by Ted Genoways
While these new battles commenced on the legislative and executive sides, legal challenges to one part or another of Fremont’s proposed ballot measure—whether or not the ordinance would violate the reserve clause, whether or not the wording of the ordinance was consistent with state law—made their way through the Dodge County District Court and the Nebraska Supreme Court. For Kobach, this was just one front in a larger war on immigration policy. His boss at the IRLI, director Michael Hethmon, had called these local ordinances and state bills “field tests”—a kind of spinning-plate strategy, whereby the organization hoped to keep enough legal cases going at once, trying slightly different strategies, that they would occasionally find sympathetic judges and establish precedents to advance all of their other cases at once. The goal was to eventually bring each piece to the U.S. Supreme Court and cobble together a new broad-ranging immigration policy, bit by bit. In late April 2010, Kobach scored a major victory, when Arizona governor Jan Brewer signed the Kobach-authored SB1070, which made it a misdemeanor for any alien, legal or not, to be present in Arizona without federally required documents on their person and not only empowered but obligated police officers to determine a person’s immigration status during any “lawful stop, detention or arrest.” The measure was criticized by pundits as the “show me your papers” law, but Kobach argued that the law merely brought state statutes into harmony with existing federal mandates.
When I spoke with Kobach in his office in Kansas, where he is now the secretary of state, he leaned way back in his chair behind an imposing mahogany desk. He conceded such legal maneuvers were part of a larger strategy—a coordinated effort at “attrition through enforcement.” But he took umbrage at critics who asserted that this amounts to harassment, achieving an extralegal end by making life miserable for an already sorely mistreated immigrant population. “That’s not it at all. It’s just changing the calculation,” Kobach insisted. He pointed to Fremont’s ordinance as an example. “If before Fremont adopted the ordinance you had an eighty percent chance of finding a job and successfully getting that job illegally, now maybe it’s a thirty percent chance. So it changes the calculation of a rational decision maker. Maybe a person says, ‘I’m not going to go to Fremont. I might not even go to the United States.’ So it’s all about changing the calculation: you ratchet up the costs, and you ratchet down the benefits, so that people make the rational decision to follow the law.”
By the spring of 2010, enough immigrants—legal or not—were choosing to leave Fremont and Hormel behind that the company decided it was time to intercede, albeit covertly. But before Hormel could effectively band together with the unlikely alliance of the ACLU, Nebraska Appleseed, and the Fremont Chamber of Commerce, a ruling came down from the Nebraska Supreme Court: the ordinance language was deemed constitutional. And a date was set—June 21, 2010—for a public ballot measure. After more than two years of legal wrangling, Fremont’s future would come down to a single popular vote in just a few weeks.
The short deadline allowed little time to organize a campaign on either side. Kristin Ostrom, a Fremont resident who held a law degree with certification as a master mediator and previously served as the executive director of the Nebraska Justice Center, decided to form an ad hoc coalition to fight the ordinance. She reached out to Gabby Ayala, a member of the mayor’s task force on immigration, and convinced her to join in founding the group they eventually named One Fremont, One Future. But by the time they held their first meeting, Ostrom told me, they had only about a month to organize.
Adding to the confusion, no one seemed to know exactly where city limits were drawn or how far municipal jurisdiction would extend to contiguous areas. Somehow, in all the arguments about the ordinance, no one had considered the bounds of its reach if it were passed. The Hormel plant, for example, had been built outside the city’s southern boundary, but its latest expansion pushed one wing across the line. Would they be subject to the ordinance? The Regency II Mobile Home Park, a largely Hispanic community of neatly rowed trailers (which counts among its residents many Hormel and Fremont Beef employees), fell right along the city limit as well and appeared, in places, to have grown outside the official boundaries. Would the ordinance be enforced on one block and not another? And who in this neighborhood was eligible to vote?
