The helicopters arrived first, their thrumming beat cutting through the pre-dawn stillness of a small Iowa town. At 10 a.m., buses rolled in, white with dark blue stripes. Armed agents in bulletproof vests, marked ICE, moved with a choreographed certainty. They surrounded Agriprocessors, the kosher meatpacking plant that was Postville’s largest employer. Workers in hairnets and smocks, many from Guatemala and Mexico, looked up from the slaughter lines and processing belts. The smell of blood and bleach hung in the air, now mixed with the scent of sudden fear.
Commands were shouted in English and broken Spanish. People were herded into the plant’s parking lot, then onto the buses. Some wept. Others stared ahead, numb. They were taken to the nearby National Cattle Congress fairgrounds in Waterloo, a site temporarily converted into a makeshift courtroom and detention center. For days, the grounds normally host to 4-H livestock shows became a venue for mass, expedited judicial proceedings. Defendants, still in their work clothes, listened through headphones to translated charges of aggravated identity theft. Most pled guilty, hoping for swift deportation. The community fractured. Stores on Postville’s main street emptied; children did not come to school. The sound of the plant, usually a constant industrial hum, grew quiet. It was a military-style operation applied to a civilian workforce, a tactic of war deployed on a landscape of feedlots and cornfields.