On December 20, 2017, asserting a large bipartisan push for the measure, President Donald Trump commuted Rubashkin's prison sentence after eight years served.

He then worked in his father's butcher shop, until he and his wife were sent to Atlanta, Georgia, as emissaries (shluchim) in the Chabad-Lubavitch outreach program.

[9] In 1987, Aaron Rubashkin opened the Agriprocessors plant in Postville, Iowa, and put two of his sons in charge: Sholom, the second-youngest, as CEO;[10] and Heshy, the youngest, as vice president of marketing and sales.

On May 12, 2008, the FBI and Department of Homeland Security agents raided the plant and arrested 389 workers who had fraudulent identity documentation.

[9] On October 30, 2008, one day after the Iowa labor commissioner fined Agriprocessors $10 million for wage violations, Rubashkin was arrested on federal conspiracy charges of harboring undocumented immigrants and aiding and abetting aggravated identity theft.

[20] Rubashkin was denied release on bail on November 20, 2008, after Magistrate Judge Jon Scoles determined that he posed a flight risk.

Scoles took into consideration Israel's "Law of Return," which grants automatic citizenship to every Jew and members of his family upon immigration, as well as a search of Rubashkin's house in which federal agents found a bag with $20,000 in cash, several silver coins and passports.

[21][22] The successful use of an argument based on Israel's Law of Return has caused concern among Jewish communities who fear that such claims could be used to deny bail to Jews in general.

Rubashkin was released on $500,000 bond and ordered to surrender his birth certificate and his and his family's passports and agree to wear an electronic monitoring bracelet.

On March 3, 2010, Reade denied Rubashkin's motion for dismissal of the financial corruption charges and request for a new trial.

[30] According to a 52-page memorandum she released the day before sentencing, Reade imposed a 324-month prison term followed by 5 years of supervised release, and ordered Rubashkin to pay $18.5 million to First Bank Business Capital, the plant's largest lender; $8.3 million to MB Financial Bank, another lender; and $3,800 to Waverly Sales, Inc., which received late payments from the plant for cattle.

[33] Before the trial, charges against Agriprocessors corporate officer Aaron Rubashkin and plant human resources employee Laura Althouse were dismissed.

According to the brief, government documents that surfaced after Rubashkin's conviction and were not made available to the defense showed that Reade was involved in planning the federal immigration raid of the Postville plant in May 2008, which it sees as collusion with the prosecution.

[40] What has united the three groups is the involvement of the judge in the case with the prosecution, as argued by Rubashkin's defense team, which, according to ACLU's Iowa legal director Randall Wilson, "immediately gave the appearance of unfairness.

[46] A petition on the White House's "We the People" website, asking then President Barack Obama to investigate Rubashkin's case, was submitted on October 22, 2011, with 52,226 online signatures.

"[54] In an op-ed titled "Prosecutors, judges decry Rubashkin 'witch hunt'" in the Des Moines Register, Charles B. Renfrew and James H. Reynolds wrote, "The explanation as to 'why' the pursuit of Sholom Rubashkin was so overzealous that it bordered on a veritable witch hunt still remains elusive, but the clarification as to 'how' is now punctiliously laid out in both the merits brief and the letter to Mr. Techau: There was false testimony and willful manipulation, and that makes this a shocking case of prosecutorial misconduct.

[56] The White House wrote the commutation was "encouraged by bipartisan leaders from across the political spectrum, from Orrin Hatch to Nancy Pelosi", and was "based on expressions of support from Members of Congress and a broad cross-section of the legal community", although the action "is not a Presidential pardon.

[57] Harvard Law School professor emeritus Alan Dershowitz had raised Rubashkin's case over lunch with Trump.