Volunteers from One Fremont, One Future went door-to-door at Regency II, registering people. But rumors continued to fly—there would be police at the poll checking identification (and, in fact, a Charlie Janssen-sponsored voter ID law was under debate in the legislature), there would be immigration officials outside the voting stations—and spontaneous intimidation began to target this area of town as well. There were numerous reports of people shouting “Go back to Mexico!” from passing vehicles, of windows being shot out. At a pair of houses under construction just south of the railroad tracks, someone vandalized the Habitat for Humanity sign in the yard, so that it read, “Habitat for Mexicans.” In the midst of it all, the Schuyler Public Schools announced plans to revise their standards for residency, barring noncitizens from attending, until the ACLU issued a warning letter—and, likewise, vowed to fight the Fremont ordinance in court if it cleared the vote.
One Fremont, One Future made no yard signs or bumper stickers or buttons; they managed only to get out a few mailings. But then Ron Tillery, executive director of the Fremont Area Chamber of Commerce, reached out to Les Leech at Fremont Beef and Don Temperley, the plant manager at Hormel. Tillery had received word that the national press was preparing to descend on Fremont; it was a grand opportunity to build opposition to the ordinance by shining a spotlight on the battle, but it also presented a peril. Any misstep could be costly. In a group meeting on June 11, it was decided that Leech would go to Hormel’s corporate headquarters in Austin, Minnesota, for meetings, presumably to establish common talking points. In the meantime, Hormel would dispatch Bill McLain, then Hormel’s manager of external communications, to Fremont to give media training to anyone who would be speaking to the press. In an email copied to a business-backed committee opposing the ordinance and a local real estate agent who is also one of the city’s largest property managers, Tillery assured everyone at the Chamber of Commerce that McLain was an “expert at dealing with situations like this” who would be arriving soon “to review a number of things.” Tillery also mentioned that Temperley had agreed to seek $10,000 from Hormel to bolster their anti-ordinance television ad campaign.
The following Monday morning, McLain arrived in Fremont. Together with plant manager Temperley, he met with Kristin Ostrom in Tillery’s office at the Chamber of Commerce. McLain offered “to teach me,” Ostrom said, “how to deal with the press and how to stay on my talking points—but I couldn’t say anything to anybody about it.”
“Did you take them up on it?” I asked.
“I took them up on the information,” Ostrom said. “I didn’t promise a thing.”
She still stiffened at the thought of accepting assistance from Hormel. In the progress of the whole sordid mess, the beleaguered liberals of Fremont had found themselves forcibly aligned with the meatpacking giants that had made a killing exploiting immigrant labor. And the city council that had been convinced by those liberal constituents to vote down the first version of the ordinance was now represented by Kris Kobach, the attorney who authored the ordinance they had opposed. The sheer madness of the situation was infuriating to Ostrom. But then, she softened a bit. The representatives from Hormel, especially Bill McLain, “were very easy to work with, very kind,” she said. They offered constructive and insightful advice in helping her steer far away from the ironies of the situation and took a strong hand in coaching her through several radio interviews, which everyone agreed would be critical in swaying potential voters.
One morning, as Tillery and Ostrom prepared for a joint interview on KHUB radio in Fremont, Bill McLain sent a long email, hoping to help Ostrom turn the interview toward certain talking points. “I’ve drafted a list of questions t
hat I think could be topics of discussion during the show tomorrow,” he wrote. “I will start drafting proposed responses to these questions and send them to you. If you prefer to run through these questions in person, please do not hesitate to let me know.” Later that night, he sent long, detailed answers—nearly 2,200 words in all—to each of the questions he had posed. If asked about Hormel, they could say that the “company supports the Chamber of Commerce’s position that immigration reform should be addressed by the federal government and not on a state or city basis,” but they were told to “note that the company voluntarily started using the E-verify system in April 1999 when it was called the Basic Pilot program” and emphasize that both Hormel and Fremont Beef “are outside the city limits.” Tillery and Ostrom stuck closely to the script, and McLain called after the show to applaud their performance.
