THE SET-UP: Nothing exemplifies the contradictions and hypocrisies of America’s immigration “policy” like slaughterhouses. Yeah, slaughterhouses. The meatpacking industry prefers to call them “meat processing plants” because it drains the life (and the blood) out of the word. Nah, nothing is being “slaughtered” in this house. We are “processing meat” and “meat” is not alive … at least, not anymore … and “plants” are factories that magically produce things … not blood-soaked abattoirs where animals lose their lives … and humans can (and do) lose their limbs.
Euphemisms notwithstanding, blood-soaked abattoirs are the reality—both for the animals we breed in ungodly conditions on factory farms and for the often-abused and trafficked slaughterhouse workers many MAGA enthusiasts like to call “illegals.” Not “illegal immigrants” … just “illegals.” By stripping away “immigrant” they strip away an element of their humanity shared by nearly every American. Like the meatpackers who hide the brutal reality of their business behind softened language, they hide the humanity of their quarry behind a single-word indictment of their character.
Thus far, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has focused on “illegals” the general public would largely find unsympathetic—alleged gang members, tattooed criminals and foreign college students who think Palestinians are human beings. But that limited scope was getting in the way of Stephen Miller’s dream of turning Gitmo into a reverse Ellis Island. He reportedly shared his dream with 50 Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) at a May 20th meeting in which Miller strongly suggested they add Home Depot and 7-Eleven to their to-do list.
And they did.
But it appears they also added slaughterhouses … like Glenn Valley Foods in Omaha, Nebraska. Similar to the ICE raid at a Los Angeles Home Depot, ICE’s raid on Glenn Valley Foods sparked a protest. Unlike L.A., FOX News is not ginning-it up into a battle for Western Civilization … let alone cover it as a news story. I guess that’s a tacit admission MAGA enthusiasts cannot handle the truth about their beloved burgers or the source of nearly everything they shovel into their mouths. For thousands of farms and dairy farms and slaughterhouses stretching from Idaho to Florida, the truth is they can’t feed America without the “illegals” targeted by Trump’s deportation scheme. And unlike meatpacking giant JBS, most probably can’t afford to buy an exemption. - jp
TITLE: Immigration raid rocks Nebraska meatpacking plant; protesters and law enforcement clash
https://flatwaterfreepress.org/ice-raids-hit-omaha-meatpacking-plants/
EXCERPTS: U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement carried out its largest Nebraska workplace raid of the current presidential administration on Tuesday.
Federal authorities detained more than 70 people during a raid on the Glenn Valley Foods meatpacking plant near 68th and J streets, ICE said in a statement.
The large-scale raid also involved the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the U.S. Marshals Service and Omaha police, according to the plant’s president.
It led to confusion inside the plant and anger outside of it, as some protesters clashed with law enforcement. It shocked company executives, who said they’d used the federal government’s system to verify the legal status of their employees. And it also set off a fresh round of fear and rumors that plants and stores elsewhere in Nebraska had been raided, or were soon to be. Those reports couldn’t be verified by the Flatwater Free Press on Tuesday evening.
ICE executed the federal search warrant on Glenn Valley Foods “based on an ongoing criminal investigation into the large-scale employment of aliens without authorization to work in the United States,” the agency said in a statement.
It’s not yet known where the workers were taken, but Glenn Valley employees leaving the scene told the Flatwater Free Press they saw dozens of their colleagues being led by agents into a white bus.
Tensions escalated between protesters and ICE as a procession of SUVs carrying federal agents left the plant after the raid. Several protesters cursed at law enforcement, jumped on moving vehicles and threw rocks and debris at the cars, shattering one window.
The raid shocked Glenn Valley Foods President Chad Hartmann, who said company leaders had “no notification, no idea whatsoever” that a raid was coming.
Glenn Valley, which produces frozen beef, chicken and pork products, has about 140 workers at its Omaha plant, Hartmann said.
The warrant said 107 of those workers would be investigated, Hartmann said. Many of those employees were cleared, he said. “I just don’t know how many were not.”
Hartmann said immigration officials collected each of the plant employees’ I-9 forms in February and reviewed them. He said the company uses the federal system to check the identity and legal status of employees, known as E-Verify.
“We’ve done everything we’re supposed to do as a company,” Hartmann said.
Several plant workers, including Marisol Mejía, streamed out of the plant after agents had verified their legal status.
Mejía said federal agents separated the workers into two groups in the plant’s cafeteria: those with documents proving their legal status and those without.
