The ripple effects

This is an excellent story [gift link] about a company in Nebraska that used E-Verify and had its workforce completely decimated anyway:

They gathered in a conference room for the weekly management meeting, even though there was hardly anyone left to manage. Chad Hartmann, the president of Glenn Valley Foods in Omaha, pushed a few empty chairs to the side of the room and then passed around a sheet totaling the latest production numbers. “Take a deep breath and brace yourselves,” he said.

For more than a decade, Glenn Valley’s production reports had told a story of steady ascendance — new hires, new manufacturing lines, new sales records for one of the fastest-growing meatpacking companies in the Midwest. But, in a matter of weeks, production had plummeted by almost 70 percent. Most of the work force was gone. Half of the maintenance crew was in the process of being deported, the director of human resources had stopped coming to work, and more than 50 employees were being held at a detention facility in rural Nebraska.

Hartmann, 52, folded the printed sheet into tiny squares and waited out the silence.

“So, this gives you a pretty good sense of the work we have ahead of us,” he said.

“It’s a wipeout,” said Gary Rohwer, the owner. “We’re building back up from ground zero.”

It should be noted here that one of the ripple effects is that at least two of the detained employees were guilty of identity theft that cost inncent people access to student loans and medication. The people guilty of this actually should be deported, but it’s also the inevitable consequence of a system that relies on immigrant labor without the willingness to give enough people legal status to work. And the necessity is acute:

“I’m still furious about what happened to our people, but we have to keep the machines running,” Rohwer said. “We need more people trained and ready to go.”

“Trained by who?” another manager asked. “We lost every supervisor out there. If you ran a machine or checked temperatures or did anything important, you’re gone.”

“Then we pick up our hiring,” Rohwer said.

He looked out into the lobby and saw three women filling out applications. Glenn Valley paid well, with an average hourly wage of almost $20 and regular bonuses, but the work was repetitive and demanding. Employees who came mostly from Mexico and Central America stood on a manufacturing line for as much as 10 hours a day, six days a week, and processed hundreds of pounds of meat through dangerous machinery in a cold factory.

Ever since videos of the raid spread across social media, Rohwer had answered dozens of calls from strangers who accused him of “stealing American jobs.” But Nebraska was experiencing a work shortage, with only 66 qualified workers for every 100 positions. Almost every one of the company’s new applicants was also a Hispanic immigrant.

The Miller raids break up families:

His parents had spent the last 25 years in Omaha, building an undocumented life with such care that to Omar it started to feel “normal, even stable,” he said. His parents met in Mexico and eventually crossed the border together on foot in their teens. They married, found work in Nebraska and bought a small house on the outskirts of downtown where they could raise their four children, all U.S. citizens. A few months earlier, Omar had encouraged his mother to hire a lawyer to help her explore a path to citizenship. She had a “perfect case,” the lawyer wrote: No criminal record. Longstanding ties to the community. A steady job with good reviews.

She took on extra hours to pay legal fees and nursed sores on her feet. It wasn’t in her nature to complain, not even now, about the raid, the detention center or the lawyer she could no longer seem to reach.

“How are you?” Omar asked in Spanish, once Elizabeth came on the line. Her children crowded onto the couch and gathered around the phone.

“I’m fine,” she said. “Tell me about all of you. Are you eating? Sleeping?”

“Don’t worry,” Omar said. “Everything’s OK.”

This was how they survived these calls: each side reassuring the other even as they continued to unravel. Omar was working the graveyard shift at a local call center to help pay for groceries. His two younger sisters, 17 and 13, were trying to cook for the family from her mother’s recipes. Omar’s younger brother, 7, was waking up at night short of breath, wheezing and choking, until Omar took him to the emergency room. Doctors said he was suffering from panic attacks. He had never spent a night away from Elizabeth, and he didn’t know what it meant to be undocumented, or detained, or deported. The family had decided it was best to tell him that his mother was still at work.

“I’ll be home soon,” she told him now.

“When?” he asked.

“I don’t know yet,” she said. “I’m trying my best.”

“You have five minutes remaining on this call,” the automated voice said.

This story does, however, have one unexpected twist:

Rohwer, 84, had always used a federal online system called E-Verify to check whether his employees were eligible to work, and Glenn Valley Foods itself had not been accused of any violations. Rohwer was a registered Republican in a conservative state, but he’d voted for a Democrat for the first time in the 2024 election, in part because of Trump’s treatment of immigrants. Rohwer couldn’t square the government’s accusations of “criminal dishonesty” with the employees he’d known for decades as “salt-of-the-earth, incredible people who helped build this company,” he said. Most of them had no criminal history, aside from a handful of traffic violations. Many were working mothers, and now they were calling the office from detention and asking for legal advice. Their children, U.S. citizens, were struggling at home and in some cases subsisting on donations of the company’s frozen steak.

Voters do have agency. You’re allowed to vote for the party that opposes mass deportations of otherwise law-abiding workers even if it means that somewhere the seventh-best player on a junior high school volleyball team gets to keep playing. Really. Even if you own a business or are corporate executive! As an English poet once said, you can choose, don’t confuse, win or lose, it’s up to you.