“We want (the raid) to be a little smaller piece of our identity, is the way I would look at it,” said Brendan Knudtson, Postville High School's principal. Since the raid, the town's school population has rebounded, the housing market has recovered and the community has healed and grown, becoming more active in immigration rights, residents said. history, many in Postville are eager to shift the focus forward. Postville eager to rebuild its identityĪ decade removed from one of the largest workplace raids in U.S. Those left behind would pick up the pieces from an event that hit their town with the sledgehammer effect of a natural disaster. Over the next days and months, families would be torn apart, abuses at the plant would come to light and at least a quarter of the town would disappear. “I started to cry because I was 15 years old, and I didn’t have a father when I grew up … my mother, that’s all I had.”Īt the plant on the edge of town, almost 400 men, women and - as agents would come to learn - teenagers had been lined up single file, chained together and hustled onto buses by immigration agents wearing black, bulletproof gear and toting rifles. “My mom told me to take care of my sister and myself,” said Rucal, now 24. POSTVILLE: Timeline of events in one of America's largest illegal immigration campaigns Over the faint sounds of screams, his mother, Irma, said into a borrowed cellphone that immigration agents were raiding the Agriprocessors meatpacking plant where she and Rucal both worked. She had been caught and was being taken somewhere, she didn’t know where. Then, the phone rang. On the other end of the line, Rucal heard bedlam. Weird, he remembered thinking, helicopters were rare in Postville, a town of 2,000 people in the hilly northeast edge of Iowa. Joel Rucal had been asleep only about an hour when the "thump, thump, thump" of rushing helicopter blades jolted him awake, breaking the serenity of that warm spring morning in 2008. Watch Video: 10 years later, memories of the Postville immigration raid linger
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