Dragnet for Illegal Workers

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Miscues and poor planning in a search for scapegoats

Anthony Spinale, owner of G& T Terminal Packing, Inc., in New York City, was startled when armed agents from the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) burst through the door last Monday. "They came in like Jesse James, covering this door, covering that door," Spinale said. "I thought it was a holdup." The agents arrested 18 of Spinale's workers, who had been packing fruits and vegetables for grocery-store produce counters, and took them away. Reason: the INS thought they might be illegal aliens.

Across the country, similar raids were conducted last week as a special strike force of 400 INS investigators and Border Patrol officers fanned out to search for undocumented workers in a $500,000 operation dubbed Project Jobs. In five days, more than 300 raids netted nearly 5,400 such workers in nine metropolitan areas.* The targets were supposed to be businesses paying considerably more than the minimum wage of $3.35 an hour, not the usual farms and restaurants. "We felt it would be good to center on these areas where we think the higher-paying jobs are held by illegal aliens," explained INS Spokesman Vern Jervis. "These kinds of jobs seem to be attractive to unemployed Americans." To help U.S. citizens get those jobs, the agency tried to keep local employment offices abreast of what businesses had been raided and how many jobs had opened up.

From the start, Project Jobs was plagued by miscues and poor planning. Alerted to the impending sweeps by news reports, some workers stayed away from their jobs to avoid encounters with INS agents. Some skilled illegal aliens were found employed as steelworkers and machinists, but many of the raids were on businesses offering mostly lowpaying, menial jobs. The raids often seemed more trouble than they were worth. In the Detroit area, for example, 40 sweeps netted a grand total of 34 illegal aliens. At the Utica Packing Co., some 30 miles north of Detroit, 20 agents rounded up 24 suspected aliens in a search that effectively shut down the meat-packing plant for several hours and cost its owners an estimated $8,000 in lost business. As it turned out, none of those taken into custody were in the U.S. illegally. All were back at their jobs by the next day.

An INS team stormed Detroit's Frederick and Herrud pork-processing plant, hauling off 33 workers. There, the bad feelings that greeted the agents everywhere across the U.S. took a comic twist when two gun-toting INS men rushed through a door into a holding area only to be charged by a herd of angry hogs. The terrified officers escaped by swinging across the rafters, Tarzan-style. None of the 33 arrested were illegal aliens.

The operation drew heavy fire from civic, business, religious and Hispanic groups. Charged Ira Glasser, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, in a letter to President Reagan: