POSTVILLE, IOWA — A hodgepodge crowd gathers here twice a week for handouts just steps from City Hall and an empty kosher deli.
Outside the local food pantry snakes a line of Guatemalans wearing court-ordered ankle monitors, imported workers from the Pacific island of Palau and unemployed town natives -- almost all there because of a dramatic raid that has left a deep mark in the way the U.S. views and deals with illegal immigration.
Since federal helicopters raced over cornfields on May 12, 2008, en route to arresting 389 illegal workers at a sprawling kosher meatpacking plant, what was a center of commerce in northeastern Iowa teeters toward collapse as the plant sputters in bankruptcy, its managers face prison time and the town fights to stay solvent.
Since the landmark raid, an economic squeeze has destroyed several businesses. Postville's population has shrunk by nearly half, to about 1,800 residents, and townsfolk say the resulting anxiety -- felt from the deli to the schoolyard -- has been relentless.
"It's like you're in an oven and there's no place to go and there's no timer to get you out," said former Mayor Robert Penrod, who, overwhelmed, resigned earlier this year.
The aftermath of the Postville raid has rippled across the country, rupturing the nation's kosher meat supply and setting back Midwest livestock farmers who supplied the plant. While advocates of stricter immigration laws argue that towns like Postville shouldn't be allowed to grow so dependent on illegal labor, critics see the raid as a symbol of greater problems with U.S. enforcement. And the fallout has helped spur changes in federal policy.
Last month, the Obama administration issued enforcement guidelines that place more emphasis on prosecuting employers rather than illegal workers. Then last week, in a ruling with clear echoes of the Postville raid, the U.S. Supreme Court required federal prosecutors to prove that someone using a fake ID knew it belonged to a real person before pursuing identity theft charges. Many of the Postville workers were charged with that crime, but they chose to leave the country instead of facing jail time.
"Postville is a stain on our judicial system," said David Leopold, a vice president of the Washington-based American Immigration Lawyers Assn., who argued that the plant workers were unfairly coerced and deprived of adequate legal protections.
