The sweep last week shook immigrants here illegally and legally. As many residents leave, towns and schools feel the effects.
WINDOM, MINN. -- Any other Thursday, the aisles of the Rincon Latino grocery here would be full of customers. But last week, in the aftermath of an immigration raid in nearby Worthington, store owner Maria Amaya could only throw up her hands in despair.
Business was bad. Real bad.
By midafternoon she had made only two sales. One was to a husband and tearful wife so frightened by the raid they had quit their jobs at a beef processing plant and bought bus tickets for Mexico.
The couple told Amaya that their son was one of 230 illegal immigrants arrested in the raid on the Swift & Co. pork processing plant, part of a crackdown on the rampant use of stolen identities by immigrants hoping to land jobs in the United States.
News of the raid, one of six carried out at Swift plants across the country, has rattled immigrant workers in food-processing plants across Minnesota. And nowhere is the impact more intense than along a 75-mile stretch of Hwy. 60.
That's where a half-dozen processing plants between Worthington and Madelia employ hundreds of immigrants, most of whom are Hispanic.
"They're afraid to go to the bank, to the stores," Amaya said. "They don't take their things. They just pick up and go, and it's hard, because they work really hard."
Hours after the Worthington raid, much of the city's Hispanic community, estimated at 3,500 people -- about half of whom are thought to be in the country illegally -- began clearing out.
The aftershocks were felt as far away as Madelia, 75 miles away, where the Tony Downs Foods processing plant employs nearly 300 production-line workers.
"People are feeling uncomfortable, so they are going to be moving," said the Rev. Hector Andrade, pastor at Communidad Cristiana de Worthington Church, which provided shelter for more than 45 Swift workers and their families in the days after the raid. "If they haven't left yet, they'll come back and get their clothes and find a job elsewhere."
Some Worthington residents said last week that the sweep was long overdue in the city, population 12,000. Worthington police said the problem of identity theft among immigrants working at Swift had become more evident in recent years.
Worthington police Sgt. Kevin Flynn said officers frequently encounter the problem while responding to calls or making traffic stops. Illegal workers would identify themselves by their real names, but also carried documentation stolen from U.S. citizens.
"They'd just be real upfront with us," Flynn said. "And the documents they had were actual documents. They weren't forgeries or fakes of any kind. They were the real deal."
By Tuesday night, immigration agents had arrested 230 workers at the Swift plant. But Andrade and others in the community say maybe twice as many workers fled town, or plan to leave soon, to avoid the risk of being arrested.
Talk of the townsThe sense of fear and distrust is rampant in towns along Hwy. 60, where some of Minnesota's largest concentrations of Hispanics live, drawn by the steady paychecks at the plants.
In Brewster, 9 miles northeast of Worthington, a family of four took shelter in the home of Rev. Jose Javier Romero, pastor at the Church of God of the Prophecy in Worthington, in the days after the raid. The father, who entered the country illegally, works at a packinghouse in Luverne.
At the Butterfield-Odin schools, where about a quarter of the district's 208 students are Hispanic, the sweep was the talk of the school. Teachers heard students asking classmates: "Did your dad go to work today?"
And in nearby St. James, Dionicio Ramirez, an employee at the Smithfield Foods lunch meat plant, said the rumor is that immigration authorities are going to hit other plants.
Darin Rehnelt, vice president of United Food and Commercial Workers Local 1161, which represents plants in Madelia, Butterfield, St. James and Worthington, said union officials have been checking daily with the plants to see whether the raid is scaring off employees at plants in other towns.
