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GREENVILLE, S.C. Accused of intentionally employing dozens of illegal immigrants, two House of Raeford Farms managers are preparing to fight the charges at trial, their lawyers say.
Federal authorities allege the two managers at the company's chicken processing plant in Greenville, S.C., hired illegal workers from about 2000 until October 2008, when U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents arrested more than 300 workers in a raid.
Columbia Farms, a company owned by House of Raeford, has also been charged with knowingly employing undocumented immigrants.
Greenville plant manager Barry Cronic, human resource manager Elaine Crump and Columbia Farms have each pleaded not guilty. All have hired top criminal defense lawyers.
“We're preparing for trial,” said Cronic's attorney, Bart Daniel, after his client's arraignment Thursday in federal court.
Daniel, a former prosecutor who served as U.S. Attorney for South Carolina, has successfully defended many white-collar prosecutions since returning to private practice in 1992.
Crump “expects to be exonerated,” her lawyer, Bill Coates, said following her arraignment last week. Cronic and Crump, both free on bond, are still employed at the plant.
In a February 2008 series on workplace safety in the poultry industry, the Observer reported that some House of Raeford managers knowingly employed illegal immigrants. Current and former supervisors said the plant preferred undocumented workers because they were less likely to question working conditions for fear of being deported or fired.
After a federal grand jury indicted Columbia Farms this month, First Assistant U.S. Attorney Kevin McDonald said the hiring of undocumented immigrants “were not acts that occurred outside of the knowledge of the corporation.”
Columbia Farms contends it has followed all employment laws and “looks forward to vindicating the company's position in a court of law,” House of Raeford said in a statement this month.
John Simmons, a lawyer representing Columbia Farms, showed up at Cronic's arraignment but declined to discuss the charges with an Observer reporter. In the early 1990s, Simmons served as South Carolina's top federal prosecutor.
House of Raeford, a family-run business, is one of the nation's top chicken and turkey producers, with $600million in annual sales, 6,000 employees and operations in the Carolinas and Louisiana.
At Thursday's arraignment, assistant U.S. Attorney Max Cauthen told the judge that prosecutors had turned over about 1,500 pages of discovery to defense lawyers. Crump and Cronic could be tried as early as November.
The October immigration raid was the largest ever conducted in the Carolinas. Most of the workers have since been deported, officials say, but several dozen others have been convicted and sentenced for crimes like using illegal documents and false Social Security numbers. Soon after the first arrests, the company began hiring fewer immigrants and more prisoners in work-release programs. Staff Writer Franco Ordoñez contributed.