Despite all the hands-on involvement, Hormel never took a public stance on the ordinance. When I reached him by phone to ask why, McLain, who is now the dayside manager at Hormel’s Fremont operation, refused to answer any questions. Every time I started to speak, he cut me off, shouting over my queries that I would have to speak to Hormel’s media relations department. When I asked if we could speak off the record, he hung up. The company, in a prepared statement, did eventually concede that McLain had traveled from Austin to Fremont “to provide communications support for media inquiries that we had started to receive.” They further explained that while “Hormel Foods supported the Chamber’s position in opposition to the ordinance,” they had considered it “most appropriate to communicate through the Chamber to enable a constructive dialogue and to speak on behalf of all of its members about this issue.” On the weekend before the election, Ostrom and other opponents of the measure went door-to-door in a final push—two hundred volunteers, knocking at some nine thousand homes. Their hopes were high that they had rallied sufficient support to defeat the measure, but, as the national press arrived in Fremont for the day of the actual vote, few residents were willing to publicly share how they intended to mark the ballot. Even at Regency II, there was only a simple white sign at the entrance—VOTE NO—and nothing more.
On the night of June 21, the supporters of One Fremont, One Future gathered in the old Fremont Veterans Club off Military Avenue—the very spot where the first signatures for the petition had been collected—and waited for the results. It wasn’t close. The county clerk’s office reported that Fremont voters had approved the measure by a wide margin—57 percent to 43 percent. “There were a lot of tears in this room tonight,” Ostrom told the New York Times. “Unfortunately, people have voted for an ordinance that’s going to cost millions of dollars, and that says to the Hispanic community that the Anglo community is saying they are not welcome here.”
One month after the vote was certified in Fremont, ACLU Nebraska announced that they were filing suit to challenge the constitutionality of the ordinance and seeking a permanent injunction against its enactment and enforcement. Blake Harper, the son of longtime Hormel worker Harold Harper, was living in Pennsylvania now, but he had been following the ordinance battle in Fremont at first with a feeling of embarrassment and dismay but then with a sense of mounting horror. “I wasn’t surprised that Fremont would bring up such a law,” he told me, “but I never dreamed it would pass.”
Blake had moved with his wife in 2009 to State College, Pennsylvania, where he was working for Subway Restaurants, selecting sites for new franchise locations and handling the leasing of those properties. But he still owned five rental properties in Fremont, holdovers from the Grant Group, a real estate and property management firm he had founded in the city in 2006. The new ordinance, if enforced, meant that Harper would have to inquire about the immigration status of each of his tenants before he could rent to them legally. He was outraged by the very idea of this, so when he saw word of ACLU Nebraska’s planned lawsuit on behalf of several renters in Fremont, he immediately called their offices in Lincoln. He said he thought the case would be even stronger if there was a landlord among the plaintiffs. “I basically told them, ‘Send me whatever I need to sign to get me on this suit.’” (Steven Dahl, another landlord in Fremont, also contacted the ACLU and joined the complaint as well.)
Alan E. Peterson, ACLU Nebraska’s attorney, contacted Harper, and they quickly crafted a declaration to be added to the brief. Most of the declaration focuses on establishing Harper’s legal standing and arguments about the infringement of his rights as a landlord. But he insisted that the document end on a more personal note. “I am very concerned about the negative effect the immigration ordinance is having on Fremont,” Harper wrote, “and personally regard the ordinance as a new form of ‘Jim Crow’ legislation aimed primarily at persons of Hispanic background, race, or national origin. It appears to me to have a real purpose, underlying the intricate legalities, of keeping the minority population very low, both in numbers and in their feelings with regard to their neighbors in this city. I do not believe that one can label a human being as ‘illegal’; regardless of immigration status. People are not ‘legal’ or ‘illegal’ and labeling them as such is repulsive, unethical, and abhorrent.”
