The Marshalltown Times-Republican’s Ken Black reports that Tom Aller,  president of Interstate Power & Light, a subsidiary of Alliant Energy, told the Iowa Utilities Board that a new plan may come in 2010.

From Black’s report:

“What we learned through this process is what we have here,” Aller said at that time. “It’s annexed. We’ve got roads. We know what the water quality is. We know what the transmission capacity is. These are all things we know about Marshalltown.”

What may not be as clear is the available fuel source. Coal was the first choice and was scrapped.

Natural gas appears to be the next choice.

Whether the city has the infrastructure in place to support a a natural gas-fired plant is still unknown, but the city’s chamber of commerce president said the city remains in contact with Alliant Energy in regards to their future plans.

During a conference call Thursday, the authors said the report, Raids on Workers: Destroying Our Rights, is the culmination of nearly two years of regional hearings, interviews with victims and analysis of immigration enforcement tactics. The commission writing the report was comprised of former elected officials, labor leaders, academics and immigration and legal experts. The group not only documented past raids, but provided recommendations for reforming the immigration system.

“The commission was formed to examine allegations of abuse and misconduct by the Bush administration during the course of immigration raids,” Joe Hansen, chairman of the commission and president of the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union, said during a conference call Thursday to formally announce the report. “In particular, it was created in response to a 2006 raid of six meatpacking plants in America’s heartland, conducted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. During that raid more than 12,000 workers, most of them U.S. citizens and legal residents, were herded together at gunpoint and denied access to phones, bathrooms, families and legal counsel.”

Mary Bauer, director of the Immigrant Justice Project at the Southern Poverty Law Center, said the report is the most comprehensive of its kind.

“It shows a law enforcement agency with really the most profound disrespect for the law and our nation’s Constitution,” she said. “In reading this report, I am particularly struck how profoundly unconstitutional most these raids were as they were carried out as a practice. What we saw again and again and heard about again and again were agents coming in and seizing all the workers without a legal basis, entering into people’s homes without warrants and separating people based on their race and ethnicity. … These were wanton violations of the fourth and fifth amendments.”

The commission, at the conclusion of its investigation, determined that ICE, under the direction of the Bush administration, repeatedly trampled on workers’ constitutional rights.

“These were not isolated incidents,” said Hansen, “but systemic problems that occurred in nearly every region of the country.”

Even those commissioners who held basic knowledge of the raids were shocked at what they heard during the course of the investigation.

“When I [joined the commission], of course, I had read about the raids and had even talked with some of the raid victims here in the Bay area,” said Bill Ong Hing, commissioner and a professor of law and Asian American studies at the University of California at Davis. “But when we traveled around the country, I was totally shocked at the level of abuse that ICE visited upon the victims of the various sites that we went to, including the Swift plants.”

Hing said that the only act committed by the workers was going to their job site. In response, ICE agents entered the sites, “weapons drawn and with no warrants for the individuals” that were detained.

“What we saw was the deprivation of prescription drugs and other medical care that a lot of these workers needed, the separation of newborns from nursing mothers, mocking of many of the people who were arrested and on and on,” he said. “What we also saw was that the communities themselves were also devastated. … Not only did the raid occur nearby, but the town was basically made into a ghost town after that.  People were chased into the woods. Families were afraid of coming back into town. … The racism we saw that was inherent in these raids was awful.”

In addition to the family trauma documented in the report, commissioners also spoke with local officials and law enforcement who reported that the raids disrupted and sometimes destroyed relationships carefully crafted between immigrant populations and government.

Several personal stories from workers at the Swift plant in Marshalltown are included in the report. Michael Graves, shown above, was the only worker to participate in a conference call announcing the report. (Photo courtesy of the commission.)

Mike Graves, a worker at the JBS-Swift plant in Marshalltown at the time of the raid, also joined the commissioners on the conference call to provide a personal narrative of what happened to him on the morning of the federal immigration raid at Swift.

“December 12, 2006 started off as a normal day,” Graves, a U.S. citizen born and raised in Waterloo, said. “As we started our production at 6 o’clock, our supervisors came out to the floor and instructed us to go to the cafeteria. So we took our equipment off, our knives and everything, and hung them up on the rack. Me and two other Hispanic people proceeded to go to the cafeteria. But as we took our normal route to the cafeteria, it was ICE agents that met up with us.”

The agents, according to Graves, had guns drawn and requested the workers show identification. The workers explained their their IDs were in their lockers. So the trio was searched for weapons, handcuffed with hands behind their backs and taken to the locker room.

“[An ICE agent] asked me where I lived [and I told him],” Graves said. “Then he asked me where my parents lived and I told him ‘Mississippi.’ He asked if I knew the way to Mississippi. I told him that I did, that we traveled there every summer. He started laughing.”

