The Exploitation of Factory Farms Doesn’t Stop at Animals

The ICE raids that targeted immigrant workers in Mississippi is the latest in a long history of bloody oppression

Photo released by ICE

The air is cold, hovering at 40 degrees. The floors are slick with bodily fluids and cleaning chemicals. Poultry workers stand before a conveyor belt making swift cuts to keep up with the line speed that brings 140 chickens down the line each minute — two birds every second. The speed of production forces workers to repeat the same movement, separating flesh and bone from whole chickens, tens of thousands of times in a single shift.

On Wednesday, the speeding assembly lines at seven chicken processing plants in small towns across Mississippi came to a halt when US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents raided and arrested nearly 700 Latin American workers in what is considered to be the largest workplace raid to occur in a single state in US history. Plant operators at Koch Foods, Peco Foods, PH Foods, MP Foods, and Pearl River Foods, which are among the wealthiest incorporated meat producers in the US, cooperated with law enforcement agents who surrounded their facilities and blocked their employees from leaving.

News of the raids targeting Latin Americans swept through social media on Thursday, followed by public outrage. Protests against the raids continue to mount while donations are being collected by the Mississippi Immigrants Rights Alliance and the Food Chain Workers Alliance emergency relief fund for the families who need financial assistance and legal council.

Vegan advocacy organizations and food media publications, however, remained mostly silent despite sharing deep ties to issues of immigrants rights, food justice and animal liberation. Vegans and labor activists share similar goals for incremental improvements at factory farms, like reduced line speeds and more sanitary conditions, but too often the protection of farmed animals has resulted in the criminalization of individual workers who make easy targets in cases of animal cruelty. Meanwhile, the industry remains unscathed, owners continue to accumulate power, and the larger system that oppresses immigrants, women of color, poor people, queer and trans people, and treats animals as disposable…