by Ted Genoways
After Kruse filed suit, ten other workers, most of them undocumented immigrants, banded together and retained Paul Dahlberg of Meshbesher & Spence to represent them in preparation for filing their own complaint. “They’re really scared,” Dahlberg said at the time. Many had already accrued medical expenses of $30,000 to $100,000—several years’ income for anyone working at the head table—and their conditions seemed to be declining. “They may be going back to work,” Dahlberg said, “but they have so much fatigue, it’s about all they can do.”
In May, AIG contacted Kruse’s attorney with news: they would no longer contest the claims and had assigned an outside social worker, Roxanne Tarrant, to guide employees through resubmitting workers’ compensation claims. As the workers began filling out their forms, QPP offered Dahlberg’s clients about $20,000 each as a preemptive settlement. But the deal required workers to forfeit coverage for medical benefits and any future claims against the company. Dr. Lachance was telling them that researchers at the Mayo Clinic were still determining whether nerve damage caused by PIN was temporary or long-term. In several of the most severe cases, workers didn’t seem to be showing the signs of recovery that Lachance had initially expected. There was no telling whether they would ever be able to work again or faced permanent disability. The workers collectively rejected the offer.
Days later, on the Monday morning after the long Fourth of July weekend, Miriam Angeles was told to report to Human Resources, where she was informed that there was a problem with her identification. Angeles, who’d been working under the assumed name Felicitas Olivas, knew she was about to be fired. Would she continue to have her health insurance? Would she still qualify for workers’ compensation?
“They said, ‘That’s your problem.’”
As Angeles told me about that day, her voice turned soft, lost in the memory.
“I feel thrown away,” she said, finally. “Like a piece of trash. Before, I worked hard and willingly for QPP, but after I got sick and needed restrictions and told them I was in pain, they threw me away like trash and were done with me.”
Bob Warner is in his eighties, with weatherworn features and a persistent cough, but he retains the booming voice and wagging index finger that marked him as an attack dog on the Fremont City Council for twenty years. During much of his time representing Ward Four, however, he had felt powerless against the demographic shift his town was experiencing. He watched Mayor Skip Edwards kowtow to Hormel from the time he took office in 1988, while the company steadily increased its Hispanic workforce. Many of these employees, Warner was convinced, were in the United States illegally—an assertion he supported by pointing to the prevalence of Spanish-speaking adults in Fremont. “How could a person be a twenty-one-year-old adult and have no knowledge of the English language at all?” he asked me, then dismissed his own question with a wave. “That’s all bullshit.”
On May 13, 2008, Warner, who had already announced his plans to retire from the council that fall, decided he’d had enough. He was fed up with rising crime, with grade schools overrun with non-English-speaking students, with unpaid medical bills at the local hospital, with immigrant families crowding into rental houses on the west side of town, and with everything from having to wait in line at the bank while people wired money to Mexico to having to press 1 at the ATM for English. Just the day before, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents had arrived at the Agriprocessors plant in Postville, Iowa; in all, they had hauled away nearly four hundred undocumented workers—more than 20 percent of the town’s total population. Warner couldn’t help imagining how Fremont would be transformed if its undocumented population disappeared in a single, swift action. Before the close of the monthly council meeting, he surprised his fellow members by proposing that city attorney Dean Skokan draw up an ordinance to ban “any resident or any business from harboring, hiring, or transporting illegal immigrants.” Skokan agreed to work on a draft but warned the council that similar municipal ordinances were facing stiff—and expensive—constitutional challenges from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). “I’m not telling you this can’t be done,” he said. “I’m telling you it’s going to be very difficult.”
Despite this concern, a draft of the ordinance was scheduled for its first public reading on the evening of July 8. But just before four o’clock that day, Warner was tipped off that the entire second shift had called in sick at Hormel; they were carpooling to the Fremont Municipal Building. By the time he reached the council chambers, Warner told me, the room was already nearly filled with Hormel workers—and the police had been dispatched to maintain order. Warner demanded that the balcony be opened to let more people in, but the room was filled to capacity and people were spilling out into the halls by the time the meeting commenced.
