Immigration enforcement raid sparks outcry

Depending on where you stand, last month's early-morning raid on the Michael Bianco company in New Bedford, Mass., which ended with the arrests of 361 undocumented workers -- more than 70 percent of the leather goods factory's workforce -- was either an unqualified success for immigration law enforcement or the kind of humanitarian catastrophe that attends natural disasters.

But regardless of your view, one thing seems clear: The emotionally charged raid and the uproar that followed reveal more about the underlying tensions of immigration politics than officials like to admit.

It has taken several weeks for all of the facts in this bureaucratic "Rashomon" to surface. First, there is the feds' account.

Starting as early as November, officials from the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency told the Massachusetts Department of Public Safety that they were planning a work-site raid in New Bedford, which would lead to the arrests of hundreds of illegal workers and to charges against the factory owner and managers. The officials were careful not to reveal all the particulars for fear of alerting their targets.

In late December, ICE officials also briefed the state's incoming secretary of public safety, they said, so that Democratic Gov.-elect Deval Patrick's administration would be up to speed.

Massachusetts officials tell a slightly different story. They agree that ICE gave them advance warning and asked for police protection for the federal agents on the scene. However, Kevin Burke, Patrick's new public safety chief, says he told ICE officials repeatedly that he feared that young children might be abandoned if their immigrant-worker parents were arrested and possibly deported.

Burke has said he pressed ICE to let state social workers interview detainees at the factory -- before they were taken to a federal holding facility -- so that officials could determine who had dependent children; those workers would then be allowed to go home.

ICE rejected this request, but it agreed to set up a "triage team." One ICE official relayed news from the factory to social workers, who stayed in touch with families. ICE also agreed to let social workers conduct interviews at a nearby Army base, Fort Devens, where ICE took detainees for further questioning.

Now here's where accounts begin to diverge even more. After the raid on March 6, stories quickly circulated that babies and small children were left without parents, and that husbands and wives were desperately searching for their spouses. A local media frenzy ensued, and the raid's outcome drew the ire of Massachusetts' two Democratic senators, Edward Kennedy and John Kerry -- both of whom were told of the raid in advance.

Patrick, the new governor, also apparently received advance notice of the raid, and Burke had told him he was worried about families being possibly separated.

But when Patrick spoke at a news conference six days after the raid, he said: "Our expectation ... was that we would have access at the [factory]. We then expected we would have access at Fort Devens. We didn't get that access from the folks who were making the calls on the ground," meaning ICE.

To that assertion, one ICE official with direct knowledge of the planning and the raid replied, "That's absolutely inaccurate." It was clear from the beginning, the official said, that ICE considered the raid a law enforcement action, meaning that the Michael Bianco factory was a crime scene and social workers couldn't go inside.

After the detainees were taken to Fort Devens, the official and others at ICE have said, social workers were allowed to interview them. And before that, ICE officials, including staff who spoke Spanish and Portuguese, asked the workers multiple times whether they had any health problems or family-care issues, officials said.

Based on those interviews, agents released 35 workers at the factory. Officials also allowed workers to use mobile phones to make personal calls. Twenty-four more workers were released at Fort Devens, and 31 more were freed in subsequent days from holding facilities in Texas.

In the end, the raid threw hundreds of lives into turmoil, and immigration laws were enforced. Yet by all accounts, no children landed in foster care. This outcome, though, has done nothing to squelch the outrage over the raid.

With the Senate set to take up debate on a massive immigration reform plan next month, and with President Bush making a public push for stricter immigration enforcement and the enactment of a controversial temporary-worker program, accusations of humanitarian insensitivity, bureaucratic bungling, and blatant political hide-covering are flying from all quarters.

Patrick, whose reputation is suffering after a series of rookie political missteps, was excoriated by Boston editorial writers. They charged that the governor either misunderstood the raid's rules, or, worse, tried to mislead the public about what he really knew ahead of time.

State officials have cast ICE as an overzealous police agency. ICE officials say privately that the locals are trying to have it both ways: They first cooperate with federal enforcement actions, but then come out swinging when things get messy.

Kennedy, who is directing Senate action on the immigration bill, has called for an investigation into the raid and likened the results to "the tragedy and human suffering that we all witnessed after the devastation wreaked by Hurricane Katrina."

Officials with the governor's office, the public safety office, and the Massachusetts Executive Office of Health and Human Services all failed to respond to multiple requests for interviews for this story.

The sole official who agreed to speak on the record was Marcy Forman, the director of the Office of Investigations at ICE. She said she had a "simple answer" for the ferocious reaction to the New Bedford raid: The immigration issue is up for debate in Congress right now, Forman noted, and "when you're dealing with human lives, instead of contraband, people get torn."

Forman, a career federal law enforcement official, defended her agency's actions.

"There was plenty of pre-notification and planning," she said. "Actually, it was unprecedented."

Asked whether state officials were trying to have it both ways -- that is, cooperating with federal law enforcement while still protecting their constituent interests -- Forman responded carefully. "It's a very difficult issue," she said. Law enforcement "is looking for a way to work with the policy makers.... We're only enforcing the laws Congress gave us."

But other Homeland Security officials said that state and local officials -- not just in Massachusetts -- are using them as a punching bag. State and local complaints have followed upon a dramatic escalation in immigration enforcement action.

In just the past six weeks, federal immigration authorities say they have arrested more than 742 undocumented workers at factories and work sites across the country. (Technically these are "administrative apprehensions": The workers do not face criminal charges but are instead sent to administrative deportation proceedings.)

In fiscal 2006, ICE made 3,667 apprehensions at work sites, a threefold increase from the previous year. The agency is also targeting for actual criminal prosecution those employers who knowingly hire illegal workers. Fraudulent document makers faced prosecution as well. ICE arrested 718 people at work sites in fiscal 2006 on criminal charges, including hiring undocumented workers and making false documents.

Nolan Rappaport, minority counsel for the House Judiciary subcommittee on immigration and border security, said that the ICE raids are indeed meant to send a message to company owners.

Stressing that he spoke for himself and not the committee, Rappaport said, "It appears that Mr. Bush thinks if you can make a big fuss out of flashy raids all over the country, you can scare a lot of employers out of their practice of hiring illegal aliens."

But in New Bedford, Mayor Scott Lang says that ICE officials simply chose to make an example of his town in an attempt to pressure Congress to pass immigration reform and a temporary-worker program that would give undocumented immigrants some ability to stay in the country legally.

Calling the raid on the Michael Bianco factory "arbitrary," Lang complained that current immigration enforcement "doesn't do anything other than disrupt the localities, disrupt the families."