Handcuffed, Graves was left to sit on a bench in the locker room for about a half hour while agents took his identification to another part of the plant. When the agent returned, Graves was given his identification back and asked to place it back in his pants pocket in his locker. Two agents spoke in Spanish and laughed, but Graves didn’t understand what they were saying. When he requested to use the bathroom, they denied his request, and left him sitting on the bench for roughly an hour longer.

“He finally came back and told me that I needed to go to the cafeteria,” Graves said.

“This cafeteria only holds 50 people on a normal day, but there were about 200 people in there. The food supply was cut off. The water supply was cut off. There was a pay phone in there, but an ICE agent had been posted in front of it so that we couldn’t phone anyone. They also wouldn’t let us use cell phones. Anyone who requested to go to the bathroom were told ‘no’ and that they had to wait until they were processed.”

Processing was done in groups of 10. Workers were escorted, without coats in 20-degree snowy weather, from the cafeteria to another section of the plant that Graves said was also overcrowded with roughly 800 workers.

“As we were walking, there were ICE agents along the perimeter with guns drawn… watching the outsides of the building to make sure nobody would run or try to get away,” he said. “When they took us in the other building and we stood there for awhile — up to eight hours — before we were allowed to go home. We weren’t fed anything until this was all over and done with.”

Former Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack agreed to serve on the commission, but he was later appointed U.S. Secretary of Agriculture by President Obama. He did not participate in the conference call announcing the report. To date, his office has released no formal statement on the matter.

In 2001, while speaking before the Iowa Legislature, then-Gov. Vilsack touted the benefits of immigrants to the state’s economy, while pushing for an initiative he named “New Iowans Project.”

“[Our state] was built by people who came here from all over the world,” he said. “From the beginning, immigrants have come to our state and helped it prosper. As they became new Iowans, and added to our economic wealth, their diversity also brought strength and cultural richness to our state.”

The initiative began with pilots in three Iowa communities — Mason City, Fort Dodge and Marshalltown — intended to lure immigrant populations into Iowa. Vilsack, who was publicly upset with how the Swift raid in Marshalltown was handled, penned a letter to Michael Chertoff, head of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, indicating that state officials would no longer cooperate with federal immigration officials.

“[Federal immigration officials] chose to pursue to alitary path that limited the operation’s effectiveness, created undue hardship for many not at fault, and led to resentment and further mistrust of government,” Vilsack wrote in the letter.

“These systemic failures to communicate with the public and news organizations created an information vacuum that was filled with unreliable and unverifiable rumors that further undermined the public’s trust and confidence in both the state and federal government.”

We elected a president who said he wants to regulate and tax coal power plants out of existence. Given its the cheapest way to provide energy, other than nuclear, we are all going to pay the price for that one.

We’ve had Democratic governors for more than 10 years now. While Vilsack should be lauded for his emphasis on more power generation in Iowa at the beginning of this decade, it certainly wasn’t a policy that continued.

Those governors have the ability to appoint members to the Iowa Utilities Board who can make prudent business decisions. Or, they can support members who lament that trees were cut down to produce the paper for the reports they are reviewing.

Those members can rely on pseudoscience, if not outright science fiction, and somehow feel good about the choices they make.

This power plant was Marshalltown’s “Get Out of Recession Free” card and Free Parking jackpot all in one. Now, we’re not even going to pass Go and get our $200.

Black’s main assertion, that the power plant construction project would have been Marshalltown’s “Get Out of Recession Free” card, is almost laughable.  The real economy is not a board game, and to pretend that any one construction project would allow a city to escape the global economic meltdown seems naive.

Of course, because the power plant is not likely to be built anytime soon, Marshalltown may never know if the coal plant would have saved it from recession.  Black’s real hope is that his readers will head to the polls in two years with an extra reason to blame Democrats for their economic woes.

But is there any reason to assume that under a President John McCain, things would be different?

McCain and some other Republicans have supported so-called “cap and trade” plans to halt carbon emissions just like President Barack Obama and the Democrats.  While the two presidential candidates’ plans for capping carbon emissions certainly varied, both shared the same basic principles.  There’s no guarantee that the federal regulatory outlook would be much different if McCain had won.

In fact, Obama was as strident a supporter of the coal industry as anyone during the 2008 campaign.  Lines from his campaign speeches are currently being used in nationally televised “Clean Coal” ads, which are paid for by coal companies.

Just a few paragraphs after bemoaning the use of “pseudoscience” (presumably referring to either climate change or air quality studies?), Black makes a thoroughly scientific argument of his own:

We’ve heard the arguments – that those of us who are for the plant are worried more about money than our family’s safety. Well, right now, we live in the shadow of a coal plant that is far “dirtier” than the one that was proposed.

I can’t name one person who has died or gotten sick because of that fact. Neither can they.

I can’t name one person who would have escaped the global recession if only the proposed Marshalltown coal plant project had moved forward.  Can you?

