Swift workers start court appearances

Bail reaches $30,000 in ID theft, forgery, impersonation cases

Chris Barge And Rosa Ramirez, Rocky Mountain News

Published December 15, 2006 at midnight

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GREELEY - It's as if a chunk of the tightly knit Hispanic community has disappeared.

Family members remained mostly in the dark Thursday about the fate of 261 workers arrested this week at the Swift & Co. meatpacking plant as part of a six-state sweep of illegal immigrants by U.S. Customs and Immigration Enforcement.

Ironically, the fraction of detainees who appeared to be in the most trouble with the law were the easiest to find Thursday.

Dressed in bright orange jail garb, five of the 16 detainees now in Weld County's custody appeared in court.

Among them was Maria Fraga- Loredo, 29, who worked at Swift for about four years.

Of the hundreds in custody after Tuesday's raid, Fraga-Loredo was one of 25 whom Weld County District Attorney Ken Buck had agreed to prosecute for crimes beyond being in the country illegally. She was charged with identity theft, forgery and criminal impersonation.

Fraga-Loredo's sister, Elisa Alvarado, a 27-year-old legal U.S. resident, began to cry when she saw her sister being escorted out of the courtroom in shackles.

"Why do they have to have them like that?" she said of the jail uniforms and chains.

Fraga-Loredo's husband waited anxiously at their Greeley home Thursday, afraid to show up for his wife's court hearing because he is in the country illegally.

Fidel spoke on the condition that his last name, which is different from his wife's, is withheld.

Fidel said he felt as if someone kicked the air out of his stomach when he heard that his wife of 10 years was facing charges for using someone else's identity.

Other than a traffic ticket, she had never come into contact with law enforcement before, he said.

"How could they do that to her? Don't they see that she has children?" he said.

Fidel said that the couple moved from San Luis Potosi, Mexico, to Kansas about nine years ago and to Greeley nearly five years ago. They have three U.S.-born children, ages 8, 6 and 5.

Fidel said his wife got her job at Swift by using a Colorado driver's license that she obtained with a birth certificate and Social Security card she had bought in Kansas for $600 from a friend of his.

The documents said that her name was Vanessa Caraveo. The seller guaranteed that they would work.

Fidel said he and his wife never asked whether the documents were stolen. Turns out, Caraveo is a real person.

Fraga-Loredo had been working at Swift & Co. for the past four years and was earning $11 per hour, Fidel said.

"Her only crime was working to support her children," Fidel said. "I haven't been to work since the raid because I'm trying to help her. But I want you to know that we've never asked the government for help, even when we had nothing to eat."

Like many of the other ICE detainees in Greeley, Fraga-Loredo was being held on $30,000 bail, though a federal hold would prevent her from getting out of jail if she came up with the money.

Other detainees are due in Weld County Court today.

Elsewhere in Greeley's Hispanic community, frustration remained high as most of the other detainees were presumed to be at ICE holding facilities around Denver.

ICE officials would not say where the workers were being held, or how many of them had already been deported to their home countries.

"All I can tell you at this stage is this is an ongoing investigation," ICE spokesman Carl Rusnok said.

Local authorities were able to shed some light on the detainee's whereabouts.

It appears that all of the 261 Swift workers arrested were initially bused to holding cells in the Denver area.

"Nobody came directly to the jail" after the raid, Weld County Jail Bureau Chief Rick Dill said. "Everybody went to Denver and went to the Federal Center."

But because there weren't enough beds, some were soon sent elsewhere.

In all, 61 detainees were bused to the Park County Jail in Fairplay, where they arrived about 4 a.m. Wednesday, Park County spokesman Steve Groome said.

The Park County sheriff brought in extra staff to handle the detainees, who had to be held in cells separate from the general jail population, as per the county's contract with ICE.

"That was a monumental task," Groome said.

The kitchen wasn't open yet, and the prisoners were hungry.

"I heard something about immediately getting them some Cheerios to eat," Groome said. "I saw 20 or so being processed and they were all young gentlemen, very well-behaved, just sitting quietly and, I'm sure, wondering what their fates were."

By noon that day, ICE had returned for 38 of the detainees. And by the afternoon, all of them had been taken away to an undisclosed location, Groome said.

"I think they were still processing people to take them in even as the bus was arriving to take them back," he said.

Meanwhile, ICE officials called Weld County deputies late Tuesday night and told them they needed to transfer 14 of the people picked up in the raid to the jail in Greeley overnight, Dill said.

By Wednesday, ICE had picked up two more former Swift workers on warrants and delivered them to the jail to be processed on criminal charges, Dill said.

"All of what ICE brought us were over and above what we normally get," Dill said. "We got our butts kicked."

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