OneWorld.net (U.S.)

SAN FRANCISCO, Jan 5 (OneWorld) - A coalition of more than 60 labor, social justice, and immigrants rights organizations issued a statement Thursday calling for an immediate halt to community and workplace raids aimed at detaining and deporting undocumented immigrants.

"As Congress begins its new session today we want to highlight that our immigration system is broken," said Gabriella Flora, an immigration organizer at the Denver office of the American Friends Service Committee, a Quaker organization that helped organize the petition.

"Enforcement is not the solution, it just creates more problems," she added. "We have a real need for our legislators to step up to the plate and make sure that raids and attacks on working people don't happen in the future."

The statement comes less than a month after U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents raided six Swift meatpacking facilities, detaining at gunpoint more than 1,200 workers. Criminal charges have since been brought against less than 5 percent of the workers.

The petition calls on the U.S. Office of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties and the Inspector General of Homeland Security to immediately investigate allegations of civil rights violations and racial profiling of workers who were apprehended.

"People were separated by color and national origin, which isn't supposed to happen in this country," Darcy Tromanhauser of Nebraska Appleseed, a non-profit legal justice group, told OneWorld. "People who looked to [ICE officers] to be of Latino or Hispanic origin got sent to one side, while white people on the other side were not checked for their work documentation."

Tromanhauser also complained that immigrant workers rounded up in raids on plants in Nebraska, Minnesota, and Iowa were taken to a National Guard facility, Camp Dodge, from which attorneys were forbidden, allegedly for security reasons.

"Families were ripped apart," she added. "ICE said their protocol was to release people who were parents so they could go home to take care of their kids. But people who said they had children were bussed away to detention centers."

Alison Brown, a senior attorney at Justice for Our Neighbors in Omaha told OneWorld that single mothers were released and allowed to await deportation proceedings at home with their children, but undocumented workers from across the Midwest and Rocky Mountains have now been sent to a federal detention center in Georgia, where they await deportation far way from their spouses and children--many of whom are U.S. citizens.

"I think the movement of the people picked up is what took people most off guard," Brown said. "There was an inability to access them because they were physically moved so far away from their families and their attorneys."

The Swift meatpacking company is also suffering as a result of the raids. Company officials said Thursday the sweeps could cost the company up to $30 million.

The Greeley, Colorado-based company estimated it will lose $20 million in lower operating efficiency as new employees are retrained, plus up to $10 million to retain workers and offer hiring incentives to replace detained, deported, and intimidated workers.

The company reported a net loss of nearly $12 million for its latest fiscal quarter.

"These raids have negative consequences throughout communities, throughout businesses, and throughout towns," AFSC's Gabriella Flora told OneWorld. "Not only do they affect families but they also impact the businesses and the economy of the country as a whole."

"This is no solution," she added. "What we need to do is create a system so that people are working and contributing." An improved immigration system would help keep families together and give immigrants a chance to obtain legal citizenship over time, Flora said.

"The fact that we have people working without proper papers is a symptom of a horrifically broken immigration system."