Agents fingerprinted all of the workers, most of whom hail from Guatemala or the Mexican state of Guerrero, she said, then led those without documents into a white bus with their hands zip tied.
Natasha Reyes left work to bring legal documents to Mejía, who is her cousin.
From outside the plant, Reyes said, she saw uniformed ICE and DEA agents with their faces covered by masks, as well as some Omaha police officers.
Reyes grew emotional as she spoke about the raid, noting that those arrested have family and friends who depend on them for survival.
“I don’t think that anyone should be punished for going to work,” Reyes said. “It seems like no one has compassion anymore.”
Karla Cabrera’s aunt, who has been in Omaha nearly 20 years, was one of the Glenn Valley workers detained and loaded onto the bus by immigration authorities.
Cabrera, standing outside the plant, said she received a call from her aunt around 9:30 a.m. after agents entered the plant, many wearing masks that covered their faces. Her aunt then left her phone on speakerphone in her pocket, so that Cabrera could hear the commotion inside. Workers hid in the warehouse, she said.
Cabrera’s aunt told her that officers were demanding that workers sign a document, but the document wasn’t translated into Spanish, so many didn’t know what it said.
Cabrera said her aunt had no idea where she’s headed.
Anna Hernandez, an Omaha advocate working with the League of United Latin American Citizens, said her organization believed that some workers detained on Tuesday had work permits approved under President Joe Biden that recently were rescinded under President Donald Trump.
“This is psychological warfare,” Hernandez said. “Families are being broken here.”
TITLE: ICE Targeting Food and Ag Businesses
https://www.dtnpf.com/agriculture/web/ag/columns/washington-insider/article/2025/06/11/ice-ramps-arrests-raid-nebraska-meat
EXCERPT: The immigration raid Tuesday of a small meat processing plant in Omaha is likely a sign of things to come.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents are starting to more aggressively target agriculture and food processing facilities around the country as reports over the past week from New Mexico and California also highlight.
In Omaha, ICE agents hit a small meat processor, Glenn Valley Foods, rounding up as many as 100 workers suspected of being in the country illegally and potentially providing fake documents to gain employment.
ICE stated it was the largest enforcement operation in Nebraska since President Donald Trump took office. Nebraska is considered the country's largest red-meat processing state with packing plants in towns and cities across the state, including multiple major plants in southeast Omaha where the raid occurred. Nearly every one of those areas also has a larger Latino population who make up the bulk of the workforce at these facilities.
Glenn Valley Foods processes and makes thinly sliced minute steaks, Gary's QuickSteak, at its facility. Gary Rohwer, owner and CEO of the company, told an Omaha TV station that federal investigators told him 97 employees had false identification. Rohwer told the TV station his company uses the federal E-Verify program.
The ICE raid led to an early panic in southeast Omaha, an area with a large Latino population and business district just off the old stockyards area where multiple larger beef packing plants are located. The Nebraska Examiner reported small Latino businesses closed their doors.
Roger Garcia, a Douglas County commissioner who represents southern Omaha was outside the JBS plant in the area posting videos on social media raising concerns about the raid. While it was rumored JBS was raided, a spokeswoman for the company stated JBS was not a target on Tuesday.
"At this point in time, there has been no ICE raid at the JBS facility in Omaha. It is being incorrectly reported that way but the actions that have happened so far today have not taken place at our plant," said Nikki Richardson of JBS. "We have not had any immigration enforcement actions at any of our plants across the U.S."
TITLE: The Escalating, Bloody Exploitation of Meat Workers Under Trump
https://prospect.org/labor/2025-06-11-escalating-bloody-exploitation-meat-workers-trump/
EXCERPTS: As the CEOs of some of the largest corporations in the world tripped over their feet to throw cash at President Trump’s inauguration fund, one outspent the rest: JBS, one of the largest meat processing companies in the country, was the single largest contributor with a colossal $5 million gift.
JBS, the biggest contributor toward Trump’s inauguration, has plenty of regulatory hurdles it could use Trump’s help to overcome. The company has long been engaged in sordid monopolist behavior: It has paid over $150 million in settlements over price-fixing allegations, has an extensive list of workplace safety violations too long to summarize, and was charged by the SEC in 2020 for “an extensive bribery scheme that took place over multiple years” during its purchase of Pilgrim’s Pride.
This behavior is, unfortunately, pretty typical for the meatpacking industry, which has spent decades consolidating into just four big meatpacking companies (Tyson, JBS, Cargill, and National Beef). Together, these companies control 80 to 85 percent of the beef market, and are dominant across pork and poultry markets as well.
