The Catholic Messenger: People testify about treatment, 'fear' during raids

[Omaha Steve]

http://home.catholicweb.com/CathMessDavDio/index.cfm/NewsItem?ID=233728&From=Home

By Glenn Leach

DES MOINES — “Fear. It was all about creating fear in people,” said Tom Chapman, executive director of the Iowa Catholic Conference, reacting to testimony from witnesses at an April 29 hearing of the National Commission on ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) Misconduct and Violations of 4th Amendment Rights.

The national commission, sponsored by United Food and Commercial Workers Inter-national Union (UFCW), was holding the Des Moines hearing as the third in a series of national hearings.

Co-chaired by former Iowa Governor Tom Vilsack and union president Joseph Hansen, the commission took testimony from a broad spectrum of people affected by ICE raids at Swift & Co. packing plants in Marshalltown, Iowa, and Greeley, Colo., on Dec. 12, 2006.

The point of the hearings “is to make sure that people get treated fairly,” said Jerry Messer, representing UFCW Local 431 in Davenport.

Chapman said that “everyone agrees the government has the right, the duty, to enforce the law. Our concern is that it be done with due regard for human rights.”

In his opening remarks Vilsack reflected on the words of Eleanor Roosevelt, who said that human rights begin in the small places — the stores, the neighborhoods, the workplaces — and that if human rights have no meaning there, they have little meaning elsewhere.

FULL story at link.