Swift & Co. should have their license to do business revoked immediately, hiring 1200 illegals, come the fuck on.A proposal to prohibit local law enforcement officials from conducting raids on illegal immigrants in Des Moines was presented to at least one City Council member recently.
Councilwoman Christine Hensley said Sunday that she spoke about six weeks ago with representatives of two immigration-rights groups that presented a plan that would block local city departments - including the police - from conducting raids on immigrants or inquiring about a person's immigration status.
Aspects of the proposal, brought up Sunday at an immigration forum, are similar to a national trend of "sanctuary cities."
"They're looking at ordinances that have been passed in other parts of the country that would address that ," Hensley said. "It's really important to emphasize it's in the very, very beginning stages of discussion."
Hensley said the impetus for the ordinance is illegal immigrants who fear raids and do not come to work, incurring costs on their employers.
"What I suggested to them is there has to be a lot of discussion about it and whether or not there's really a problem," she said.
Details on the plan and its chances of becoming an ordinance are unknown.
Alex Orozco, executive director of the Iowa-based Network Against Human Trafficking who is one of the people who met with Hensley, said Sunday he is trying to set up a meeting with Des Moines Mayor Frank Cownie before the end of the year.
Orozco would not name the other immigration-rights group involved in the proposal.
Orozco declined to elaborate on specifics of the proposal except to say that "the ordinance would make it harder to conduct raids" and "all the city departments would be involved."
Hensley said she didn't have more details about the plan.
Councilmen Tom Vlassis, Bob Mahaffey and Michael Kiernan each said they had not heard of the plan.
Cownie, Councilmen Brian Meyer and Chris Coleman could not be reached for comment.
Orozco said media coverage of the plan while it is still in the preliminary stages would hurt its chances of passage. "We don't want anybody with hard feelings about this issue to get mad when we haven't even finalized it," he said.
Orozco had made a reference to the proposal earlier Sunday at an immigration forum at Plymouth Congregational Church in Des Moines.
Even without all the details, some aspects of the proposal appear to mimic a nationwide trend: so-called "sanctuary cities" that direct local police not to look for violations of immigration law.
The term "sanctuary city" has come under scrutiny, said Tim Counts, a spokesman for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, adding that there is no legal definition.
Counts said that as far as he knew, any city ordinance would not interfere with federal agents conducting raids.
Nearly 70 cities, counties, and states have enacted sanctuary policies, according to a preliminary count by the National Immigration Law Center, but the Congressional Research Service in 2006 put the number at 32 cities and counties, according to a Sept. 25 article in the Christian Science Monitor.
A major raid in Iowa came last Dec. 12 when immigration agents swept through Swift & Co. meatpacking plants in Marshalltown and five other cities nationwide, arresting about 1,200 workers - one-tenth of Swift's work force - on immigration or identity-theft charges.
The raids prompted a September federal civil-rights lawsuit filed in Texas against both the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and Immigration and Customs Enforcement by some of the workers detained.
In August 2000, Des Moines police detained 49 illegal immigrants in a raid on a south-side bar that they said was the result of a six-week police investigation of drugs allegedly being sold at the establishment.
Sanctuary cities are not a solution to our problems, but it amuses me that cities will invoke 'civil disobedience' by ignoring their responsibilities for a crime like illegal immigration... people that they know nothing about and have no way of keeping track of... yet they blindly enforce other responsibilities against registered citizens that have no effect on anything.. I want to start my own little sanctuary city...
