by Ted Genoways
But he denied any suggestion that QPP was intentionally hiring undocumented workers. “There is no advantage for us to hire someone illegal to work here,” Wadding said. “None.”
Even after his diagnosis with PIN, Emiliano Ballesta couldn’t bring himself to request a transfer from the head table to another part of the production line. His job, removing sinewy cheek meat from the tight nooks of the skull (a job known as “chiseling”), required more precise handwork than almost any other position in the plant. In the era of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, workers at the head table used an actual chisel to pry open and dislocate hogs’ jaws, then hacked away muscles from the cheeks and temples. But today most factories use a mechanized jaw-puller for the brute task, and the meat is harvested by a single highly skilled worker making precise cuts with a straight blade, honed to razor sharpness and handled with a chain-mail glove. The dexterity and mastery it takes to perform this task while keeping pace with the speed of the line made Ballesta’s job one of the most prestigious and (at $13.15 per hour following a raise) highest-paying positions at QPP. Younger workers with straight-blade jobs at other stations often sought out Ballesta, hoping to apprentice in his technique—to study the angle and speed at which he drew his knife along the hone, to count the number of strokes he used to achieve his edge and the number of cuts he made before he dressed it back again.
In the kitchen of his rented apartment in a house on the east side of the Cedar River, Ballesta showed me a technique. He turned the blade of a butcher knife over, checking both sides.
“You have to be sure there are no dents in the blade,” he said, as one of his sons translated. “Then you sharpen it against the steel rod.”
He slid the blade out and back along the sharpening steel in a fluid motion that made the knife hum and sing. During the early days of the new plant, veteran workers complained repeatedly about the introduction of mechanical knife sharpeners, which were replacing the personal stones and steels used to hone and feather their knives. They insisted that the mechanical sharpeners never gave knives a proper edge, leading to more strain while cutting and eventually to carpal tunnel syndrome. Some continued to use their own sharpeners. Ballesta said there wasn’t time for the mechanical sharpeners. Cutting through the dense hide of the hog’s head and slicing away the meat meant he had to redress his blade, a few precise strokes against the hone dangling from his belt loop and then back to cutting, almost every minute of his shift.
“The skin of a hog is very thick and the blade would wear out quickly,” Ballesta said. “I had to keep sharpening it all day.”
Everything about him was commanding, from his trimmed mustache to his iron-gray temples. Once, I spotted him among the crowd of congregants arriving for Mass at Queen of Angels Catholic Church, his bright red western shirt pressed and perfectly creased, the sleeves buttoned to conceal the circular scar of a Whizard knife slash on his left forearm. He had always hated the mechanical knives after that incident long ago and resolved ever after only to use a blade under his exact control. But even on the day of that injury, he had gotten patched up at the Austin Medical Center and returned to QPP to finish his shift. It must have been nearly impossible for him now to accept that something invisible—something he referred to always as “the infection”—had robbed him of sensation and fine motor function, turning what had been surgical skill into a fumbling hazard.
After his diagnosis, Ballesta was given work restrictions and assigned to other jobs: weighing and packing parts, running the circular saw that clips off snouts. He even tried going back to a less skilled job trimming head meat with the Whizard. But by March 2009, Ballesta’s work with the humming blade—performing the same motion 400 to 500 times per hour—had worsened the tingling in his right hand and left his middle finger completely numb. “I strongly suspect this is carpal tunnel syndrome,” Dr. Lachance wrote to Carole Bower. Ballesta was given lighter duty washing ears, then taken off the line altogether to work in the box room alongside Matthew Garcia. He couldn’t take it. In May, Ballesta asked to be put back at his chiseling station, but he had trouble keeping up, and his need for breaks jeopardized his ability to hang on to the job. Under his contract, he had to meet standard in order to keep the job—and the high-paying position was coveted by other workers.
