An Educator's View on Postville ICE Raid

Earlier this week, we reported on the ICE raid in Postville, Iowa. Mary Ann Zehr of Education Week has sent this:

The Des Moines Register broke a story yesterday about how, prior to a raid by federal immigration authorities on a meatpacking plant in Postville, Iowa, on Monday, the Postville Community School District was given a subpoena to turn over detailed information about students to the Iowa Division of Labor Services. The subpoena included a mandate to provide the names of students working at two apartment buildings that had been owned by a Postville school guidance counselor and sold to the CEO of Agriprocessors Inc., the same company that owns the plant that was raided this week.

I was curious if there was a connection between the subpoena and the immigration raid. In other words, did any information provided by school district officials, when they complied with the subpoena, get into the hands of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents? And is this another incident where educators have been dragged into an area of federal law that is murky? What steps should school officials take in such situations to ensure that undocumented students get the free public education in this country guaranteed by the 1982 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Plyler v. Doe? (I've written about this issue in a Sept. 12, 2007, article for Education Week, "With Immigrants, Districts Balance Safety, Legalities.")

I followed up with my own interviews of Gail Sheridan-Lucht, an attorney for Iowa Labor Commissioner David Neil, and David Strudthoff, the superintendent of the Postville school system, to write a story about the immigration raid and the subpoena, which you can find here.

Ms. Sheridan-Lucht said she issued the subpoena to the school district as part of a joint investigation by the U.S. Department of Labor and the Iowa Division of Labor Services into various labor practices of the Agriprocessors meatpacking plant in Postville. The investigation included the possible violation of state and federal child labor laws, Ms. Sheridan-Lucht said. (In fact, 12 minors were arrested at the plant during Monday's raid, according to federal officials.)

Mr. Strudthoff said he wasn't told about the impending immigration raid at the time that he was handed the subpoena in early April—and he doesn't know if information about Postville students, such as addresses and telephone numbers, was turned over to federal immigration authorities. Ms. Sheridan-Lucht said she couldn't comment on the issue because the labor investigation was still going on. Click here for the rest of the piece.

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