A Matter of Interpretation.

• Author: Camayd-Freixas, Erik
• Position: Essay

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

I arrived late in Waterloo, Iowa, Monday ,night, May 12, and missed the 8 p.m. interpreters briefing. I was instructed by phone to meet the next morning at 7 a.m. in the hotel lobby and carpool to the National Cattle Congress, where we would begin our work.

The clerk's office of the U.S. District Court had contracted with me and twenty-five other federally certified interpreters the month before. We were told we were to go to a remote location as part of a "Continuity of Operation Exercise" just in case there was an emergency, which in Iowa is likely to be a tornado or flood. I was not prepared for a disaster of a different kind, one that was entirely man-made.

We arrived at the heavily guarded compound, went through security, and gathered inside the retro "Electric Park Ballroom," where a makeshift court had been set up. The clerk of court, who coordinated the interpreters, said: "Have you seen the news? There was an immigration raid yesterday at 10 a.m. They have some 400 detainees here. We'll be working late conducting initial appearances for the next few days."

The clerk was referring to the raid of Agriprocessors, Inc., the nation's largest kosher slaughterhouse and meat packing plant, located in the town of Postville, Iowa. Immigration officials boasted it was "the largest single-site operation of its kind in American history."

The clerk gave us a cursory tour of the compound. The National Cattle Congress is a sixty-acre fairground that had been transformed into a sort of detention center. Fenced in behind the ballroom/courtroom were twenty-three trailers from federal authorities, including two set up as sentencing courts, various Homeland Security buses, and an "incident response" truck. Scores of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents and U.S. Marshals roamed about. And in the background stood two large buildings: a pavilion where agents and prosecutors had established a command center, and a gymnasium filled with tight rows of cots where some 300 male detainees were kept, the women being housed in county jails.

Then began the saddest procession I have ever witnessed, which the public would never see, because cameras were not allowed past the perimeter of the compound. Driven single-file in groups of ten, shackled at the wrists, waist, and ankles, chains dragging as they shuffled through, the slaughterhouse workers were brought in for arraignment. They sat and listened through headsets to the interpreted initial appearance before marching out again to be bused to different county jails, only to make room for the next row of ten. They appeared to be uniformly no more than five feet tall, mostly illiterate Guatemalan peasants with Mayan last names. Some were in tears; others bore faces of worry, fear, and embarrassment. They all spoke Spanish, a few rather laboriously. It dawned on me that, aside from their Guatemalan or Mexican nationality, which was imposed on them, they too were Native Americans, in shackles. They stood out in stark racial contrast to the rest of us as they started their slow penguin march across the makeshift court. They had all waived their right to be indicted by a grand jury and accepted instead an information , or simple charging document by the U.S. Attorney, hoping to be quickly deported, since they had families to support back home.

But it was not to be. They were criminally charged with "aggravated identity theft" and "Social Security fraud"--charges they did not understand ... and, frankly, neither could I.

We got off to a slow start that first day, because ICE's barcode booking system malfunctioned, and the documents had to be manually sorted and processed with the help of the U.S. Attorney's Office. Consequently, less than a third of the detainees were ready for arraignment that Tuesday. There were more than enough interpreters at that point, so we rotated in shifts of three interpreters per hearing. Court adjourned shortly after 4 p.m. However, the prosecution worked overnight, planning on a 7 a.m.-to-midnight court marathon the next day.

I was eager to get back to my hotel room to find out more about the case, since the day's repetitive hearings afforded little information, and everyone there was mostly refraining from comment. There was frequent but sketchy news on local TV. A colleague had suggested The Des Moines Register . So I went to DesMoinesRegister.com and started reading all the articles, along with the fifty-seven-page "ICE Search Warrant Application."

These were the vital statistics. Of Agriprocessors' 968 employees, about 75 percent were illegal immigrants. There were 697 arrest warrants, but late-shift workers had not arrived, so "only" 390 were arrested: 314 men and 76 women, 290 Guatemalans, 93 Mexicans, 4 Ukrainians, and 3 Israelis who were not seen in court. Some were released on humanitarian grounds: 56--mostly mothers with unattended children, a few with medical reasons, and 12 juveniles--were temporarily released with ankle monitors or directly turned over for deportation. In all, 306 were held for prosecution. Only 5 of the 390 originally arrested had any kind of prior criminal record. There remained 307 outstanding warrants.

Postville, Iowa (pop. 2,273), where nearly half the people worked at Agriprocessors, had lost one-third...