Sen. Tom Harkin

U.S. Sen. Tom Harkin is hopeful that he will present the Obama administration with recommendations for Iowa’s two U.S. attorney posts in the next few weeks. As the federal government’s top prosecutors in the state, both positions are central to Iowa law enforcement and both are politically sensitive.

Harkin said he is meeting with potential candidates but did not name any names.

“We are grateful to have a number of highly qualified individuals interested in each of the U.S. attorney positions,” Harkin said in an e-mail to the Iowa Independent Tuesday. “We’re equally grateful to have a high level of anticipatory interest in our process, which we hope will lead to recommendations … during the coming weeks.”

A spokesperson in Harkin’s office said  there are currently no “finalists” for either the Northern District position, now held by Matt Dummermuth, or the Southern District office, now occupied by Matt Whitaker.

By tradition, the senior senator of the president’s party nominates candidates from among whom the White House chooses. While each new incoming administration gets the prosecutors they want, the White House is expected not to interfere with their work as Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez and the administration of President George W. Bush did in New Mexico, southern California and several other well-publicized cases.

Both of the Bush-appointed U.S. attorneys have roots in politics as well as the law. Neither has figured in the national U.S. attorneys scandal. While Whitaker and Dummermuth both have a wide array of drug, gun and sexual predator convictions under their belts, they are arguably best known for their response to immigration raids.

In the Southern District, Harkin and the Obama White House will replace Matt Whitaker, a 2002 Republican candidate for state treasurer, who has served since June 2004. An attorney at the Finley Alt Smith firm in Des Moines prior to his appointment, Whitaker was nominated by Bush following a recommendation by U.S. Sen. Chuck Grassley. He had worked for the law firm of Briggs & Morgan in the Twin Cities and as corporate counsel for the national SUPERVALU grocery company.

Whitaker was one of six U.S. attorneys who took charge of investigation and prosecution in the aftermath of Operation Wagon Train, a massive December 2006 immigration raid that netted arrests of 1,297 meatpacking plant workers in six states. Swift & Company, which was at that time one of Marshalltown’s largest employers, was targeted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in the raid.

U.S. Attorney Matt Whitaker, earned U.S. Sente confirmation in June 2004. His tenure followed Stephen Patrick O'Meara (2003-2004), Steven M. Colloton (2001-2003), Inga Bumbary-Langston (2001) and Don C. Nickerson (1993-2001).

The days that followed were ones of confusion for family members, immigration advocates and attorneys. The federal government, indicating it was acting on the wishes of local law enforcement at the locations of the temporary detention facilities, would not publicly release the whereabouts of those detained.

Whitaker was criticized for alleged heartlessness in the days following the raid because he dismissed reports of children being separated from their parents as exaggerated stories told for political gain.

Seven days later, on Dec. 19,  a federal grand jury in Des Moines handed down indictments of 23 undocumented workers on immigration and identity-theft charges. It was Whitaker who announced that the 23 charged came from a pool of 664 workers federal authorities suspected of being in the U.S. illegally. Whitaker also announced that 89 people had been removed from Marshalltown on the day of the raid, a number “lower than expected.” Two low-level members of plant management were charged and ultimately convicted on immigration-related charges. One received a year in prison and the other was sentenced to probation.

While speaking with the Associated Press about his belief that the Obama administration will replace him as U.S. attorney, Whitaker defended his actions following the much-criticized raid, noting that hourly wages in Marshalltown increased by $2 as the source of exploitable undocumented workers dried up. While the media remained busy doing periodic impact reports from Marshalltown and the five other sites included in the 2006 raids, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) quietly secured the National Cattle Congress fairgrounds in Waterloo, reportedly for training exercises.

Those facilities came in handy for Matt Dummermuth, the interim U.S. attorney for the Northern District, who had jurisdiction when 389 workers at the Agriprocessors meatpacking plant in Postville — nearly a third of the workforce — were detained on May 12, 2008, by federal authorities. All were initially taken to the secured Waterloo facility, although a few women were transported to a county jail.

U.S. Attorney Matt Dummermuth

Dummermuth, who worked as a previous campaign staffer for the successful Bush-Cheney 2000 presidential campaign and for the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice, seemed to have learned from the Marshalltown public relations fiasco. He launched a much more transparent public relations campaign, featuring joint press conferences with immigration officials and a steady stream of press releases.

His office let reporters know that approximately 40 Postville residents were released, with ankle tracking devices, because they had health concerns and/or small children. Even a forgetful public could remember the charges of “inhumane treatment” associated with the Swift detentions, and Dummermuth’s gesture insured that the Postville raid attracted much less criticism.

Within two weeks, more than three-quarters of all those detained had been quickly and efficiently convicted of criminal wrongdoing, primarily on identity theft-related charges. Although critics strongly voiced their opposition to the temporary courtroom facilities at the fairgrounds and immigration attorneys chafed at less-than-adequate access to clients, Dummermuth was credited with quick completion of an unprecedented undertaking.

