Jackson Free Press

JACKSON (AP) — Federal court records show a Mississippi company that was the target of the largest U.S. workplace raid on undocumented workers has settled a discrimination lawsuit by four black women who claimed the company gave preferential treatment to Latinos.

A tentative settlement was announced in February. Details were released in court documents filed this past week.

Records show a federal judge has given tentative approval, but final approval won't come until after a mandatory fairness hearing is conducted later this year.

U.S. District Court records show Howard Industries will pay $1.3 million into a settlement fund to be paid to possibly as many as 5,000 non-Hispanic individuals who applied for jobs at the company between March 2003 and Aug. 28, 2008.

Also, within nine months after the settlement, the company will hire at least 70 of the individuals who had applied for jobs, according to court documents.

The lawsuit claimed that one of the plaintiffs, Charlyn Dozier, applied for a job at the Howard Industries electrical transformer plant in Laurel, Miss., every three to six months beginning in 2002, but wasn't offered a position until after the 2008 raid. The other plaintiffs, Veronica Cook, Yolanda Phelps and Seleatha McGee, made similar allegations.

Immigration agents detained nearly 600 undocumented immigrants during the raid at the sprawling plant. Most of them were deported, though a handful faced identity theft charges. The company was fined $2.5 million in February 2011 after pleading guilty to conspiracy to violate immigration laws.

The discrimination lawsuit was filed Feb. 25, 2011, and claimed Howard Industries discriminated against American workers by giving preferential treatment to Latino applicants and workers, many of whom were immigrants from Mexico.

The lawsuit claimed Howard Industries not only knew it was hiring undocumented immigrants, but instructed some on how to get false identities and concealed the fact that hundreds of employees were immigrants working illegally . Federal authorities made similar allegations against the company.

In the days after the raid, hundreds of people lined up outside the plant to apply for jobs. Jobs at Howard Industries were among the most coveted in the area, which is in Mississippi's Pine Belt region and is home to a commercial timber industry and chicken processing plants. Howard Industries makes dozens of products, from electrical transformers to medical supplies. It had been considered one of Mississippi's most successful private companies.

Howard Industries repeatedly denied knowing that undocumented immigrants worked at the plant, and blamed the situation on its former personnel director, Jose Humberto Gonzalez. Gonzalez was the only company executive charged in the case and pleaded guilty in December 2009. He was sentenced last March to six months house arrest and five years on probation for knowingly hiring immigrants without work permits. His fine was $4,000.

Howard Industries has said the immigrants used fake papers to circumvent numerous identification checks the company uses. Prosecutors said the company knowingly hired illegal immigrants.

Some of the workers were given jobs even after the Social Security Administration told the company that their Social Security numbers were not valid, prosecutors said. The same allegation is made in the civil lawsuit.

Gonzalez admitted to similar allegations when he pleaded guilty.