Treat workers with dignity

Last December, federal agents raided six Swift & Co. meat-packing facilities, including one in Hyrum, as part of a crackdown on an identity theft scheme. Innocent men and women were rounded up with suspected criminals. A lawsuit filed by a union that represents 1.3 million food industry workers alleges hundreds of people were detained without bathrooms, access to lawyers or telephones.

In Utah, the ripple effect of the raid was significant. Parents arrested in the sweeps did not come home, leaving children unattended and frightened. Some children were afraid to return to school for some time after the raids. Of 1,200 people arrested, identity theft charges were filed against only 65. According to The Washington Post, the raid cost Swift about $50 million.

A lawsuit is not the most convenient way to solve problems. But the raids raised serious concerns about violations of U.S. citizens' and legal residents' Fourth Amendment rights. Hundreds of innocent people were detained to find a few criminal suspects. This matter should be heard in a court of law.

ICE officials, in published reports, deny that people who were arrested were denied access to telephones. Moreover, they insist that the raids were lawful. That will be up to a court to decide. To casual observers, the raids appeared to be publicity stunts. In a season during which families should have been celebrating the holidays, many were separated one from another while federal officials attempted to sort relatively few lawbreakers from the innocents.

Utah's Swift plant is not part of the lawsuit because the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union does not represent Utah workers. However, attorneys for the union hope to include the Utah workers under a class action.

There is little point in trying the lawsuit on the editorial pages, other than to comment that these raids and others like them are symptomatic of a far greater problem — Congress' failure to pass meaningful immigration reform.

Congress must come up with a legal means for people to live and work in this country. A guest worker program would give federal authorities a better handle on the nation's immigrant population. This information would help authorities make more targeted arrests of criminal suspects.

The vast majority of immigrants in the United States — legal and illegal — are here to work and to improve their lives. Again, because of our nation's broken immigration policies, many families are of mixed status. Some parents may be foreign-born, but their children were born in the United States, thus they are American citizens. While the children may participate in the mainstream, parents who fear deportation try to blend in the background, where they are vulnerable to abuse and exploitation. Until Congress acts, that will not change.