Because of Dummermuth and his wife Rebecca’s direct connections to the Bush administration — she was a former White House associate director for legal affairs in the Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives – his appointment was repeatedly scrutinized at the time of the U.S. attorney scandals. To his and his staff’s credit, Dummermuth was not accused of any perceived impropriety.

Sen. Chuck Grassley, for whom Dummermuth once interned, first recommended Dummermuth, a native of Elgin, to replace the retiring Chuck Larson Sr. in 2006. Nearly two years later — and nearly a year after Dummermuth had been sworn into office — President George W. Bush sent the official nomination to the U.S. Senate. Confirmation hearings were never held because the necessary paperwork from the Iowa delegation was not received.

As the nation considers and lawmakers decide if the E-Verify program, scheduled for reauthorization this November, is worth saving, eyes are turning to Iowa, a state that has weathered two unprecedented immigration raids in as many years.

A Tale of Two Meatpackers

It’s been relatively easy for advocates of immigration crackdown to point fingers at Postville’s kosher meatpacking plant Agriprocessors. Despite numerous written warnings from the Social Security Administration about submitted employee data not matching federal database information, company officials — like thousands of others across the U.S. — never opted to use the E-Verify program. Since making national headlines as the site of the nation’s largest single-location immigration raid on May 12, the company has since hired a staffing company that uses the online federal system to check workers’ eligibility.

Finger pointing at the management of Swift & Co., a meatpacking plant that operates in Iowa and other states, hasn’t been as clear cut.

On Dec. 12, 2006, in an event dubbed Operation Wagon Train, Immigration and Customs Enforcement raided Swift plants in Colorado, Iowa, Minnesota, Nebraska, Texas and Utah. A total of 1,282 workers were detained on immigration and criminal charges. Roughly 100 of those detained were workers at Swift’s Marshalltown plant. It remains the largest multiple work site sweep in ICE’s history and caught the meatpacker, one of a handful of companies that voluntarily used E-Verify to authorize workers, completely off guard.

On March 1, 2006, ICE presented a subpoena at the Marshalltown plant for the company’s I-9 employment verification forms. It wasn’t an unusual request and, as such, did not alert plant management of the already ongoing investigation and soon to be impending raid. The search warrant filed by ICE in the U.S. Court for the Southern District of Iowa indicates that the agency believed 664 workers were illegal immigrants who had assumed the identities of U.S. citizens and thus thwarted the E-Verify system.

During the course of both investigations, ICE sent an undercover agent into the plants. On Aug. 22, 2006 the undercover agent at Swift recorded Braulio Pereyra-Gabino telling new employees in Spanish how to protect assumed identities. On Jan. 8 the undercover agent at Agriprocessors recorded a female human resources employee (unnamed in the search warrant) speaking in Spanish to a group of newly hired employees and joking about how the individuals should mark their employment verification forms. Pereyra-Gabino was convicted in May of harboring illegal aliens and sentenced last week to one year and one day in prison and a $2,000 fine. He was aquitted of false representation of a Social Security number and aggravated identity theft. At his trial it was revealed that one of the detained workers testified for the prosecution that she taped a conversation in which Pereyra-Gabino, knowing she was undocumented, told her how to obtain papers so she could work at Swift.

Another employee at Swift — Christopher Lamb, an assistant human resources manager — was also charged with harboring illegal aliens after a detainee who used a stolen identity agreed to cooperate with the ICE investigation. Alejandro Vazquez-Avina, according to court documents, had worked at the Marshalltown plant at various times since 2002. Since he had known Lamb for a number of years, Vazquez-Avina agreed to wear a wire and approach Lamb about once again working at Swift. Lamb did not directly hire Vazquez-Avina, but did offer advice as to how the man should react when he applied for employment at the plant. Lamb entered a guilty plea and was sentenced in March to 12 months probation.

Two lower-level members of management at Agriprocessors remain the only plant supervisors that have been charged with crimes in conjunction with the immigration raid there. Martin De La Rosa-Loera and Juan Carlos Guerrero-Espinoza are both charged with aiding and abetting the possession and use of fraudulent identity documents and encouraging aliens to illegally reside in the U.S. Both have entered pleas of not guilty and are now remanded until their scheduled September trial dates.

Although court documents indicate that the raid on Agriprocessors resulted in the discovery of dozens of fraudulent permanent alien resident cards from the company’s human resources department, to date, no member of the Agriprocessors’ human resources department has been charged.

You’re Either With Us Or Against Us

Officials with the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) seemed to be little taken aback by a recent blog posting by DHS Assistant Secretary for Policy Stewart Baker. In the post, dated July 11, Baker lashed out at the professional organization for human resource executives.

…I suppose corporate hiring is easier if you can hire illegal workers, so perhaps I shouldn’t be suprised that SHRM want to kill a program that makes it harder to hire illegal workers.

