A poultry processing plant manager who was earlier indicted on charges related to the 2019 U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids of Mississippi poultry plants, has pleaded guilty to harboring an illegal immigrant.
Salvador Delgado-Nieves, 58, Pelahatchie, Mississippi, worked for southern Knights Industrial Services as the manager of the A&B Inc. poultry processing plant in Pelahatchie. He was charged with aiding and abetting the harboring of an illegal immigrant for financial gain, according to a press release from the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ).
The case was investigated by Homeland Security Investigations.
Delgado-Nieves was initially indicted in July 2020 with three counts of assisting illegal immigrants in falsely representing themselves to be United States citizens, three counts of assisting illegal immigrants in obtaining false Social Security cards, and one count of making a false statement to law enforcement officials when he denied having hired illegal immigrants at A&B. Delgado-Nieves was one of four people to be indicted at the time.
Sentencing for Delgado-Nieves has been scheduled for September 15, 2021. He faces a maximum penalty of ten years in prison. A federal district judge will determine any sentence after considering the U.S. Sentencing Guidelines and other statutory factors.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Lynn Murray is prosecuting the case.
The guilty plea comes as an outcome of the ICE raids in which agents executed multiple federal criminal search warrants at seven agrifood plants in Mississippi on August 7, 2019. Those raids resulted in the detainment of 680 alleged illegal immigrant workers.
Other facilities targeted in the raids were operated by Peco Foods, Pearl River Foods, MP Foods, PH Foods and Koch Foods. Three of those facilities were operated by Peco Foods, with those located in Canton, Bay Springs and Sebastopol. However, Peco announced in January 7 that the Canton plant would be one of three company facilities to close with some of that production being transferred to Sebastopol.
