Hundreds of Workers Held in Immigration Raid

From The New York Times:

In another large-scale workplace immigration crackdown, federal officials raided a factory [in Laurel, Mississippi] on Monday, detaining at least 350 workers they said were in the country illegally.

As of late Monday afternoon, no criminal charges had been filed, said Barbara Gonzalez, an agency spokeswoman, but she said that dozens of workers had been “identified, fingerprinted, interviewed, photographed and processed for removal from the U.S.”

The raid follows a similar large-scale immigration operation at a meatpacking plant in Postville, Iowa, in May when nearly 400 workers were detained. That raid was a significant escalation of the Bush administration’s enforcement practices because those detained were not simply deported, as in previous raids, but were imprisoned for months on criminal charges of using false documents.