After Immigrant Raid, Iowans Ask Why

In this small northeastern Iowan town surrounded by newly planted cornfields, a middle-aged white woman walks into the local Guatemalan restaurant with her arm around a Hispanic child who is sobbing because she can’t find her mother. After conferring with a restaurant worker, the woman takes the child nearby to St. Bridget’s, a small 1970s-era brick Catholic church on a quiet tree-lined street that has become command central for what people in this community of 2,273 describe as a “disaster relief response.” In the aftermath of the nation’s largest single-site immigration raid — a May 12 raid of a Postville-based meatpacking plant, Agriprocessors Inc. that took 389 workers into custody — Hispanic children and adults here remain fearful. And many white residents remain hard at work helping the people left behind — mostly women from Guatemala and Mexico and their children.

Read the story from TIME | No Comments | Posted June 8, 2008 at 12:38 AM by Sam Bear