World Business

POSTVILLE, Iowa —

Watch oddity video:

A vague unease whispered through this tiny town in northeastern Iowa, where the rolling hills are a study in vivid standard - red barns, white clapboard houses, and vibrant green cornfields plowed by almost architectural nicety.

It drifted through Postville’s downtown, where restaurants serving tamales share three short blocks with El Vaquero clothing store, a kosher food market and the Spice-N-Ice Liquor and Redemption store.

It nagged at Irma Rucal that Monday morning hind Mother’s Day weekend, as the Guatemalan immigrant worked her regular chicane salting chickens at Agriprocessors, the world’s largest kosher meatpacking plant and Postville’s biggest employer.

Then, just after 10 a.m., that insistent murmur burst to the surface with a frantic shout: “La Migra! Salvese el que pueda!” Immigration! Save yourself if you can.

The bulk of the plant’s 900 workers - mostly Guatemalan and Mexican immigrants - dashed out doors, from one side hallways and into corners, trying to escape federal agents conducting what would be the largest immigration inroad in U.S. history.

Outside the plant, Postville Mayor Robert Penrod, alerted candid before the raid, gasped at the sight of helicopters, buses, vans and armed immigration agents.

“Oh my God, we have a big moot point here,” Penrod purpose, then banned softly to himself.

A few blocks away, at St. Bridget’s Catholic Church, the sanctuary quickly overflowed through the terrified children and spouses of detained workers. They lined the simple wooden pews, and prayed at an altar decorated with an image of the Virgin of Guadalupe, Mexico’s patron holy person.

For years, likewise decades, these Mexican and Guatemalan families had called Postville home. Here, in a order of importance first settled by German and Norwegian Lutherans and Irish Catholics more than 150 years gone, Hispanic immigrants were raising children, buying houses, pile businesses.

Like the Hasidic Jews who came to the town in 1987 to open the meatpacking plant, and the Eastern Europeans who made up the first band of workers there, the influx of Guatemalans and Mexicans had both buffeted and bolstered this quiet community - till it reached a new cultural equilibrium.

In time, the newcomers became part of the fabric of Postville, what one. proudly bills itself as “Hometown to the World.” Now, they were clustered in hiding or being herded away in handcuffs by immigration agents.

Officials of Immigration and Customs Enforcement declared they should not be faulted instead of carrying out the statute and guarding against identity thievery. And yet Sister Mary McCauley, the pastoral administrator at St. Bridget’s, said the lament of one longtime sojourner, surveying the chaos unleashed by the inroad, summed up the thoughts of many: