On the recordJune 22, 2010
on December 12, 2006, Immigration and Customs Enforcement staged raids on Swift & Company meatpacking plants in six states--Colorado, Iowa, Nebraska, Texas, Utah, and my home State of Minnesota. Over 1,500 unauthorized immigrants were arrested in these raids. They also left countless children--most of them citizens and legal residents--without their parents and with no way of finding them. One second-grader in Worthington, MN--a U.S. citizen--came home that Tuesday night to find his 2-year-old brother alone and his mother and father missing. For the next week, this boy stayed at home caring for his 2-year-old brother while his grandmother traveled to Worthington to care for her grandchildren. On June 22, 2007, ICE agents staged another raid, this one in the Jackson Heights Manufactured Home Park in Shakopee, MN. Early that Friday morning, around 6 a.m., Federal agents seized a husband and his wife for suspected immigration violations. Somehow, they didn't even notice their daughter, who was sleeping. So later that morning, that 7-year-old girl was found wandering the park, looking for her parents. Stories like these happen every day. They are happening to innocent children, most of them United States citizens. Children who have committed no crime, who have hurt no one, but who have had their lives torn apart because of the sins of their parents.
