By Doug Cunningham

The UFCW sponsored a Town Hall Forum on immigration issues in Chicago that was critical of the way the federal immigration enforcement agency, known as ICE, conducts workplace raids. Sonia Mendoza is a U.S. citizen rounded up by ICE at Swift and Company in Texas. She says hundreds of workers were held incommunicado without being able to eat, call family or go to bathrooms.

{Mendoza]: “We understand that ICE agents, you know, they have to do their job. Why did they have to herd us up like cattle, just sit there? We were like cattle in a cattle pen, because we couldn’t get out, we couldn’t drink water, we couldn’t do nothing.”

The Reverend Nelson Johnson chairs Interfaith Worker Justice.

[Rev. Johnson]: “There is something deeply anti-human about the direction that our nation is movin’ in. The ideological foundation and justification for it might start with one particular group of people. But there are no fences around it. It will wash over all of us unless we stand together. The God I serve didn’t make any illegal immigrants. And so every brother and sister anywhere has a right to life!”

The UFCW is suing the government for violating the rights of workers rounded up and held for hours during these raids.