Skokan announced that language in the ordinance was still rough but had been modeled on similar measures drafted by the Immigration Reform Law Institute. When he was done reading, council members informed the crowd that they would hear constituent complaints at this meeting (and two more to come) before making a decision. First the council heard from several landlords, who protested that Fremont had 4,247 rental units—and estimated that between a quarter and a third of the occupants were Hispanic. It would be impractical to check everyone’s status, they said. And trying, complained one landlord, would lead to “targeting Hispanics”—a violation of the Fair Housing Act.
Norm Pflanz, a staff attorney with the Nebraska Appleseed Center, echoed this concern. But Warner responded angrily. “Illegal is illegal,” he said, “and it has nothing to do with discrimination.” But according to people present in the meeting, Warner’s comment sparked several pro-ordinance supporters in the crowd to begin pointing around the room: “There’s an illegal. . . . There’s an illegal. . . . There’s an illegal. . . .” Warner leaned over to Mayor Edwards and said, “Skip, you’re opening a can of worms.” He didn’t think that Pflanz—or anyone else who lived outside the city limits—should be allowed to speak. “He shouldn’t have taken testimony from anybody, unless they was a resident of Fremont,” Warner told me. “It’s a city issue. It’s not county, it’s not state, it’s not federal.” The atmosphere was so tense that night that, when Pflanz and a group of Hispanic testifiers started for the door during a recess, a police officer interceded. According to Pflanz, the officer said, “I think I’m going to escort your group to your cars.” Before the meeting was adjourned, Warner and Skokan scheduled a reading of a revised version of the ordinance for July 29.
When Roxanne Tarrant, the social worker assigned to help QPP employees with their workers’ compensation claims, first met Pablo Ruiz, he was slumped in a recliner in the living room of his ramshackle rental on the east side of Austin. The kitchen was almost too tight to turn around, and the lower reaches of the plasterboard walls were covered with crayon scrawls. Ruiz sat impassively, taking in the swirl of activity around him with a sluggish indifference induced by high doses of his pain meds. He had been experiencing searing pain in his legs for months, he told Tarrant, as well as pounding migraines that made it impossible for him to sleep. His voice was so reedy that every word seemed eked out in the midst of a spasm, and his eyes often fluttered closed from the throbbing in his temples. He appeared in such acute pain that Tarrant immediately called Dr. Lachance.
Ruiz had first seen Lachance in January 2008, when he was hospitalized at the St. Mary’s division of the Mayo Clinic. After Ruiz’s fall on the floor of QPP in November, he had appeared to make a speedy recovery. Doctors at the Austin Medical Center prescribed pain medication and put Ruiz on crutches. For a few weeks, he worked at a desk job in the QPP office. Then one morning just into the new year, Ruiz awoke in such pain that he couldn’t stand. He screamed to his wife, begging her to get him to the hospital. His head hurt so much he thought his skull might split wide open.
He was given a full workup—a spinal tap, EMG, MRI of his head and spine, blood work. He was released a week later, but follow-up visits revealed
signs of decline. His lumbar nerves were inflamed; the steroid treatments recommended for PIN patients had induced type 2 diabetes in Ruiz. He was taking antidepressants. Now, when Tarrant reached Lachance in Rochester, he reported that on reviewing Ruiz’s latest MRI, he had found brain inflammation. He prescribed sleep medication and Paxil for anxiety over the phone and asked Tarrant to arrange for Ruiz to resume steroid treatment immediately.
Despite the steroids, Ruiz’s condition continued to worsen. Lachance worried that he might be suffering from some form of meningitis, and Tarrant was unable to get him into counseling for his depression because she couldn’t locate a Spanish-speaking psychologist closer than the four-hour round-trip it would require to go to the Twin Cities. When a Mayo Clinic psychiatrist brought in for consultation recommended another hospitalization for depression, AIG objected. They asserted that family troubles (his dying mother, his monetary stress) were the source of Ruiz’s anxieties—and, as such, his depression was not covered by QPP’s workers’ comp insurance.
