Glenn Valley Foods tried to verify every hire through a federal system. After a raid, the company is wondering how it can keep going.
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. “We’re building back up from ground zero.”
It had been almost three weeks since dozens of federal agents arrived at the factory’s door with a battering ram and a warrant for 107 workers who they said were undocumented immigrants using false identification — part of a wave of workplace raids carried out by the Trump administration this summer. The president’s advisers had set a target of 3,000 arrests per day, shifting the focus of enforcement away from the border and into the heart of the American economy. Trump had vowed to pursue “blood-thirsty criminals” during his campaign, but he had also promised the “largest mass deportation in history,” which meant agents were rounding up hundreds of immigrants from restaurant kitchens, avocado groves, construction sites and meat processing facilities, where most of the work force was foreign-born.
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.
“I’m still furious about what happened to our people, but we have to keep the machines running,” Rohwer said. “We need more people trained and ready to go.”
“Trained by who?” another manager asked. “We lost every supervisor out there. If you ran a machine or checked temperatures or did anything important, you’re gone.”
“Then we pick up our hiring,” Rohwer said.
He looked out into the lobby and saw three women filling out applications. Glenn Valley paid well, with an average hourly wage of almost $20 and regular bonuses, but the work was repetitive and demanding. Employees who came mostly from Mexico and Central America stood on a manufacturing line for as much as 10 hours a day, six days a week, and processed hundreds of pounds of meat through dangerous machinery in a cold factory.
Ever since videos of the raid spread across social media, Rohwer had answered dozens of calls from strangers who accused him of “stealing American jobs.” But Nebraska was experiencing a work shortage, with only 66 qualified workers for every 100 positions. Almost every one of the company’s new applicants was also a Hispanic immigrant.
“There are some jobs Americans don’t want to do,” Rohwer tried explaining to one caller. “We’re caught up in a broken system.”
The Homeland Security Department had accused many of the company’s former employees of working under stolen IDs, which E-Verify didn’t always catch if the ID number itself was valid. Rohwer had met with officials after the raid to ask for a better system, and they told him to keep using E-Verify. One agent gave the company a hotline number to call for hiring questions. Hartmann tried it once and waited on hold for 57 minutes before giving up.
“They said the only thing we can do is verify, verify, verify,” Rohwer said.
“But we’re already doing that,” Hartmann said. “How do we avoid ending up in the same situation?”
Production has plummeted at Glenn Valley Foods, where an advertisement featuring Gary Rohwer played in the lobby, and Alfredo Moreno, the new director of human resources, needed to fill openings right away.
Their first step was to rebuild the hiring process, so one morning Hartmann met in his office with the company’s newest employee, Alfredo Moreno. It was Moreno’s second day as the H.R. director. He still didn’t have an office and he’d never seen the factory floor, but Hartmann had given him a stack of dozens of applications to review.
“How many people did you lose total?” Moreno asked.
Hartmann looked at his computer and tried to count. “They arrested 76, which doesn’t include the ones who were too shaken up to come back,” he said. “How does that happen if you E-Verify and do everything right?”
“I think I can help you with that part,” Moreno said.
He had spent the last 25 years hiring for pork plants and chicken factories across the Midwest, and he’d shown up at Glenn Valley unannounced a few days after the raid, convinced he understood their problem. Over the years, Moreno had reviewed hundreds of applicants through E-Verify, checking their ID and Social Security numbers against federal records to confirm they were eligible to work.
In his experience, E-Verify was good at checking numbers, not people. The government maintained that Glenn Valley employees had been using IDs that were stolen. One number belonged to a nursing student in Missouri, who lost her student loans as a result of the identity theft. Another came from a disabled man in Texas, who could no longer get his medications.
Moreno told Hartmann that the only way to truly prevent fraud was to scrutinize IDs with black lights and magnifying glasses to make sure they weren’t fake, and then interview each potential employee in person. He had memorized regional accents and studied the geographies of Central America, Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic. He estimated that about half of the people he interviewed for meat processing jobs lied about some aspect of their documentation.
“I ask where they were born, what town, where they traveled,” Moreno said. “Does the person on paper fit the person in the chair? I don’t want to say I interrogate, but I ask very specific questions without discriminating.”
“Yes. I like that,” Hartmann said. “Because we can’t go through this again. Honestly, it was very traumatic for everyone involved.”
Hartmann started to tell Moreno about that Tuesday morning, when the company was humming through one of its best months in 12 years. More than 130 workers walked into the factory at 7 a.m. All five manufacturing lines started moving at full speed. Hartmann was taste-testing a new meat product with the sales team when he heard a knock on the front door. He walked into the lobby and saw several agents in tactical vests, carrying nightsticks and wearing bandannas to cover their faces.
His first thought was that maybe one employee had gotten into trouble, but then he glanced outside and saw several government vans, a drone circling the roofline and dozens more agents surrounding the property. “We’re going to be busy here,” one of the agents said.
