Immigration doesn’t ruin a community — it enhances it

Julio Barroso has made it his life’s goal to return to Storm Lake. Now 31, he and his family were deported, along with about 75 others as a result of the May 1996 Immigration and Naturalization Services (INS, now ICE) raid at Storm Lake’s Iowa Beef Processors (IBP) plant. In a conversation he had with The Storm Lake Times, Barroso said that when he and his family left town, he thought they were going on vacation, and that they would be back in a few weeks. When he realized what had really happened, he said he was “Depressed, crestfallen, I don’t know how you say it. I lost my best friends, I lost Sundays with my family. I lost my life.” Mark Prosser, chief of police at the time of the IBP raid, regards the event as the turning point of his career, saying in a Feb. 17, 2021 interview with students at Miami University, “I knew that day that it was a mistake on my part. I was pretty public from there on out that our organization would never be a part of that again.” But for some, the damage was already done.

Folks like to paint Prosser as an advocate for the community. Someone to be trusted. And these days, he is but he used to be vehemently against undocumented immigration. For many years he worked to control immigration in Storm Lake. According to several October 1995 articles from The Storm Lake Times and the Pilot-Tribune, Prosser attempted to entice INS to open a branch in town due to the increasing immigrant population, and he allowed Storm Lake to participate in an INS pilot program designed to return results on illegal immigrants for which the INS had no current data. As crime increased leading up to 1996, Prosser and the department attributed it to increasing numbers of illegal immigrants. He expressed frustration that there was nothing he and his team could do about the issue unless a crime was committed that could be proven to have been done by an illegal immigrant. Prosser was so focused on ridding his community of illegal immigrants that, in an interview with the Pilot-Tribune in October 1995, he said that if INS wouldn’t open a branch in Storm Lake and step in, he would “look into other avenues and see if we can get help elsewhere.”

This deep-seated desire to rid the community of its undesirable elements, so to speak, led him to collaborate with the INS in conducting the raid. Make no mistake, the raid was not masterminded wholly by the INS, but rather in cooperation with Prosser and his department as it attempted to regain control of their community. That weekend, local and state police arrested 14 more immigrants independent of the INS. 

The aftermath of the events of the raid hit Prosser hard and caused him feelings of guilt that served as the impetus for him to increase community outreach from the department, recruit more officers of color, and put his officers through cultural sensitivity training, among other things. These days the Storm Lake Police Department is in the spotlight, upheld as a model department for other communities with immigrant populations. 

While it’s obvious that policing in Storm Lake has changed for the better since 1996, it’s important not to get complacent. As national discussions concerning immigration control continue, communities like Storm Lake must remember that not everyone sees the value in its diversity. After all, Rep. Steve King, District 4’s former congressional representative, is a Storm Laker, and there’s a King around every corner in Northwest Iowa. 

Keeping the community safe is not as easy as being pro-immigration. Even under the current police chief, Chris Cole, who is dedicated to upholding Prosser’s post-1996 track record with the community, the Storm Lake Police Department is a player, willing or not, in controlling immigration in the community.

ICE runs a program called Automated Biometric Identification System (IDENT)/Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System (IAFIS) Interoperability which is a biometric screening system that is in full effect across all local and state jurisdictions. When a person is arrested and booked into jail, they are fingerprinted. The fingerprints are then submitted to the state database and the FBI. If the arrested party has previously been fingerprinted by an immigration official, the database alerts ICE of the match at which point ICE determines what actions are to be taken. There is no way for communities to opt-out of this program. 

Another ICE program referred to as the 287(g) program in reference to section 287(g) of the Immigration and Nationality Act, is one that communities opt into. Under this program, local officers are trained in certain immigration control duties and serve essentially as an extension of ICE. So far ICE works with about 150 law enforcement agencies in 27 states through this program. Neither Storm Lake Police Department nor the state of Iowa figure into these numbers, but that’s not to say that they couldn’t in the future. It all depends on who Chief Cole’s successor is.

With that in mind, Storm Lakers, do not allow yourselves or your neighbors to get complacent. You may have won the battle with Prosser and Cole as your police chiefs, but you haven’t won the war until some serious action is taken against those who wish to stifle the vibrancy that immigrants bring to your community. The immigrants in your town are just like Julio Barroso: intelligent, kind-hearted and eager to be a part of your community. So, if you want to see Storm Lake continue to be the vibrant place that it is today, I urge you to stay the course, advocate for yourselves and your community, and show America the way forward. Immigration doesn’t ruin a community. As most of you know, it enhances it. 

Katie Johnston is a student at the University of Miami in Oxford, Ohio.