When I spoke to Harper, he was reluctant to delve too deeply into the psychology of his swift reaction to the immigration vote, but he conceded that—ever since the mysterious illness he had suffered in third grade, the one that had left him with severe-profound hearing loss and a lingering speech impediment—he had felt a reflexive kinship toward the powerless. After his stint at the Boys Town National Research Hospital in Omaha, Harper had emerged as an awkward and thin-skinned ten-year-old with a pair of clumsy hearing aids. In order for him to be able to hear in the classroom, his parents invested in a microphone that his teacher could wear around her neck, so her voice could be transmitted directly to young Blake’s hearing aids. But when he started the fourth grade in the fall, Harper told me his teacher, Marilyn Wiegert, didn’t wear the microphone.
I stopped him. “Marilyn Wiegert?”
Harper heaved a deep sigh. “Look,” he said, “everybody’s had to deal with bullshit in their lives, but I don’t think mine was worse than anyone else’s. And I’m suspect of the narrative fallacy—to say that I did this because of that. But, yes, John Wiegert’s mother was my fourth-grade teacher at Clarmar Elementary, and I hated her.”
Harper, however, was quick to remind me that Fremont was a small town. Sure, he had lingering animosity toward the Wiegerts. And it was true that his mother had worked with Cindy Hart, Jerry Hart’s sister, at 3M and eventually asked to be transferred to another division because of conflicts they were having. But he didn’t want me to come away with the idea that his opposition to the ordinance was somehow born out of personal feuds and provincial rivalries. He didn’t even join the suit because of his feelings, one way or the other, about immigration. “I got involved, because, as a landlord, I thought it was a violation of fair housing law,” he told me. “And that’s completely separate from anything immigration related.” Exactly as he had stated in his declaration, he considered the law discriminatory, bigotry cloaked as legality, the real intent of which was to allow those with power to strike fear in the hearts of people who had none. To that extent, he conceded, it was no surprise to him to see the Harts and the Wiegerts lined up in favor of the ordinance, but the real struggle is for the future of Fremont. People needed to stop directing their anger toward exploited immigrants and start aiming it where it really belonged: toward Hormel. The city would never be free to determine its own future so long as it remained tied to its postwar past, looming silent and sphinxlike across the railroad tracks.
“People say that if Hormel left, the town would die,” Harper said. “Okay, maybe—so let’s build something else. Because Hormel isn’t going to change. Hormel is a machine, it’s a robot, and it’s going to just go and go and go and go as long as you feed hogs into it. But while the manufacturing sector is doing its thing, the city could be deciding to become a progressive enclave, an arts en
clave, a local food enclave. Otherwise, kids, like myself, grow up there, go to college, and get the hell out. And all you’re left with is Hormel—and a town divided between the Hispanic people who are moving there to work at Hormel and the old guys, like my dad and his buddies, who used to work at Hormel but got screwed over and are bitter. What kind of future is that?”
Chapter 12
BROTHER, ARE YOU OKAY?
When Immigration and Customs Enforcement finally cracked down on Quality Pork Processors, it wasn’t the kind of dramatic action that immigration opponents like Ruthie Hendrycks at MinnSIR or Samuel Johnson of the National Socialist Movement had been hoping for. It wasn’t like the coordinated raids in 2006, when ICE agents descended simultaneously on six different Swift & Company meatpacking plants across the Midwest, including the one in Worthington. Not like the raid on the Agriprocessors plant across the border in Postville, Iowa, in 2008, in which agents patrolled the air with two black helicopters and loaded undocumented workers onto a caravan of white buses emblazoned with the words HOMELAND SECURITY. Those raids had given the agency a black eye. Minnesota senator Al Franken publicly raised objections over the tactic of swooping in unannounced. “The raids resulted in the arrest of over 1,500 unauthorized immigrants,” he said. “They also left hundreds of children—most of them citizens and legal residents—without their parents and with no way of finding them.”