Continues . ..
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. “We’re building back up from ground zero.”
It had been almost three weeks since dozens of federal agents arrived at the factory’s door with a battering ram and a warrant for 107 workers who they said were undocumented immigrants using false identification — part of a wave of workplace raids carried out by the Trump administration this summer. The president’s advisers had set a target of 3,000 arrests per day, shifting the focus of enforcement away from the border and into the heart of the American economy. Trump had vowed to pursue “blood-thirsty criminals” during his campaign, but he had also promised the “largest mass deportation in history,” which meant agents were rounding up hundreds of immigrants from restaurant kitchens, avocado groves, construction sites and meat processing facilities, where most of the work force was foreign-born.
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.
“I’m still furious about what happened to our people, but we have to keep the machines running,” Rohwer said. “We need more people trained and ready to go.”
“Trained by who?” another manager asked. “We lost every supervisor out there. If you ran a machine or checked temperatures or did anything important, you’re gone.”
“Then we pick up our hiring,” Rohwer said.
He looked out into the lobby and saw three women filling out applications. Glenn Valley paid well, with an average hourly wage of almost $20 and regular bonuses, but the work was repetitive and demanding. Employees who came mostly from Mexico and Central America stood on a manufacturing line for as much as 10 hours a day, six days a week, and processed hundreds of pounds of meat through dangerous machinery in a cold factory.
Ever since videos of the raid spread across social media, Rohwer had answered dozens of calls from strangers who accused him of “stealing American jobs.” But Nebraska was experiencing a work shortage, with only 66 qualified workers for every 100 positions. Almost every one of the company’s new applicants was also a Hispanic immigrant.
“There are some jobs Americans don’t want to do,” Rohwer tried explaining to one caller. “We’re caught up in a broken system.”
The Homeland Security Department had accused many of the company’s former employees of working under stolen IDs, which E-Verify didn’t always catch if the ID number itself was valid. Rohwer had met with officials after the raid to ask for a better system, and they told him to keep using E-Verify. One agent gave the company a hotline number to call for hiring questions. Hartmann tried it once and waited on hold for 57 minutes before giving up.
“They said the only thing we can do is verify, verify, verify,” Rohwer said.
“But we’re already doing that,” Hartmann said. “How do we avoid ending up in the same situation?”
Production has plummeted at Glenn Valley Foods, where an advertisement featuring Gary Rohwer played in the lobby, and Alfredo Moreno, the new director of human resources, needed to fill openings right away.
Their first step was to rebuild the hiring process, so one morning Hartmann met in his office with the company’s newest employee, Alfredo Moreno. It was Moreno’s second day as the H.R. director. He still didn’t have an office and he’d never seen the factory floor, but Hartmann had given him a stack of dozens of applications to review.
“How many people did you lose total?” Moreno asked.
Hartmann looked at his computer and tried to count. “They arrested 76, which doesn’t include the ones who were too shaken up to come back,” he said. “How does that happen if you E-Verify and do everything right?”
“I think I can help you with that part,” Moreno said.
He had spent the last 25 years hiring for pork plants and chicken factories across the Midwest, and he’d shown up at Glenn Valley unannounced a few days after the raid, convinced he understood their problem. Over the years, Moreno had reviewed hundreds of applicants through E-Verify, checking their ID and Social Security numbers against federal records to confirm they were eligible to work.
In his experience, E-Verify was good at checking numbers, not people. The government maintained that Glenn Valley employees had been using IDs that were stolen. One number belonged to a nursing student in Missouri, who lost her student loans as a result of the identity theft. Another came from a disabled man in Texas, who could no longer get his medications.
Moreno told Hartmann that the only way to truly prevent fraud was to scrutinize IDs with black lights and magnifying glasses to make sure they weren’t fake, and then interview each potential employee in person. He had memorized regional accents and studied the geographies of Central America, Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic. He estimated that about half of the people he interviewed for meat processing jobs lied about some aspect of their documentation.
“I ask where they were born, what town, where they traveled,” Moreno said. “Does the person on paper fit the person in the chair? I don’t want to say I interrogate, but I ask very specific questions without discriminating.”
“Yes. I like that,” Hartmann said. “Because we can’t go through this again. Honestly, it was very traumatic for everyone involved.”
Hartmann started to tell Moreno about that Tuesday morning, when the company was humming through one of its best months in 12 years. More than 130 workers walked into the factory at 7 a.m. All five manufacturing lines started moving at full speed. Hartmann was taste-testing a new meat product with the sales team when he heard a knock on the front door. He walked into the lobby and saw several agents in tactical vests, carrying nightsticks and wearing bandannas to cover their faces.
His first thought was that maybe one employee had gotten into trouble, but then he glanced outside and saw several government vans, a drone circling the roofline and dozens more agents surrounding the property. “We’re going to be busy here,” one of the agents said.
Continues . ..