Meanwhile, Ruiz’s blood sugars soared to over 300, and he suffered from severe all-over inflammation—an attempt by his body, a Mayo Clinic physician told him, at “desensitizing itself.” Ruiz was referred to the chronic pain clinic, but nothing seemed to be working. Lab results indicated that the steroid treatments were having little effect. His sweat tests showed advancing neuropathy in his arms and legs. The numbness in his hands had spread as far as his elbows now, and his arms were too weak to comb his hair or brush his teeth.
In early August, Ruiz was notified by QPP that his six months of health benefits were up. By then, the pain in Ruiz’s right leg was so agonizing that doctors ordered a bone scan. “I most worry about my leg,” Ruiz said. “It feels like it’s going to explode or something.” But AIG refused to pay for the test. By fall, Ruiz was only able to get around with the help of a walker, and each round of sweat tests kept coming back abnormal. The bills were mounting when QPP contacted Ruiz’s attorney to up their previous buyout offer from $20,000 to $22,000. But, as with the previous proposal, Ruiz would have to agree to quit his job effective immediately, with no chance of return or any future claim against QPP. The payment wouldn’t have even covered his outstanding medical bills, Ruiz told me, and he was beginning to fear that he was permanently disabled. On advice of his attorney, Ruiz turned down the deal.
Fremont was threatening to boil over into violence. In the weeks after Bob Warner proposed the anti-immigration ordinance, upstart opposition group One Fremont, One Future documented dozens of incidents of hate-based intimidation—anonymous callers threatening to burn down Hispanic-owned businesses, rocks hurled through front windows from passing cars. When Maggie Zarate turned away a salesman at the door of her home, the man began cursing at her and shouting at her children playing in the yard, “Go back to Mexico!” (Zarate’s children are fourth-generation Americans.) Andy Schnatz, local leader of the anti-immigration Nebraskans Advisory Group, sent emails to the mayor and members of the city council. “We’re in a battle right now with illegals coming across the border,” he wrote. “We shed blood to build this country and we will shed blood again to take it back.”
Republican leaders, from Governor Dave Heineman to state senatorial candidate Charlie Janssen, both from Fremont, urged ordinance supporters to seek out expert legal advice, in order to steer debate toward matters of law, rather than matters of race. “That’s when they went to Kris Kobach,” Warner told me. By that time, Kobach had become a minor celebrity in conservative circles on the strength of his work on the other local ordinance cases as counsel for the Immigration Reform Law Institute—the legal arm of the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR). With Kobach’s help in reshaping the language of Warner’s proposed ordinance to closely resemble the local ordinances working their way through the courts in Kansas, Pennsylvania, and Texas, city attorney Skokan felt he could come up with a proposal that would be deemed constitutional should the ordinance pass a council vote—and, with any luck, help quell the anger bubbling to the surface citywide.
But one morning soon after, Alfredo Velez, owner of Tienda Mexicana Guerrero, arrived at his shop in downtown Fremont to find a police car waiting in the parking lot and his storefront window shot out, broken glass everywhere inside. Velez told me that the shot appeared to have been fired from across the street, maybe from a moving car. For him, it was more than simple vandalism; it was an insult, an attack on his family and all they had worked for. Like so many in the area, he had grown up near Chichihualco, but he’d been born to a wealthy Mormon family on a sprawling mountain estate, dotted by tall trees and an enormous herd of cattle. The land had been in his family since it was deeded to his grandfather by the king of Spain in the 1860s, and Velez himself, with his silver temples and gentle accent, still retains something of that regal air. When Velez was a young man in the 1970s, however, the Mexican government seized his family land for corn and bean plantations. He came to the United States legally and obtained citizenship in 1985. To support himself, he worked at area packinghouses and set aside money every month. In 1998, he had enough to buy his small grocery space along D Street and supplemented his income, at first, by working on the kill floor at Hormel. He put his four children through college, determined that they would never have to work on the meatpacking line as he had.
After his window was shot out, Velez considered leaving Fremont, maybe joining his daughter in Omaha or his eldest son in Lincoln; he even flirted with the idea of returning to his native Chichihualco. But he didn’t want people to think he had been in Fremont illegally or that he had been run off by threats. He resolved to speak out—but then, on the night the ordinance was scheduled for its second public reading, Velez received an anonymous letter. “It appears that your business is the drop off point for illegal immigrants,” it began. “This could be a violation of the federal immigration laws. I also heard that you cash checks such as payroll checks from Hormel without asking for identification. That also could be a violation of the federal immigration law. The illegals are costing every legal resident of this city a lot of money and they are destroying Fremont. It is the responsibility of every American to insure that this stops and that those people harboring them are held accountable.” Velez decided to stay behind the counter to protect his store and listen to the hearing on the radio.