Bower sent an email to Lachance. “Rather difficult,” she began. “He really likes the chiseling job and does not want off of it.” She explained that Ballesta had asked to return to chiseling full-time. But Lachance believed he would still need fifteen-minute breaks every two hours, something that Bower doubted could continue to be accommodated. Still, she wrote that Ballesta “is a very good and ethical man so wants to work hard and please his employer. Can we see how it goes for awhile?”
In July, Bower told social worker Roxanne Tarrant that QPP had been reviewing the job lineup sheets for the workers with PIN, and it was becoming increasingly difficult to manage their required accommodations. She asked Tarrant if Ballesta could possibly chisel cheek meat without taking breaks. For the first time, Ballesta balked. He said that he still had terrible burning in his feet if he stood too long; he had tried to work full shifts without a break, but he just couldn’t do it. On October 1, Ballesta finally gave in and requested to be put on cutting and cleaning intestines—despite a 20-cent-per-hour pay cut. He was dismayed but joked to coworkers that, after years at the head table, he would finally graduate to another station. That Saturday, October 3, would be his fifteenth anniversary at QPP. He called it his quinceañera, his coming of age.
But that Saturday, when he arrived at work, Ballesta was summoned to Human Resources. It was his last day at QPP.
Kelly Wadding didn’t want to talk to me. I called and left voice messages dozens of times. I sent long emails assuring him that I wanted to hear his side of the story. After months of silence, I got a phone call one day from his assistant. Wadding was on the road; she didn’t say where. She explained only that he was in a hotel room, traveling for business, and had a few minutes. She gave me his cell phone number and told me to keep it short.
At first, when I got Wadding on the line, he was tense but cordial as we talked through the history of QPP, the unfolding of the PIN cases, and the unexpected spotlight it had shone on immigration issues. But when I said something vague, simply that I had been struck by how many of the people affected by PIN had turned out to be undocumented workers, Wadding plunged into a defensive monologue. “We go above and beyond what the government requires as far as documentation. So we feel very comfortable with the documents of the people we hire. Now, there is an issue with people having forged documents. That is a problem—a big problem. I speak for myself and my company: we’re in support of immigration reform, we would like to see something done on that. Now, having said that, we’re very diligent in our process, making sure people have the proper documents. When these people—”
He caught his breath, and then, without prompting, turned adamant.
“I know where you’re headed and I’ll tell you right now: anybody that’s contracted PIN or any other illness or injury at work, we never, ever, ever go back and check their documentation.” I could hear his fist bang on something hard. Never, ever, ever. I imagined a buckling nightstand, the Gideon’s Bible rocking inside its drawer. Bang, bang, bang.
I told him that I wasn’t implying anything, but many former workers insisted that Dale Wicks had targeted sick workers for immigration review. I explained the larger facts as I understood them. His company had experienced an outbreak among its workers. Before bringing in the Department of Health, he transferred all of his shares to a holding company. Later, he shifted large parts of his workforce to a new company, one without an existing union contract. And when ICE had come down on him for violating laws against employing undocumented immigrants, he had begun removing workers from his rolls. The only question was whether there was any truth to the claim that Wicks began with—and focused on—employees who had filed workers’ compensation claims
.
“That is not done,” Wadding said emphatically. His voice was insistent. “The only time we go back and review the documentation and confront the employee about their legal status is if we’re contacted by the Social Security department or the unemployment department, those state agencies or federal agencies that contact us, and notifying us that they have suspicions of somebody’s identity. At that point then we do go back, and we will check records, and we will confront the person. And that happens regardless of if they’ve had an injury, regardless of what their status is here at work. We do that. And that is commonplace, more commonplace than I’d like to say, but that happens on a regular basis to people. And, yes, some of these people had PIN. We were contacted by Social Security that they had questioned their documents and we confronted them and found out they were illegal and we had to take action. We cannot employ them lawfully, so once we have that information . . . but at no time did we go back and check their records after they contracted this disease.”