SHRM says it doesn’t want to kill E-Verify. SHRM says it wants to replace E-Verify with a new, better program to prevent illegal hiring. A closer look shows that the SHRM alternative is doomed to fail — and will take years to do so. So, for a decade, while the SHRM alternative is failing, no one will have a good tool to actually prevent illegal hires. Which may be precisely what SHRM wants.

China Miner Gorman, acting president and chief executive officer for SHRM, wasted little time firing off a letter to Michael Chertoff, director of the Department of Homeland Security and Baker’s boss.

…DHS is attempting to discredit SHRM by asserting that our support for the New Employee Verification Act (NEVA) and our work with the bill’s primary sponsor, Rep. Sam Johnson (R-TX), are nothing more than an elaborate plan to kill employment verification altogether. … SHRM and its members are on the front lines of employment verification every day. We know what works and what doesn’t — and E-Verify doesn’t work. E-Verify’s effectiveness has been called into question by a variety of organizations, businesses, the Government Accountability Office, Members of Congress and state governments. … DHS has chosen to use Executive Orders and legal maneuvers to force participation in E-Verify, while ignoring requests to discuss our concerns or modify its plans in any way.

Gorman goes on to document two 2007 requests by “Five of the nation’s leading human resources organizations” to meet with DHS officials and discuss ways to improve the E-Verify program. Both requests went unanswered, according to Gorman.

Questioning critics’ desire to change or avoid use of the DHS-administered program, however, is not something new to the government agency. In his own blog post in September 2007, Chertoff responded to an Illinois law that would prevent companies in that state from using E-Verify by asking, “Could it be that the Illinois state legislature wants to prevent businesses from using the best available tools to determine whether new employees are illegal aliens?”

In an October 1007 post, he took the Washington Post and New York Times to task for editorials critical of E-Verify. He describes the latter publication as “hyperventilating” about DHS immigration enforcement actions.

“People often wonder why it’s so difficult for the government to get a grip on illegal immigration,” Chertoff wrote. “But interest groups often work to slow or stop our efforts through lawsuits or political pressure. We need to decide as a nation if we’re going to be serious about solving this problem. It is up to Congress to enact legislation that will fix the problem comprehensively. Until then, we shouldn’t tie the hands of the men and women trying to enforce the law as it is.”

John Noll, legislative director for the Iowa council of SHRM and someone who is employed full-time as a human resources manager, said the motives behind the criticism of the E-Verify program were pure.

“SHRM believes in secured borders for our country and we believe in maintaining a legal workforce,” he said. “We believe E-Verify is at least a step in the right direction — there are some very good qualities to it. But we also believe that it just simply does not go far enough.”

Removing the requirement for paper employment verification forms, which can be easily altered and/or falsified, according to Noll, would be a big improvement.

“Currently, there is no way for an employer to verify that a person showing certain forms of identification are there person that they are claiming to be,” he said. “The database has not yet proven to be 100 percent accurate. I think the last percentage I saw was a 4 percent error rate, which represents roughly 6 million people within the country’s working population. … So, there are components we’d like to see added to it, especially before it becomes and permanent and mandatory tool.”

Those components, he said, are available in the alternative program that’s been introduced by the Republican from Texas.

“With NEVA, we do away with the paper aspect of verifying employment,” he said. “So we get further away from the possibility of being fooled by fake documents. The other piece that is of interest is the biometrics piece of verification. So that we can, hopefully, do away with the cases of stolen identity cases. With that piece, we can be much more sure that the person presenting himself is who he says he is.”

In lieu of relying on Social Security databases, NEVA would make use of an existing database used by about 90 percent of U.S. employers to check criminal backgrounds of new employees — the New Hires Registry operated in each state, established more than a decade ago as a part of federal welfare reform. After 11 years in existence, only about 10 percent of all U.S. employers use E-Verify. The NEVA program would also be able to “ping” data within the Social Security and Homeland Security. The proposed legislation also calls for a marketing campaign aimed at encouraging U.S. citizens to ensure their Social Security information is and remains up to date. Finally, the NEVA proposal calls for a moratorium of prosecution of employers who use the system, but unintentionally hire an illegal worker.

DHS, when faced with such criticism, is quick to point out that modifications and enhancements to the E-Verify program have been made. One piece that Noll said he had not yet seen in the system is photo verification. According to the government agency, there are now roughly 15 million photos included in the system.

Noll was hesitant to speculate on if usage of E-Verify would have prevented or lessened the immigration raid on Agriprocessors.

“It’s a tool,” he said. “And, as with any tool, it’s only as good as how it is used and monitored. My understanding, however, is that the Swift plants were using E-Verify and it did not help in their situation. Again, this is because the documents can be falsified, and E-Verify relies on documents. … I can’t say that it would have prevented what Agriprocessors went through and their workforce being illegal, but my experience based on Swift is that it did not help them.”

