(Reuters) – Latino workers at a Tennessee meat processing plant have reached a $1.2 million settlement in a lawsuit over a 2018 immigration raid in which they were “targeted by federal agents” because of their ethnicity, an immigration group said on Monday.
About 100 workers who were detained during the raid will receive a total of $550,000, the National Immigration Law Center (NILC) said.
The federal government will also pay $475,000 to six individual plaintiffs to settle claims including excessive force and wrongful arrest under the Federal Tort Claims Act. The settlement includes $150,000 in attorneys’ fees and expenses.
In February 2019, NILC and several nonprofit groups filed a lawsuit alleging that armed U.S. Department of Homeland Security and Internal Revenue Service “unlawfully targeted”
; Latino workers in the raid, used excessive force, and made false arrests.DHS and the IRS did not immediately respond to Reuters requests for comment.
The deal was approved late Monday in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Tennessee.
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