He breathed again, exasperated this time. “You know, you guys just don’t understand stuff,” he said.
In April 2010, Matthew Garcia was called in to talk to Dale Wicks in Human Resources. Wicks told him that a man had been arrested in Texas; his name was Matthew J. Garcia—and he had the same date of birth and Social Security number as this Matthew J. Garcia. Wicks asked if his papers were his own. By now, workers—who had formed a support group that met weekly at Centro Campesino—had learned not to confess the way Miriam Angeles did, the way Emiliano Ballesta did. Of the fourteen workers who had workers’ comp claims, six had been fired for working under forged or stolen identities.
“I told them, yeah, they’re my papers,” Garcia said. “I have my ID, I have everything.”
During his illness, Garcia had enrolled in classes at Riverland Community College, and his English was now good enough for him to get by without an interpreter; he was not as frightened as other workers had been. Wicks warned that law enforcement was investigating, that they had already found records of Garcia’s information being used in five other states. Garcia didn’t budge; he insisted he didn’t know anything about that, that those people must have somehow stolen his information.
Garcia wasn’t fired—but, in June 2010, his condition suddenly worsened. Lachance ordered a fresh round of tests and found no evidence of relapse. Instead, in a letter to QPP, Lachance attributed the symptoms to “a chronic fibromyalgia like condition,” which he said he had also observed in “several individuals” with PIN. The tests did reveal residual nerve damage that Lachance said was hindering his ability to walk and “affecting some degree of permanent impairment of bowel and bladder function.” Lachance now regarded Garcia’s illness as a chronic condition. “I think his symptoms will be long term,” Lachance wrote to Bower, urging QPP to find a place for Garcia to perform light work—perhaps, now that his English skills were improving, even a desk job in the office. “Hopefully some day his pain syndrome will gradually remit and his tolerance for physical activity improve but for the foreseeable future, especially concerning work-related activities, I think it is reasonable to assign some permanency here.”
Roxanne Tarrant told me that she understood the difficulty that QPP faced in finding light-labor positions for the injured workers. “It’s a slaughterhouse,” she said. “There really are no light jobs.” Still, she was dubious of the claim that Immigration and Customs Enforcement just happened to be investigating so many affected workers whose doctors had recommended lighter duty. (Indeed, it’s not clear ICE did.) “When the first firing happened, I thought it was interesting,” Tarrant said. “When the second, then the third happened, I thought it was fishy.”
In the end, fourteen of the twenty-three workers who tested positive for PIN were approved for workers’ compensation. Of that group, six were fired for working without proper documentation between the time when claims were filed in June 2008 and April 2010: Miriam Angeles, Emiliano Ballesta, Santa Zapata, José Díaz, Lupe Treviño, and Humberto Paz. Zapata, Ballesta, and the young man I have called Matthew Garcia have all now been classified as permanently injured. And Pablo Ruiz, despite earlier skepticism from Lachance, successfully challenged his insurance suspension and was eventually allowed to resume care at the Mayo Clinic, where he continues to show permanent nerve damage on his periodic sweat tests.
Meanwhile, even as Kelly Wadding was assuring me that QPP had made no special effort to remove workers with PIN from employment, company attorneys were in the final stages of negotiating a settlement with up to a dozen employees. After attorneys’ fees, each received $12,500, a half year’s pay—all except Ruiz, who refused the settlement and still has not received any payment from QPP. Garcia, because of the extent of his injuries, got a one-time payment of $38,600—and, as a condition of the settlement, voluntarily terminated his employment at QPP. “I felt pushed into it,” Garcia told me. “My attorney said, ‘If you don’t do it, you’ll end up with nothing.’” He used some of the money to pay for more courses at the community college, but when I spoke to him last, the settlement money was going fast. He asked me not to use his real name, fearing it might hurt an application he had pending at McDonald’s.