The Politics of Money

Erik Camayd-Freixas, one of the court appointed Spanish interpreters who translated the swift criminal proceedings that followed the raid on Agriprocessors, took a long look at what he describes as the economics behind the Postville event.

“At first sight it may seem absurd to take productive workers and keep them in jail at taxpayers’ expense,” he wrote in 15-page essay. “But the economics and politics of the matter are quite different from such rational assumptions.”

Camayd-Freixas examined ICE’s 2007 annual report which states that the agency grew to 16,500 employees and had a $5 billion annual budget. Under the umbrella of DHS since March 2003 the department describes itself as “a law enforcement agency for the post-9/11 era, to integrate enforcement authorities against criminal and terrorist activities, including the fights against human trafficking and smuggling, violent transnational gangs and sexual predators who prey on children.” Camayd-Freixas, already having stated his case that the criminal identity theft charges against the Postville workers were questionable, goes on to state his belief that such charges are necessary if ICE wishes to continue to earn its keep.

ICE documents report that in FY 2007 the agency’s human trafficking investigations results in 164 arrests and 91 convictions. The agency also launched 3,069 financial investigations in order to dismantle the schemes that criminal and terrorists organizations use to earn, move and store illicit funding. The annual report states that these investigations resulted in “significant increases in arrests.” In addition, the agency reports that it made 188 arrests and secured 127 convictions in national security investigations relating to intercepting illegal exports of weapons, military equipment and technology. In the realm of counterfeit goods and products, ICE made 235 arrests that resulted in 117 convictions. The Border Enforcement Security Task Forces were responsible for 526 criminal arrests and seizures of $2.5 million in cash and significant amounts of narcotics and weapons.

“The real numbers,” wrote Camayd-Freixas, “are in immigration: ‘In FY07, ICE removed 276,912 illegal aliens.’ ICE is under enormous pressure to turn out statistical figures that might justify a fair utilization of its capabilities, resources and ballooning budget. For example, the report boasts 102,777 cases ‘eliminated’ from the fugitive alien population in FY07, ‘quadrupling’ the previous year’s number, only to admit a page later than 73,284 were ‘resolved’ by simply ‘taking those cases off the books’ after determining that they ‘no longer met the definition of an ICE fugitive.’”

To justify the budget, he concludes, ICE is taking the low-lying fruit.

“Since FY06 ‘ICE has introduced an aggressive and effective campaign to enforce immigration law within the nation’s interior, with a top-level focus on criminal aliens, fugitive aliens and those who pose a threat to the safety of the American public and the stability of American communities,’” Camayd-Freixas wrote. “Yet as of Oct. 1, 2007, the ‘case backlog consisted of 594,756 ICE fugitive aliens.’ So again, why focus on illegal workers who pose no threat? Elementary: they are easy pickings. True criminal and fugitive aliens have to picked up one at a time, whereas raiding a slaughterhouse is like hitting a small jackpot. It beefs up the numbers.”

While the detained workers are often charged criminally and placed in federal facilities before they are deported, the company owners and members of upper management rarely face criminal charges. Instead, corporations are fined. The annual report states that “in FY07, ICE dramatically increased penalties against employers whose hiring processes violated the law, securing fines and judgments of more than $30 million.”

The whammy consists in beefing up an additional and meatier statistics showcased in the Report: “These incarcerated aliens have been involved in dangerous criminal activity such as murder, predatory sexual offenses, narcotics trafficking, alien smuggling and a host of other crimes.” Never mind the character assassination: next year when we read the FY08 report, we can all revel in the splendid job the agency is doing, keeping us safe, and blindly beef up its budget another billion. After all, they have already arrested 1,755 of these “criminals” in this May’s raids alone.

But Chertoff argues that the agency is doing what prosecutors have done for ages: starting at the bottom and working their way up.

“For those who say that we are only focusing on the illegal workers themselves, I point out that last year we had over 90 employers, or those in a supervisory chain who were convicted of crimes. We have had one CEO or President of a company sent to jail for 10 years,” Chertoff said in June during the State of Immigration Address. “We will continue to pursue employers. I know these cases take a little bit longer. There is a — it is always more difficult to work up the chain. I can tell you as an old organized crime prosecutor and as an old drug prosecutor, you always start with the bottom ring first, then you work your way up to the top ring.”

Chertoff ended his remarks by validating the need for the proposed $100 million budget for E-Verify — $17 million of that for program enhancements. The department also request $50 million in new funding that will be used “to develop an electronic information sharing and verification hub capability.” Overall the department is requesting a 6.8 percent increase in funding to $50.5 billion.

ICE has requested $5.7 billion in funding. Roughly $46 million will be used to “add 1,000 additional detention beds, staffing and associated costs required to meet the current demand generated by increase enforcement activities.”

