From Yahoo:
DES MOINES, Iowa - Iowa labor officials said Tuesday that they had uncovered dozens of child labor violations at the nation's biggest supplier of kosher meat.
Officials from the state's Labor Commissioner's Office said their investigation, which spanned several months, uncovered 57 cases of child labor law violations at the Agriprocessors kosher meatpacking plant in Postville, where nearly 400 workers were arrested this spring in the largest immigration enforcement operation in U.S. history.
The types of violations included minors working in prohibited occupations, exceeding allowable hours for youth to work, failure to obtain work permits, exposure to hazardous chemicals and working with prohibited tools.
"The investigation brings to light egregious violations of virtually every aspect of Iowa's child labor laws," Dave Neil, Iowa Labor Commissioner, said in a statement. "It is my recommendation that the attorney general's office prosecute these violations to the fullest extent of the law."
Juda Engelmayer, an Agriprocessors spokesman, declined to comment.
Federal immigration agents arrested 389 illegal-immigrant workers, mostly Guatemalans, in a May 12 raid at the Agriprocessors plant. Most of the arrested workers pleaded guilty within a week and are serving sentences in federal prisons outside Iowa before being deported. Allegations of child labor violations were included in an initial affidavit and a search warrant that led to the raid at Agriprocessors, which also operates a plant near Gordon, Neb.
Kerry Koonce, a spokeswoman for Iowa Workforce Development, the agency that oversees the labor commission, said Iowa's child labor investigation into Agriprocessors began before the federal immigration raid and was independent of the raid.
Under Iowa law, it is illegal for children under the age of 18 to work in meatpacking plants. Koonce said the number of violations is much larger than what is typically found in the state of Iowa.
"Typically, when we have child labor issues it's an issue of one or two individuals," she said. "From our point of view, with this investigation, it's a large-scale violation of the law."
Koonce said the full report was not being made public because it is a part of a criminal investigation but she confirmed that 57 children were involved.
Read the full article
From Spero News:
Led by 43 Guatemalan and Mexican women wearing ‘electronic tracking bracelets’ imposed by local authorities, hundreds of people from around the country marched peacefully in Postville, a small town in Iowa, in protest against the biggest immigration raid in US history. The raid occurred on May 12, when 389 migrants, including 287 Guatemalans, were arrested for possession of false documents while working at the Agriprocessors kosher meat plant in Pottsville.
The immigrants also denounced their transferral to a sort of detention camp set up at the local livestock show-ground, where they remained for days in the cold, without food or hygienic services; eighty some of the immigrants were tried directly and sentenced to between five and seven months in prison ahead of deportation.
The protesters took off from the St. Bridget church and marched for 10km, chanting “No more raids”. “We demand respect of the human rights of immigrant workers”, said Marcos Yax, vice-president of the Coalicion de migrantes guatemaltecos (Conguate), reminding that the arrests separated many families, with serious consequences mainly for the children; union representatives participating in the march also emphasised the responsibility of Agriprocessors, accused of persistent violations of migrant workers rights and security norms due to frequent workplace accidents; two company officials are currently under investigation.
From Guatemala, Cardinal Quezada Toruño dedicated the Sunday homily to his fellow nationals in US territory, remembering the exodus of at least one million Guatemalans caused by the long civil war (1960-96): “The arrests and deportations hurt our souls. Let us pray for those who suffered these painful separations”, said the cardinal.
Demont Bowie, shown in a booking photo, is the man who kidnapped M.B. from a party on Minnehaha Avenue in Minneapolis and brought her to Iowa.
The Gazette recently released a special report about a rural Iowa prostitution business that yielded Iowa’s first federal human trafficking case.
From the report:
In the basement of an ordinary-looking Williamsburg home, the 13-year-old girl was given a choice. Either she would have sex with two men nearly twice her age or she would be given back to her kidnapper.The girl would come to be known as M.B. in court documents in Linn, Johnson, Iowa, Washington and Clayton counties, as well as U.S. District Court. Getting her out of the business that seemed to produce poison in so many ways would almost cost one Iowa woman her life.
Locking up the people who'd exploited her would take more than two years.Hers, the first human trafficking case prosecuted in Iowa federal court, would test the resources, skills and patience of investigators and prosecutors who never had dealt with such a complex case, and who hope, even as they ready themselves to better respond to the next, to never see another like it.
People unfamiliar with the business sometimes think of prostitution as a victimless crime — a simple transaction of money for sex. In reality, experts say, pimps prey on vulnerable women and girls with few other options, isolating them, coercing them into the business and keeping them there by force.
It's a drug-infused, violence-infested culture that can operate below the surface in even the smallest and safest of Eastern Iowa's small towns, as M.B.'s case would show.
As one prosecutor put it: "This isn't 'Pretty Woman.'"
Read the special report here
Also: Gazette Dropping "Spas, Escorts" Ads
