty finding replacement workers. NCR was unable to reach the plant for comment by phone or with e-mail inquiries to their Web site.

Post mortems of the raid, official and unofficial, continue to circulate on the Internet -- YouTube videos of agents going house to house looking for immigrants not snared at the plant; blogs condemning McCauley and Dubuque Archbishop Jerome Hanus for their “misplaced compassion.” Other posts spoke of McCauley as a kind of “Rosa Parks” and her action as reminiscent of the early days of the civil rights movement.

Matt M. Dummermuth, U.S. attorney for Iowa’s Northern District, touted the raid as the largest enforcement operation of its type ever in Iowa, and called it “an astonishing success.” Claude Arnold, a special agent with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said it was necessary to “maintain the integrity of the immigration system.”

McCauley disagreed. “My concern is, as they held up the law, they totally neglected the integrity of the person and the integrity of the family, as families broke apart. Little children who are being educated -- future bilingual, wonderfully gifted people from our total United States community, and we now have deprived ourselves of that gift. So I think the real call for all of us is to work toward immigration reform.”

She dismissed any talk of her being the focus of St. Bridget’s role in welcoming the immigrant community. “If there were any Rosa Parkses here,” she said, “they were the women who continued to protest even after they had been fitted with ankle monitors.”

Echoing remarks by Hanus, the archbishop, McCauley said that the goal now has to be challenging laws that target the most vulnerable people among us. “Our current enforcement-only immigration policy is totally inappropriate to the reality and suffering of people,” she said.

Patrick Marrin, editor of Celebration, NCR’s liturgy publication, contributes frequently to the newspaper.

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Sanctuary
Defined as “immunity to arrest afforded by a sacred place,” the idea of sanctuary dates back to fourth-century English law. Similar to political asylum, it justifies the immunity on church premises for persons fleeing arrest under fear of violence or loss of due process.

The Sanctuary Movement
Between 1982 and 1992, many refugees fleeing the civil wars in Central America were denied U.S. asylum because the United States government supported the juntas or rebel groups in their home countries. Hundreds of churches transported and harbored refugees in defiance of immigration laws. Some Catholic parishes took part, but the Catholic church took no official position and did not publicly support civil disobedience.

The New Sanctuary Movement
In 2007, a coalition of churches and other activist groups launched a movement to protest the detention and deportation of economic refugees in the United States under post-9/11 Homeland Security anti-terrorism laws. Supporters argue that current immigration law is broken and that enforcement measures often violate basic human rights, divide families and disproportionately punish poorer immigrants drawn here to fill available low-wage jobs without hope of legalization. Supporters offer humanitarian aid, legal help and, when needed, safe havens for undocumented immigrants facing deportation.

U.S. Catholic bishops
The church has issued numerous pastoral letters and statements laying down principles on immigration reform that respect both right of governments to regulate their borders and the right of people to emigrate legally and to be treated humanely. In response to press inquiries about the “New Sanctuary Movement,” the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops issued a 2007 statement saying that the conference “does not take a formal position on the issue, which is left up to individual bishops as heads of their respective dioceses. However, permitting parishes to provide sanctuary in violation of federal immigration law could invite prosecution and penalties upon conviction for priests and possibly bishops who aid and abet, or participate in such practices.”

Individual leaders
Los Angeles Cardinal Roger Mahony electrified the immigration debate in a 2005 letter to President Bush saying that he would instruct church workers to ignore a proposed federal law that would have criminalized knowingly aiding undocumented persons. Mahony argued that churches are not required to screen applicants to determine their legal status. The measure was voted down in Congress.

CNS/David Crenshaw: Bishop Edward SlatteryIn 2007, Tulsa, Okla., Bishop Edward Slattery publicly opposed a state law criminalizing assistance to undocumented people, promising to “go to prison” before he, his priests and deacons would comply with it. He also condemned enforcement agent visits to churches at Mass times, saying he would go underground if necessary to continue to provide the sacraments to undocumented church members.

National Catholic Reporter June 13, 2008