The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the agency responsible for using the E-Verify program does not yet have the resources to implement a mandatory screening, Richard Stana, director of Homeland Security and Justice Issues at the Government Accountability Office told a House Judiciary Subcommittee in June. He estimated that USCIS would need between $765 and $840 million if the program is to be implemented over four years. In addition, Stana said the Social Security Administration would require $281 million and at least 700 new employees.

The E-Verify program is scheduled for reauthorization in November. On July 31, the U.S. House passed what is believed to be a nonpartisan compromise between those who wish to see the program completely scrapped and those who want it to become both permanent and mandatory. The House legislation calls for a five-year extension of the program, combined with two government-generated impact reports. The legislation passed by the House has been sent to the Senate, where it is unclear when it will be discussed.

Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, is one of 12 Republican senators who sent a letter to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nevada, encouraging him to bring reauthorization of E-Verify to the floor.

“Congress is running out of time to reauthorize and even enhance E-Verify,” Grassley said. “If this program expires, it gives employers even grater opportunity to hire illegal aliens. It’s time for the Majority Leader to act and ensure this tool is available for employers who want to do their part to comply with the law.”

Among those testifying in support of the plant was Iowa Valley Community College District Chancellor Tim Wynes. He supports the building of the 650-megawatt facility because of “the economic development that will come with the plant,” which he said was a “a huge part” of the mission of his school. Wynes said he heard “a lot of testimony concerning the impact the plant would have that were negative and mostly it was hypothetical.”

Wynes said the negative testimony played on people’s fears “of taking the initiative and moving forward” and that the IUB should “make a decision [based] on what you know and not what you don’t know or what is speculative.”

He said he attended five meetings with the Wisconsin energy company.

“Alliant brought their engineers out to the college. They also had a presentation for Marshalltown Economic Development Group, MEDIC. They did a presentation at our Rotary and they did a number of town meetings … they consistently presented what they were going to try to do.”

More from IUB witnesses, including some video interviews, are available below the fold.Taking a different economic view of the coal-burning proposal was investment banker and financial advisor Tom Sanzillo of New York. He called coal energy a “dinosaur” and said that this is the worst time to build a coal plant because of a variety of economic factors.

Sanzillo said the ethanol industry in Iowa doesn’t have sufficient growth to “demand new capacity at the level they’re demanding it. So by putting up this particular power plant they’re really using a Cadillac to do what a Volkswagen could do.”

Here is Sanzillo on the economics of the coal-burning power plant:

Dr. Jerry Schnoor said the decision to build a coal plant in Marshalltown is difficult because “ethanol plants are so economically important” in Iowa. But Schnoor worried that the proposed plant will indirectly and inefficiently be “turning coal into ethanol.” He is a professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of Iowa and is the chair of the Iowa Climate Change Advisory Council.

He noted that the plant, which is scheduled to be on line in 2013, will devote over half of its electrical output or about 350 megawatts to ethanol production.

NASA scientist Dr. James Hansen, who was in Iowa to testify before the Iowa Utilities Board, dubbed coal power “silly” because of the threat of global warming:

“The only way we’re going to keep climate within a reasonable range is if we phase out use of coal except where we capture the CO2 and sequester it because most of the carbon dioxide in the fossil fuels is in coal.

“So we could solve the problem, that would be 80 percent of the solution but it does require that we have a moratorium on any new coal-fired power plants and, over the next 25 to 30 years, we’re going to have to phase out those that exist.

“And this is going to become very clear within the next several years, so it is just plain silly to build a new one now because you’re not going to be able to grandfather these in … Once the government understands how serious the problem is, these plants are going to have to go so it just makes no sense to make another one now.”

NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) recently declared that 2007 was the second-warmest year in over a century of recorded global temperatures.

Hansen predicted that “barring a large volcanic eruption, a record global temperature clearly exceeding that of 2005 can be expected within the next few years … because of the background warming trend attributable to continuing increases of greenhouse gases.”

Dr. Hansen is an alum of the University of Iowa and made clear that he was expressing his opinions as a private citizen.

Dr. Kristin Welker-Hood also testified before the IUB this week. She had an entirely different set of concerns with Alliant Energy’s coal-burning facility. Here is what she said about some of the health effects of burning coal:

Dr. Welker-Hood is the director of environmental and health programs for the National Physicians for Social Responsibility office in Washington, D.C.

She noted that the Union of Concerned Scientists reported a prediction of increased heat waves in Iowa resulting from global warming. She said that “the number of days over 90 degrees will increase by two- to five-fold” in the state by the year 2100.

Hansen is the director of NASA’s Goddard Institute of Space Studies and has measured planetary climates since working on his doctoral thesis at the University of Iowa .

Hansen said that coal-fired power plants account for the largest portion of greenhouse gas emissions and that ending coal plant construction is the easiest way to curb climate change.  He also noted that pollutants that result from coal burning, like mercury, are also damaging to public health.