During the Biden administration, the meatpacking industry came under increased scrutiny, including investigations into its high degree of concentration and use of child labor. JBS’s “investment” in Trump’s inauguration will likely benefit not just their company, but the entire industry’s deregulatory agenda. Just witness what Trump’s appointees are already working on.
In meatpacking, “line speed” refers to how quickly the animals are moved through the process of slaughtering, butchering, and processing. As a rule, companies want to speed it up, while workers—who are doing this grim work with very sharp knives and saws—want to keep it slow, for safety reasons. Sure enough, Trump’s USDA pick Brooke Rollins announced in March that she would be extending line speed increase waivers granted to poultry and pork processing plants. At the same time, she announced that the USDA will immediately begin to write a rule codifying maximum line speed increases for plants beyond the waiver system.
The pork processing plant waiver extensions are part of a drawn-out implementation of a rule finalized during Trump’s first term known as the New Swine Inspection System (NSIS). The NSIS allowed meat companies to reduce the number of independent federal inspectors on the processing line, instead replacing them with company-employed inspectors, who are not required to receive federal training, and who would have to go through their bosses if they want to enforce safety measures that often incur high costs. Simultaneously, the rule got rid of speed limits entirely.
The implications for food safety of an accelerated and self-regulated meatpacking process are clear. Scaling down the number of independent federal inspectors while increasing line speeds makes it more likely they will miss contaminants, such as feces, sex organs, toenails, bladders, and hair, as well as bacteria such as E.coli, salmonella, and campylobacter.
Even though Rollins’s USDA claims that line spread increases are safe for workers, the extensive studies done on the topic show that the opposite is true. The agency’s own trials show that faster speeds increase the risk of “developing carpal tunnel syndrome and other crippling upper extremity disorders.” Almost every meat worker who spoke to Human Rights Watch in 2019 said that increased line speeds are dangerous—which is backed up by “decades of research that has found that rapid work speeds compound the highly repetitive, forceful movements required by meat and poultry slaughtering and processing work and increase the risk of developing musculoskeletal disorders.”
In swine slaughterhouses, hog carcasses are suspended above a conveyor belt while workers have to quickly slice or package the cuts as the line moves along—with current line speed caps, workers perform each cut in about three seconds, 8,848 times a day. Poultry and cattle processing facilities have a similar structure. Even under capped line speeds, worker deaths and serious injuries occur often—an average of 27 meatpacking workers have to get amputations or are hospitalized every day. In 2023, a 16-year-old Guatemalan immigrant was sanitizing machines at a poultry plant when the machine pulled him into its gears and killed him. A worker at a Colorado JBS plant that same year died after he fell into a chemical vat used to process animal hides. Another JBS worker had his arm ripped off by a conveyor belt in 2021, and others have had their fingers crushed.
Meat workers are often intimidated to keep the speed up, afraid to stand up to their bosses to slow things down even when exhaustion sets in and their knives get dull. In fact, line speeds are so strict that 80 percent of workers have reported not being able to use the bathroom when needed, with some workers testifying that people are even forced to soil themselves to keep working.
Many of these workers are children. In February 2023, the Department of Labor found that JBS, Cargill, and Tyson all contracted a cleaning service that employed over 80 children at meatpacking facilities across the country. Some of the children were as young as 13, and they worked overnight shifts in slaughterhouses using hazardous chemicals to clean jagged processing equipment designed to rip through flesh. Tyson didn’t seem to learn their lesson, since additional federal court records unsealed in 2024 showed the company was being investigated for employing minors under the age of 16 at two plants in Arkansas.
In general, Big Meat preys on some of the most marginalized workers for its aggressive exploitation. Somewhere between 30 and 50 percent of the workers in the meat industry are undocumented, with Latin Americans making up about two-thirds of that segment. Additionally, many workers are displaced refugees or asylees who would be affected by Trump’s threats to end Temporary Protected Status. The industry’s support for Trump despite his stated plan to deport such a significant segment of the workforce is no mistake. His administration’s systemic denial of these workers’ human rights makes them more vulnerable to some of the most predatory kinds of exploitation. Not only are workers who live in fear of federal agents storming their homes and putting them in handcuffs easier to scare away from forming unions, but they are more likely to put up with wage theft, dangerous workplaces, grotesque injuries, harassment, and countless other abuses. Better keep quiet, or the boss will call ICE.