Jack Hassard writes about the excitement of the first day of school. The children in their best clothes, looking forward to meeting their new teacher. But when school is over, their parents are nowhere to be found. They were arrested by ICE.

The mass arrest of 680 workers in Mississippi occurred only days after the slaughter in El Paso, where the killer targeted what he thought were Mexicans.

The targeting of Latino families by the Trump administration is tantamount to the targeting that was no different than the Sturmabteilung, a paramilitary storm troop detachment dressed in brown shirts.  These were Hitler’s thugs who violently intimidated Germany’s leftists and Jewish population. Hitler used them as security forces at rallies, used violence and threats to purge and assault.

Are the ICE arrests any different than the action of the brownshirts against the perceived enemies of Nazism?

From the Washington Post:

The owners of the chicken processing plants are wealthy. They have had labor problems and fought efforts by their workers to unionize. They have been fined millions of dollars for violating the civil rights of their workers.

Raids spanning seven cities, six work sites and five companies ended in arrests for 680 people — and underscored an industry’s reliance on foreign-born workers at a time when federal immigration policy is the focus of intense debate.

On Aug. 7, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers swept through agricultural processing plants in Mississippi, capping a year-long investigation. Officials said it was the largest single-state workplace enforcement action in U.S. history.

Mississippi is the fifth-largest chicken-producing state in the United States, and two of the raided companies, Koch Foods and Peco Foods, are among the nation’s biggest chicken producers.

The state’s poultry industry has a complex history with labor, race and immigration, academic research shows. The civil rights and worker rights movements of the 1960s and 1970s led to not only integration but also an exodus of white workers. By the 1990s, businesses began aggressively recruiting Latin American immigrants to fill their labor needs, luring them to rural Mississippi from places such as El Paso and Miami…

Privately held Koch Foods makes chicken products under its own brand and through private labels for buyers such as Walmart. The company is headquartered near Chicago and has no relation to the multinational Koch Industries. It employs nearly 13,000 people in Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee, Illinois and Ohio. Its Morton, Miss., plant produces more than 700,000 tons of poultry feed each year.

Its owner, Joseph Grendys, is worth $3.3 billion, Forbes estimates.

Did he welcome the raid to intimidate his uppity workers?

Democracy Now reported:

The mass arrests also came on the first day of the school year, and some children walked home from school only to find their doors locked and their family members missing. Wednesday’s raids targeted chicken processing plants operated by Koch Foods, one of the largest poultry producers in the U.S. Last year, the company paid out $3.75 million to settle an Equal Employment Opportunities Commission class-action suit charging the company with sexual harassment, national origin and race discrimination, and retaliation against Latino workers at one of its Mississippi plants. Labor activists say it’s the latest raid to target factories where immigrant workers have organized unions, fought back against discrimination or challenged unsafe and unsanitary conditions. 

Where do you stand?