Hansen commented on the challenges of clearly communicating on the issue of global warming and climate change:

“… there remains a gap between what is understood about global warming by the relevant scientific community and what is known by those who need to know, and thats the public and policy makers, and its maybe partly that scientists are just not very good communicators.

It’s also a complex subject, but it’s particularly handicapped by the fact that there special interests who would like that communication to be hindered and by continually raising questions and muddying the discussion, it has made it more difficult to communicate without a doubt … we’ve got to do better on our communications because we’re running out of time.”

In a media conference call yesterday he said he was coming to Iowa as a private citizen and that he recently declined an invite to appear on the “Colbert Report” because the show’s format did not serve his message.Hansen and other experts will be in Des Moines at the State Historical Society Building on Wednesday, Jan. 16:
5:30-6pm Press Conference
6:00-7:00 Legislators reception on the third floor 
7:00-8:30 A panel discussion with expert witnesses based on prepared questions and questions from the audience.  This event will be moderated by State Sen. Robb Hogg of Cedar Rapids Iowa .

A similar forum will be held in Iowa City Thursday, Jan. 17 at Old Brick Church (corner of Market and Clinton)
5:00-7:00  Fund raising event open to the public.
7:00-8:30  A panel discussion with expert witnesses based on prepared questions and questions from the audience.
This event will be moderated by Professor Craig Just, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Iowa .

There is also a classroom seminar earlier that Thursday, Jan. 17, at 3:30pm in the Center for Global and Regional Environmental Research, Room 104 IATL on the campus of the University of Iowa .

Hansen is scheduled to testify before the IUB on Friday, Jan 18.

To hear the entire conference call with Hansen, download an mp3 of the 41 minute press conference here:  http://www.reamp.org…

Ignoring the relatively high concentration of Hispanic people in Marshalltown, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney told a crowd of almost 200 there Friday that “you probably don’t have a lot of immigrants legally” in Iowa.

Marshalltown, which is home to a meatpacking plant operated by Swift and Co., was at the epicenter of a nationwide string of immigration raids in December 2006.  The 2000 census measured the percentage of Hispanics in Marshalltown at 12.5%, though that number has likely grown.

“We should not be welcoming” those who cross the border illegally, Romney said in response to a question about illegal immigration.  But, Romney noted, “It’s a labyrinth trying to figure out how to get into this country legally.”

Edgar Perez, who attended Romney’s event with classmates from nearby Excel High School, told Iowa Independent that his family successfully navigated the “labyrinth.”  After crossing the border from Mexico to the United States with his family, he said they have become “legalized citizens.”

He was unconvinced of Romney’s ability to stop immigration, noting that there are too many jobs in the United States for potential immigrants seeking a better life. 

Videos available below the fold.In this video, Perez talks about his family and  community in Marshalltown and Mitt Romney states his case for legal immigration and against illegal  immigration.

Romney was introduced by Barb Livingston, the Marshall County GOP Chairperson.

Livingston cheerfully reminded the audience that Romney had saved the Olympics in Salt Lake City and that he had once worked at Fisher Controls in Marshalltown.  In his speech, Romney reminisced about his consulting days in Iowa.  Talking about the ideal conditions for farming in Iowa he said that, “God must have loved Iowa.”

After the event, Livingston acknowledged the complexities of immigration issues to this reporter, noting hardship not only on families but also the economic impact to businesses that lose workers from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids in and around Marshalltown.  ICE is an agency of the Department of Homeland Security.

Livingston said that immigration is one of the top issues in Marshall County.

Romney’s focused some of his speech on what he calls “radical jihadism.”  He summarized the Democratic party’s strategy in the War on Terror as one of “defeat and retreat.”

In this video, Mitt Romney talks about how the U.S. has changed after September 11, 2001.

Romney traveled to Waterloo later in the day for more campaigning.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) spokeperson Greg Palmore said that ICE provided expertise, “assistance and administration processing,” to local police but did not initiate the investigation.

Warrants had been prepared for 26 people from Marshalltown who were contracted by Manpower, Inc. to work at the Monsanto Seed Co. in Grinnell.  There is no official word on the missing 10 individuals.

Prior to accepting the Manpower employees for a temporary project, a Monsanto spokeperson said  the seed company “insisted that we would only accept employees that were properly documented.”

Hispanic Ministries at St. Mary’s Church of Marshalltown has a list of all who are being held.  Family members are still seeking legal representation for many of the 16 who were arrested.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has stated that this is a local law enforcement operation and that arrests were made on criminal charges.

ICE was notified one week ago about this local operation which involves people from Marshalltown who were subcontracted by Manpower, Inc. to work at Monsanto.

The arrests were made in Poweshiek County, but police from Marshall County were involved in the operation.  The individuals are being held in the Marshall County jail and all are believed to reside in Marshalltown.

Family members are currently seeking legal representation for their relatives.  Further details, including the names of those arrested, have not been released.