Homeland Security: snow job

I guess Homeland Security recognizes that immigrants are just doing the work natives won’t do… and so, have to do it, even when they shouldn’t be doing it, because, as we know, they’re “illegal” and all.  Or something like that.

Boston Globe, via Benders’ Immigration Bulletin:

PROVIDENCE – Federal agents detained dozens of Guatemalan immigrants en route to shovel snow at Gillette Stadium last week, and then drove many of them back to the stadium to work, the immigrants said yesterday, giving their fullest account yet of the operation.

Yesterday, dozens of the immigrants poured into the Guatemalan consulate, a two-story red brick building near Federal Hill, wearing thick sweatshirts, baseball caps, and worried faces, since they are here illegally and now facing possible deportation. But they and their advocates said they are workers, not criminals, who had left poor villages in the hope of finding better lives for themselves and their families.

In interviews at the consulate, where they sought legal assistance, the workers, most of whom live in Rhode Island, said they had cleared snow at Gillette last Tuesday, and were heading back to work early Wednesday in four vans when federal agents pulled them over.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement detained 58 people during the operation as part of a search for fugitives, including criminals, who had been ordered deported. Seven people, including people with criminal records such as domestic assault, are being held in Bristol County jail.

The immigrants said the rest were taken to a nearby police station, fingerprinted, photographed and released, pending an interview with immigration officials to determine their legal status, before they were driven to the stadium.

“They brought us back to work themselves,’’ said Vicente Avila, 43, who said he lives on $200 a month so he can send as much as $800 a month to his family, including five children, in Guatemala. “They told us if you want to go to work, you can go to work.’’

Matthew Chandler, deputy press secretary for the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the agency that carried out the operation, declined to confirm that federal agents drove the immigrants to Gillette or to describe the agency’s policy on transporting immigrants after such operations.