Erik Camayd-Freixas: the federal court interpreter gives an insider's account of the justice system after one of the largest immigration raids in U.S. history.(Q&A)(Interview)

You arrived in Postville, Iowa, Last May immediately after an immigration raid at a meatpacking plant led to the arrests of nearly 400 workers--many of them Guatemalan. How would you describe the scene? These raids are paramilitary operations. Their distribution and resources, their trailers, are all based on a military plan. It was very, very tight security. There were hundreds of armed agents. There was one trailer alone that was an actual arsenal. They also had an evacuation plan in case of a riot for the civilians. It was very much Guantanamo-style.

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How did the courts operate under these conditions? Judges and prosecutors never get to see the real human situation up close because they don't get to interview the defendants in private. From that safe moral distance, it's very easy to prosecute and convict and condemn. In fact I only saw one person do this--a Ukrainian woman spoke in court about her young daughter who was so ill, whose hair had fallen out and needed an operation or she would have died. She came to the U.S. to work to save her daughter in Ukraine.

When the lawyers and interpreters went to the jail interviews, to meet one-on-one, we spent hours interviewing people and getting their whole story. There was a man who walked for 40 days from Guatemala to the United States. Imagine the other 269 stories of people sitting in jail!

If you saw what these people are going through as parents ... it's an absolute violation of human rights. In jail, whenever people cried telling their stories, they never cried for themselves, but for their children and what they would have to go through.

Immigrants were given options of choosing five months in jail followed by deportation or waiting to be tried. How did you interpret this for immigrants? These so-called options were no options at all. They basically gave the lawyers a 15-or 20-page plea agreement to read in Spanish. For most of the detainees, Spanish was a second language for them. Even if they understood the Spanish, they never would have understood the legal jargon. It was hard enough for me to understand it.

We had to say, "Okay, if you plead guilty, you get five months and get deported, but if you plead not guilty, you face a trial. If convicted, you get a minimum of two years."