... They gathered in a conference room for the weekly management meeting, even though there was hardly anyone left to manage. Chad Hartmann, the president of Glenn Valley Foods in Omaha, pushed a few empty chairs to the side of the room and then passed around a sheet totaling the latest production numbers. "Take a deep breath and brace yourselves," he said.
For more than a decade, Glenn Valley's production reports had told a story of steady ascendance " new hires, new manufacturing lines, new sales records for one of the fastest-growing meatpacking companies in the Midwest. But, in a matter of weeks, production had plummeted by almost 70 percent. Most of the work force was gone. Half of the maintenance crew was in the process of being deported, the director of human resources had stopped coming to work, and more than 50 employees were being held at a detention facility in rural Nebraska.
Hartmann, 52, folded the printed sheet into tiny squares and waited out the silence.
"So, this gives you a pretty good sense of the work we have ahead of us," he said.
"It's a wipeout," said Gary Rohwer, the owner. ...
Rohwer, 84, had always used a federal online system called E-Verify to check whether his employees were eligible to work, and Glenn Valley Foods itself had not been accused of any violations. Rohwer was a registered Republican in a conservative state, but he'd voted for a Democrat for the first time in the 2024 election, in part because of Trump's treatment of immigrants.
Rohwer couldn't square the government's accusations of "criminal dishonesty" with the employees he'd known for decades as "salt-of-the-earth, incredible people who helped build this company," he said. Most of them had no criminal history, aside from a handful of traffic violations. Many were working mothers, and now they were calling the office from detention and asking for legal advice.
Their children, U.S. citizens, were struggling at home and in some cases subsisting on donations of the company's frozen steak. ...
