The fallout: At least 100 kids parentless

Myung Oak Kim And Rosa Ramirez, Rocky Mountain News

Published December 14, 2006 at midnight

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At least 100 children are without parents because of the massive immigration raid Tuesday at the Swift & Co. meatpacking plant in Greeley, immigrant advocates estimated Wednesday.

But getting an exact count could prove challenging because many of the families are too fearful to seek assistance from a government agency.

When they muster up the courage to look for help, they turn, instead, to community organizations.

Sylvia Martinez, of Greeley-based advocacy group Latinos Unidos, said she calculated the 100-children figure based on the number of calls she's received from people affected by the raid.

"We expect that there will be more," she said. "There's a lot of single parents that were picked up. ICE did this without regard for family values or the (rights) of U.S. citizen children."

Ron Marks, executive director of Congregations Building Communities, an advocacy group in Weld and Larimer counties, said some organizations, including a union at Swift, have been trying since Tuesday to compile a list of children whose parents were taken away by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers.

Marks expects the number of children to "be in the three digits."

Weld County Social Services has no children in its care as a result of the raids but was told that about 100 children are staying with relatives or neighbors because their parents were arrested, said administrator John Kruse.

He said his agency will try to contact the children to offer help once agency workers have names.

Kruse said his agency has received many calls, mostly from people who want to help the families affected by the raid. His agency has referred all of those calls to the United Way of Weld County.

The United Way brought in two extra referral specialists to handle more than 500 calls related to the raid, said spokeswoman Toni Baldwin.

The callers offering help are upset that the raid happened so close to the holidays, Baldwin said.

The agency received a small number of calls seeking help, including one from a woman with three children. She said her husband was arrested during the raid and that she's running out of money, Baldwin said.

Meanwhile, school officials scrambled to make sure students were sent home Tuesday and Wednesday with relatives or close friends.

On Wednesday, a check at three schools showed that attendance was "essentially normal" and that the day went by without a major crisis, said Mark Stevens, spokesman for Greeley-Evans School District 6.

"That doesn't mean that the families and community are not in stress," he said. "It just means that our side . . . is normal."

At Billie Martinez Elementary, one of the closest schools to the meatpacking plant, 90 percent of the school's 541 students went to school Wednesday, said Principal Paul Urioste.

Attendance Tuesday was 75 percent, he said. Normal attendance is 95 percent.

Urioste said the school psychologist talked to a number of students whose relatives were arrested at Swift. He said school district officials are trying to assemble a list of students whose parents work at Swift. He estimates that fewer than 5 percent of his students have parents detained by federal authorities.

But fifth-grader Dinah Gutierrez said most of her classmates were affected by the raid.

The girl said kids were talking about the raid at school, saying "their uncles and aunts were taken."

"They're all scared," the girl said.

Her mother, Christina Gutierrez, said her neighborhood is full of Swift workers and that the mood Wednesday was full of anxiety.

Gutierrez, who was born and raised in Greeley, said she has mixed feelings about the raid. She's concerned about the children. But she contends that people legally in the country have been unable to find work because of the influx of illegal immigrants.

The Swift raid "needed to happen" so that other people can get work, she said.

kimm@RockyMountainNews.com or 303-954-2361

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