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President-elect Trump's mass deportation plan was a prominent campaign pledge during his most recent run for office. But for a group of small towns in Central Mississippi, it's not just an idea. It's a life-changing event. More than 700 migrants were arrested in workplace raids in the area the last time Trump was in office at chicken processing plants that form the backbone of the local economy. As NPR's Sergio Martínez-Beltrán reports, the memory of those raids still looms large.
SERGIO MARTÍNEZ-BELTRÁN, BYLINE: Secondhand stuff spills across the sidewalk outside a small thrift store in downtown Morton, Mississippi. It's right across from the town's biggest employer, a chicken processing plant. There are interesting finds at this store - an old karaoke machine, a blue chest that looks like it came out of a pirate movie, and an orange chainsaw that Raymond Davila is inspecting closely. Suddenly, a noise pulls Davila's attention skyward.
(SOUNDBITE OF HELICOPTER OVERHEAD)
RAYMOND DAVILA: (Non-English language spoken). Medical. That's a medical helicopter.
MARTÍNEZ-BELTRÁN: He says a Border Patrol helicopter sounds different. He always keeps an ear out for the same reason he says he always carries his birth certificate and Social Security card with him to his job at the chicken plant.
(SOUNDBITE OF MONTAGE)
UNIDENTIFIED JOURNALIST #1: U.S. officials confirming some major ICE raids in Mississippi.
UNIDENTIFIED JOURNALIST #2: Six hundred and eighty people rounded up by Immigrations and Customs Enforcement.
JUDY WOODRUFF: The operation targeted processing plants in half a dozen towns outside Jackson.
MARTÍNEZ-BELTRÁN: It was the morning of August 7, 2019. Seven poultry plants in Central Mississippi were raided by Immigration and Customs Enforcement or ICE. Six hundred and eighty workers were taken away with no warning, more than half right here in Morton.
BRANDY FREEMAN: It was horrible. It was really horrible.
MARTÍNEZ-BELTRÁN: The memory of that day causes Brandy Freeman to pause her thrift shopping and tear up. Her partner is from Guatemala and in the country illegally. She tells us she worries he'll be caught in a new raid, leaving behind their 3-year-old son.
FREEMAN: We've talked about it. I got numbers that I could call, but other than that, it's a constant worry, you know?
MARTÍNEZ-BELTRÁN: The events that day disrupted the lives of nearly everyone in town, including Kimberly Trujillo, who works at a dental office.
KIMBERLY TRUJILLO: Well, I got to work. Thirty minutes later, my phone starts blowing up.
MARTÍNEZ-BELTRÁN: Before the raid, Trujillo was an unofficial translator, helping her Spanish-speaking neighbors with English language paperwork. So the day of the raid, people called her for help.
TRUJILLO: There's been a raid at the chicken plant, and they took my wife or my husband. We need to find them. We don't know where they are. Can you help us?
MARTÍNEZ-BELTRÁN: She spent all day calling around, trying to figure out where people had been taken to. Many ended up out of state.
TRUJILLO: It was a sad day. When I came home from work, my house was full of kids. I had four of my godkids at the house 'cause their parents were taken.
MARTÍNEZ-BELTRÁN: This is what everybody remembers as being the worst part of the raids. It was the first day of school. And for the kids whose parents got detained by ICE, they returned to empty houses.
MIKE LEE: It was a pretty frantic, I would say, two days.
MARTÍNEZ-BELTRÁN: Scott County Sheriff Mike Lee has been critical of what went down that day.
LEE: I never want to make it as if I'm criticizing the men and women that work for ICE, but the planning could have been better because we had kids that were coming from schools and parents were not going to be at home. And these were young children.
MARTÍNEZ-BELTRÁN: Two days after the raid, President Donald Trump was asked about that at a press gaggle before boarding Marine One.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
DONALD TRUMP: I want people to know that if they come into the United States illegally, they're getting out. They're going to be brought out. And this serves as a very good deterrent.
MARTÍNEZ-BELTRÁN: As he gets ready to start serving a second term, Trump and his advisers have said workplace raids will be restarted after the Biden administration stopped them. Trump's team says they'll first go after migrants with criminal records and final orders of deportation. But in the 2019 raid, most of the migrants picked up by ICE didn't have a record. Out of the nearly 700 detained, about 230 were removed from the country for causes such as prior removal orders, according to the Mississippi Center for Justice. Local activists say agents also briefly detained people with work permits. Sheriff Lee says in his community, migrants are not committing crimes.
LEE: If you ride around our community, you'll see that we have a very good, safe community, and that includes the people that are here potentially illegally or working. So we would make sure the laws are carried out, but it would severely hurt this area of Mississippi.
MARTÍNEZ-BELTRÁN: And local business owners can attest to that. Sofia Hernandez is the owner of Maria's Mercado, a little restaurant and convenience store in downtown Morton.
SOFIA HERNANDEZ: (Speaking Spanish).
MARTÍNEZ-BELTRÁN: She used to take up to 80 lunch orders a day, she says. After the raid, a lot of her customers never came back to Morton. The orders went down to zero. She had to fire employees. Todd Hensley, the thrift shop owner, says he was affected, too. Still, he voted for Trump, like the majority of Scott County.
TODD HENSLEY: About 50% of my business here is immigrants. Now, if I lose those 'cents, yeah, I'm going to be aggravated about it because they're going to be gone, and I'm not going - I'm not going to make any money. I mean, I might close down if they leave. It'd be that serious. But lots of businesses would close down.
MARTÍNEZ-BELTRÁN: The chicken plants are likely to survive, though. At least they did after the 2019 raid. One of them, Cook Foods, halted production for half a day and hosted a job fair that same week. Cook Foods didn't respond to a request for comment for the story, but in a statement in 2019, the company denied any allegations of wrongdoing and said it adhered to federal law when verifying the immigration status of employees. At least four managers at two other companies faced charges related to their raids. Silvia Garcia's husband worked in one of the plants when ICE agents stormed in. He was arrested, detained and deported to Guatemala. It took him about a year and a half and three tries to get back to his family in Mississippi.
SILVIA GARCIA: (Speaking Spanish).
MARTÍNEZ-BELTRÁN: Garcia says the experience devastated their two kids psychologically. Max, their 11-year-old, is still in therapy. These days, the family is all together. They wear colorful, woven Guatemalan shirts to church. The kids have pet guinea pigs and Benjie, a small dog.
(SOUNDBITE OF BENJIE BARKING)
MARTÍNEZ-BELTRÁN: But husband, Baldomero Orozco-Juarez, still works in a poultry plant, and the couple worries about the future.
BALDOMERO OROZCO-JUAREZ: (Speaking Spanish).
MARTÍNEZ-BELTRÁN: Orozco-Juarez says he believes Trump will follow through on his campaign promises, so he and his wife have arranged for someone to take care of their kids in case they are deported.
OROZCO-JUAREZ: (Speaking Spanish).
MARTÍNEZ-BELTRÁN: "Those who have gone through the pain of being separated from their families," Orozco-Juarez says, "know that anything can happen under Trump."
Sergio Martínez-Beltrán, NPR News, Central Mississippi.
(SOUNDBITE OF CASPIAN'S "CMF") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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