Chapter 11
YOU ARE NOT WELCOME
Shortly after the start of the morning shift on a cold and blustery day in early March 2010, ICE agents from the Omaha Field Office entered the Fremont Beef processing plant, directly across South Platte Avenue from the Hormel plant. Fremont Beef’s President Les Leech was informed that his company was one of a thousand businesses nationwide that had been selected at random and audited against the Federal Trade Commission’s identity theft database. Agents presented him with a list of names, and those employees were summoned to a conference room. Managers did not tell the workers why they were called in, only to cooperate and answer all questions. In the hallway outside, ICE agents—all dressed in civilian clothing, their firearms concealed—divvied up case files. Then they entered the room and began calling names.
David Gran, a special agent with nearly two decades at ICE and the former Immigration and Naturalization Service, took a seat behind the conference table and called the name of Olga Arguelles. A woman rose and came to sit beside him. Gran showed her his agent identification and asked the woman for her true and complete name. “Rosaura Carrillo-Velasquez,” she replied. She told him that she had been born in Guatemala, that she was thirty-two years old, and had been living in a trailer park in Schuyler. She admitted that she did not have immigration papers and had entered the country illegally. Gran informed her that she would be taken into custody on an administrative arrest and transported by van to the detention center in Omaha. He asked if she had any conditions that required the retrieval of medications, or any small children at home who would require caretaking. She did not. Agent Gran then escorted her across the hall to a holding room. Eventually, agents arrested eighteen workers from among Fremont Beef’s dayside crew, roughly half the shift.
To Jerry Hart, the sweep was proof of what he and his fellow petitioners had been saying all along. “To those people who want proof that Fremont has a problem with illegal aliens, here it is. To those that still think that the problem is not that big, think again,” he wrote in an editorial for the local newspaper. “Had the ordinance prohibiting the hiring, renting to or harboring of illegal aliens been in force, these identity thefts might not have happened. It is appalling that citizens have to fight the City of Fremont, have to take the time and effort to circulate petitions to force this city to enforce federal laws. I am enraged that these crimes were committed in Fremont. I am more enraged that this city could have prevented these crimes simply by preventing illegal aliens from being in Fremont in the first place.” Les Leech protested that Fremont Beef, and the Hormel plant directly next door, were already using E-Verify but had been denied access to the FTC database—so they had less information available about their own workforce than ICE did. “This ordinance will not change the complexion o
f this county one bit,” Leech told the New York Times, “because E-Verify doesn’t work.”
But panic spread quickly. “We heard that this happened at Fremont Beef,” Raul Vazquez told me, and the rumor flew: “This is going to come to Hormel.” An email circulated, in Spanish, saying that ICE was planning a raid at Hormel, that immigrants should stay away from Wal-Mart because ICE agents might be positioned there as well. A story went around that there were middle-of-the-night arrests in Schuyler. The sheriff’s office was called out to the Hormel plant to investigate a bomb scare—and, upon finding a device in an employee locker, the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and Nebraska state troopers sent in a robot to retrieve the suspicious mechanism and detonate it in the west parking lot. Fear and mistrust began feeding on themselves among the residents of Fremont.
In the meantime, Kris Kobach, the aggressive young attorney from the Immigration Reform Law Institute, pressed for taking the ordinance and its mission to the state level. He advised former Fremont city councilman Charlie Janssen, by then a state senator, on the authorship of LB 1001—a bill to repeal Nebraska’s Dream Act, allowing in-state tuition for undocumented aliens who graduated from high school in the state. Kobach personally filed suit against the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, the Nebraska State College System, and the Nebraska community colleges on behalf of six legal residents—his in-laws in Fairbury—claiming that their taxes were being used to support tuition breaks for illegal aliens in violation of federal law. Last but not least, Governor Dave Heineman, himself a former councilman in Fremont, entered into an agreement with ICE for a new program called Secure Communities. The new initiative took fingerprints, obtained through arrests by local and state law enforcement, and shared that biometric data with the Department of Homeland Security to check against immigration databases.