Officials seek legal status of 19 Hispanic steelworkers
Posted on Thursday, September 13, 2007
The Missouri State Highway Patrol and the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency are investigating the legal status of 19 Hispanic men employed by a Little Rock firm working on a construction project at a Hannibal cement plant, the Highway Patrol said Wednesday.
Working on a tip, patrol officers went Wednesday morning to Continental Cement in the northeast Missouri town.
“Nobody was detained, nobody was taken into custody,” patrol Lt. Nelson Elfrink said. “This was about gathering some information.”
As the off icers checked names, the workers kept working.
Elfrink said three of the 19 had proper documentation and were not illegal immigrants.
One of the workers was probably in the country illegally, Elfrink said.
“On those other 15, we were able to find no documentation on them at all in our database,” he said.
Their names were turned over to immigration officials.
The workers are with Schueck Steel of Little Rock.
Thomas Schueck, Schueck Steel’s founding owner and president and chief executive officer of the firm’s Little Rockbased parent company, Lexicon Inc., said Wednesday he was unaware of the work-site visit by authorities.
Schueck said company policy required workers to have on file two separate forms of legal identification.
“This is something we have to watch constantly,” he said. “We’re very strict about it and we do what the government tells us we are supposed to do. If it turns out it wasn’t enough, I guess we’ll have to do more.”
The workers in Hannibal are helping build a new $ 150 million kiln.
Calls by the Associated Press to Continental’s Hannibal plant and corporate office in suburban St. Louis were not returned.
Elfrink did not say who provided the tip or why it was believed the workers were in the U. S. illegally.
The Quincy (Ill. ) Herald-Whig reported the tip came from an unidentified local legislator.
Late last month, Missouri Gov. Matt Blunt announced a two-pronged crackdown on illegal immigrants.
Blunt directed the Highway Patrol to check the immigration status of every person incarcerated by the patrol and he directed the state’s Department of Economic Development to tighten oversight of contractors that receive state tax breaks or funding.
Hispanic advocates say the crackdown will lead to racial profiling and could foster an atmosphere of hostility.
It wasn’t immediately clear if the construction project in Hannibal receives state funding or tax breaks, or if those could be jeopardized if the workers are determined to be illegal.
Calls by the Associated Press to Blunt’s office and the state economic development office were not returned. Information for this report was contributed by Jacob Quinn Sanders of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.
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