The second reading of the ordinance drew more than a thousand people—so many that the gathering was moved at the eleventh hour to the high school auditorium. Some fifty police officers and a bomb-sniffing dog patrolled the crowd, and more than seventy residents, both citizens of Fremont and people from surrounding areas, were allowed to take the lectern for more than four and a half hours of testimony. Jerry Hart, a retired IRS agent, voiced outrage that the ordinance hadn’t already been passed and implemented. John Wiegert, a fifth-grade math teacher in nearby Yutan, told the council that Fremont needed the ordinance to reduce the strain on schools. “Racism has nothing to do with this ordinance,” Wiegert insisted. “This ordinance is about what is legal and what is illegal. If the federal government is not going to watch out for us, then we need to watch out for ourselves.”
After public comments concluded, the council voted to suspend the rules and place the ordinance on immediate final reading in order to vote that night. They explained later that they worried about waiting another three weeks for resolution, but when the measure came to a vote, the council split—4 to 4—leaving Mayor Edwards to break the tie.
Edwards had clearly foreseen this possibility. It was nearly midnight as he took out a prepared statement. “This has weighed very heavy on me,” he said, then began reading. “Control of illegal immigration is a federal issue,” he said. “I’m bound by the law, too.” The proposed ordinance, he explained, overstepped the city jurisdiction. He said he had consulted with Nebraska attorney general Jon Bruning and two outside attorneys. They agreed that immigration matters should remain in federal hands and voiced their belief that passing an ordinance
would pull Fremont, already struggling economically, into a long and expensive legal fight that it would ultimately lose.
“I vote no,” Edwards concluded—and the room roared, but not everyone was cheering.
Chapter 6
THIS LAND IS NOT YOUR LAND
Two weeks after the city council vote in Fremont, nearly 150 people gathered for an anti-immigration rally at the Oak Park Mall in Austin. Ruthie Hendrycks, founder and president of Minnesotans Seeking Immigration Reform (MinnSIR), warned the audience not to believe it when Hormel said that the company was forced to rely on undocumented labor, that Hispanic immigrants were just doing the jobs that American citizens were now unwilling to do. “Who was doing these jobs before?” she demanded. The crowded erupted into applause and hoots of approval.
Hendrycks had launched MinnSIR with her husband, Scott, from their home in Hanska, Minnesota, in early 2006 after seeing a report issued by Governor Tim Pawlenty’s office estimating that eighty-five thousand undocumented immigrants were living in the state. Hendrycks was angry that Swift & Company in Worthington and Hormel in Austin had attracted so many Latino workers to southern Minnesota, spilling over into the Tyson plant in Sleepy Eye and the Armour-Eckrich plant in St. James, not far from her home. According to Pawlenty’s report, these new immigrants were costing taxpayers $188 million a year for education and health care. Hendrycks, who worked as a dental hygienist, saw these immigrants coming into her office in increasing numbers, paying for dental cleanings for themselves and their children with Medicaid. She didn’t like that her tax dollars were supporting their health care while they took jobs away from Minnesotans.
She began writing to the leaders of FAIR, the Minuteman Project, Brotherhood Organization of a New Destiny, the John Birch Society, and other anti-immigration groups, asking them to endorse her organization and speak at a series of rallies to be held in the Twin Cities and then other cities in southern Minnesota. Within a few months, ICE had carried out a massive enforcement action at six different Swift plants across the Midwest, including the one in Worthington. Hundreds of workers were taken away in handcuffs and eventually deported. Hendrycks believed the enforcements were sparked by MinnSIR’s spotlight on the region and called for similar actions at Hormel and QPP in Austin—and when Susan Tully, Midwest field director for FAIR, told her about what was happening in Fremont in summer 2008, Hendrycks began to think that the time was right for a rally in Austin, to see if citizens there would get behind a similar ordinance.
