Somewhere in the confluence of Interstates 80 and 35 near Des Moines, Iowa – our crossroads near the center of the USA – rolls a van full of undocumented Latinos on the promise of a job growing tomatoes or mixing mud for construction.
In O’Neill, Neb., and Mount Pleasant, Iowa, scores of Latinos were rounded up by immigration officials and shipped out to points unknown this summer. In O’Neill they were working on a farm growing hydroponic tomatoes. In Mount Pleasant they were netted at a cement factory.
In El Paso, Texas, and nearby Las Cruces, New Mexico, men from Guatemala, or field workers from Mexico are bound in shackles for a plane that will touch them down south of the border to a fate uncertain or worse in a land they knew 10 years ago, if at all.
In Denison, Iowa, 11 immigrant men were found dead 16 years ago in a freight train hoping for a job, perhaps, in the nearby pork plant. Or maybe they were bound for Storm Lake, my home town of about 15,000 in north-west Iowa, where more than 2,000 immigrants process pork and turkey for Tyson Fresh Meats at $16-18 an hour.
And in San Antonio, Texas, a couple of years ago, nine men died and at least 30 more were detained after being sprung from the back of a sweltering freight trailer in a Walmart parking lot. They had been locked in there for several hours with no air conditioning; the temperature outside soared over 100F. They breathed through holes in the wall. Children cried. The trailer was owned by Pyle Transportation of Schaller, Iowa, just 10 miles down the road from Storm Lake. The only person to take a rap was the truck driver, a 60-year-old black man from Alabama who got life on a plea bargain.
We wondered what those parched people smuggled in by coyotes thought they might find and where. Might they have found it in Storm Lake, or maybe in the pork plant up in Worthington, Minn.?
And, we still wonder what happened to the survivors from that hot parking lot, the ones who fell into the immigration net most recently. We called down to Texas to ask their lawyer. His secretary was gracious enough to respond on his behalf that the overburdened attorney has no idea. They disappear into ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) and have not been heard from again.
We asked the criminal defense lawyer in Las Cruces if he hears from his clients. Maybe, he says. But rarely. They are gone with a handshake in chains. They are part of the flow that never ceases along with the sorrow and disruption.
And they are forgotten.
It’s like that every day.
Latinos are breathing life into communities from Dodge City to Garden City, Kansas, that Dust Bowlers fled generations ago for the West Coast. They are building record school enrollments, a busy downtown retail district and a hope for the future in Storm Lake that is forsaken in much of the rural Midwest today.
Topiz Martinez is putting in a new breakfast grill at Better Day Cafe on Lake Avenue. Ignacio “Nacho” Torres was a top student at Storm Lake high school last spring, mothered by his teachers, and is bound for the University of Iowa to do great things. Mercedes Rosales is thrilled to live at the Westview Trailer Park in Alta, four miles away from Storm Lake, with her children excelling in school. Storm Lake is growing organically because of our new neighbors, one of the few rural Iowa counties with more births than deaths each year.
They are here because they were asked to come by employers who could not attract homegrown Anglos to the cold meatpacking plant after they had seen the bright lights of Omaha.
The young men, like those on the train or in the trailer or bound in chains, came to Storm Lake starting in about 1990. They came mainly from Jalisco after rural Iowa was drained out by a farm depression that endured most of the previous decade. Previously, immigrants would come and go with the seasons. These men stayed. They got married. They are making babies and buying homes.
They are the lucky ones. Since 2010 border encounters are down but arrests are way up. Nobody is making it through at Juárez any more like they did roaming for centuries before, the men in chains are told. Don’t even try again.
In Storm Lake, families and a community are built.
In some cattle lot on the high plains or greenhouse in Nebraska, they are torn apart when ICE makes a showing.
Some make it – 10-14 million people are in the US without documents – and some don’t. Four hundred or more children are still stranded in detention separated from their families, or so we are told. Countless more young people brought here without papers by their parents hang in a cloud of uncertainty.
All because of a debate driven by Storm Lake’s congressman, Steve King, a Republican who was building that wall in his head when Trump was dumping his first wife. He says that Latino teens have calves the size of cantaloupes from hauling stash on their backs, imagine that. He tweets with white nationalists and insists that immigrants are a lethal threat physically and culturally. And, that most worthwhile stuff was produced north of the equator.
The likes of King and Trump have convinced half the country that they have a gripe with the man in chains. The man in the orange jumpsuit picks vegetables in the fields among the rocks. He has no crime other than wanting to be an American. For that, he is a felon.
The man or woman cutting pork at Tyson in Storm Lake wonders. He feels safe. He has papers. But nowadays, when they are talking about revoking citizenship, well she just doesn’t know. People feel secure in that the police don’t arrest them just for being undocumented. The churches are reaching out to refugees. The police chief speaks to immigrant groups to calm them. But he acknowledges that people who used to talk with police shy away or aren’t there at all. “Mainly, we are sad,” said Ofelia Valdez Rumbo, a local spokeswoman for the Dreamers.
There’s an election ahead, of course. King is secure in a seat that Cook Political Report labels “likely Republican.” His challenger is an affable former semi-pro pitcher and paralegal from Sioux City, J.D. Scholten, who just might strike lightning as a wave builds toward November.
Because, people even in this district don’t necessarily like that sort of talk. They are uncomfortable seeing children in cages. They are getting to know Latinos in conservative Iowa Dutch enclaves that need help in their dairy barns and small meat-processing plants.
But there remains a powerful anti-immigrant appeal, which is all King has to sell, among people who feel forgotten out here among the elements that they can’t seem to control. At least, King tells them, we can control this.
They are smothered, roasted and sexually abused on the journey here by freight train or semi-trailer. If found, they are chained and felonized for wanting to scoop out a hoghouse or pull a pork loin. What employer has been draped in orange and leg shackles? The poor men and women are forgotten as the debate and despair ebb and flow. But they are recalled in Storm Lake, where the more fortunate quietly build on a dream.
Art Cullen is editor of The Storm Lake Times in Iowa and won the 2017 Pulitzer prize for editorial writing. Cullen is the author of the book, Storm Lake: A Chronicle of Change, Resilience, and Hope from a Heartland Newspaper, which will be published by Viking, an imprint of Penguin Random House, on Oct. 2. This originally appeared in The Guardian.
From The Progressive Populist, October 15, 2018
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