Baldomero Orozco-Juarez was slicing chicken meat into tenders at a poultry processing plant in Carthage, Miss., when immigration agents stormed in with guns drawn. Some workers tried to flee. There was nowhere to run.
Mr. Orozco-Juarez was arrested, along with dozens of other undocumented workers at the plant. He was held in federal detention for 10 months before being put on a plane to his native Guatemala.
The raid was one of many carried out across Mississippi that day in August 2019, part of the largest workplace sweep in more than a decade and the biggest under President Donald J. Trump. Immigration and Customs Enforcement took 680 people into custody at poultry plants across central Mississippi.
Now, in his bid to return to the White House, Mr. Trump has pledged to deport millions of people in what would be the largest such effort in U.S. history. Workplace raids similar to the 2019 sweep in Mississippi would be a key element in large-scale deportations, his advisers have said.
But five years after the Mississippi raids, Mr. Orozco-Juarez, 40, is back in the United States, living in Carthage. Gone for 19 months, he said he was determined to find a way back to his family. Today, he works at a different chicken plant, paid $12.50 an hour to clean blood and meat scraps from the machinery used to debone carcasses. He now has a work permit, but he still faces the possibility of deportation, and he has been speaking out about the conditions many undocumented workers endure.
The story of what happened after ICE raided Mississippi poultry plants illustrates the realities of deportation in a dysfunctional immigration system that has not been overhauled in decades. Immigration courts have yearslong backlogs. Many immigrant workers have such longstanding ties to this country that federal law makes it hard to summarily expel them. But it also offers them few pathways to live and work legally in the United States.
That was the case for many of those arrested at the chicken plants, some of whom had lived in rural Mississippi for years before the raids upended their lives. In many cases, they were never deported, after contesting their removals in cases that dragged on for years. They, too, are still living, worshiping and working across this quiet pocket of Mississippi.
“They traumatized us,” Mr. Orozco-Juarez said. “We’re still going through it. We still remember all of it.”
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In Morton, a town of about 4,000 people roughly 40 miles east of the state capital, the ammonia-laced air marks the Koch Foods plant even before you see the sprawling building. This is chicken country. The meat and eggs produced in Mississippi are worth about $3.5 billion annually in 2023, making it by far the biggest sector of the state’s agriculture industry.
A few blocks from the plant, Maria’s Mercado, offering caldo de camaron and other seafood soups on the weekends and money transfers to Guatemala, hints at a demographic truth: In a state where less than 3 percent of residents were born outside of the United States, this is a community shaped by immigrants.
Central Mississippi poultry processing companies began recruiting Latin American immigrants in earnest in the 1990s, after a series of unionization efforts by mostly African American workers. Since then, Cubans, Argentines, Mexicans and now Guatemalans have all worked the lines.
Even before the Trump years, rumors of raids rippled through the community. But mostly, immigrants considered their home “tranquilo.”
“They still felt safe in places like this, in these rural spaces,” said Lorena Quiroz, who founded Immigrant Alliance for Justice and Equity to advocate immigrants’ rights after the raids. “And there was always work.”
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On the morning of Aug. 7, 2019, production lines ground to a halt. Hundreds of ICE agents streamed into seven processing plants in six towns. At a plant in Sebastopol, northeast of Morton, workers found that doors were closed. “People started to get alarmed, that it was immigration and that we had to run, but I said, ‘Run where?’” said Carolina Perez, 26, who had worked at the plant for two years before the raids and still lives in Mississippi.
Agents loaded nearly 700 people onto buses and drove them to an airplane hangar outside of Jackson.
Back in the plant towns, there was confusion and fear. Mike Lee, the sheriff of Scott County, where three plants were raided, said his office was inundated with calls about children at home alone after they returned from school — their parents did not return from work.
It was the biggest such raid since 2008, during the George W. Bush administration.
ICE published its own images of agents rounding up workers inside the plants. CNN released a video of an 11-year-old girl begging for her father to be returned.
Kamala Harris, at the time a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, called the raids part of a “campaign of terror” against immigrant communities.
President Trump said he hoped to see more of them.
“I want people to know that if they come into the United States illegally, they’re getting out,” he said.
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It’s not clear exactly what happened to each of the 680 people arrested. Once they were in deportation proceedings, ICE did not keep particular track of how they had ended up there, though lawyers who provided legal assistance after the raids estimate that about 230 were deported.
For many, it was the first time they had talked to a lawyer about their immigration status, and some were told they had solid arguments to be allowed to stay. Lawyers said clients applied for legal status based on how long they had lived in the country, or a claim for asylum.
“I told them, ‘This could be the best thing that ever happened to your family,’” said Jeremy Litton, a Jackson-based lawyer whose firm represented dozens of people arrested in the raids.
In interviews, advisers to Mr. Trump have proposed curbing due process in the future for people in deportation proceedings. The advisers have also said that instead of releasing most people to await immigration proceedings, they would seek to detain more of them, hoping to pressure people into leaving the United States.
While the Mississippi cases were pending, many were eligible for work permits. Some got their old jobs back.
In 2021, the Biden administration changed enforcement priorities to focus on people with criminal convictions. Most people arrested in the Mississippi raids were not in that group. Rather than keep trying to deport them, the Department of Homeland Security has simply dismissed many of their cases. That leaves them with the legal status they held on Aug. 6, 2019: None.
Edgar Lopez, a longtime Carthage resident, was deported and determined to return. He was held with Mr. Orozco-Juarez in Louisiana before they were both deported. In 2021, on his journey back to the United States, Mr. Lopez was killed along with 18 others in a massacre near the Mexican border with Texas; 11 Mexican police officers were later convicted of carrying out the killings.
“If he hadn’t been deported, he wouldn’t have died,” said Mr. Orozco-Juarez’s wife, Silvia Garcia.
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After the raids, officials emphasized that they wanted to hold employers accountable.
A year later, Mike Hurst, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Mississippi, announced indictments of four managers at two of the plants on charges including “harboring illegal aliens.” He said the indictments marked “the beginning, not the end” of the prosecutions.
No other charges were filed against employers. Mr. Hurst, now a partner at the firm Phelps Dunbar and chairman of the Mississippi Republican Party, did not respond to requests for comment.
Two of the managers were sentenced to two years of probation; a third was given a year of probation; charges against the fourth were dismissed.
Today, the poultry industry here continues to rely on immigrant workers, and immigrants rely on the jobs. Indeed, the shortage of workers willing to do difficult, often dangerous work for low wages, is what draws so many undocumented immigrants to the country. (One of the raided plants recently advertised 100 open positions.)
It’s still possible to get employment at chicken plants in the area without work authorization, immigrant workers said. Local intermediaries provide the documents, arrange the work and take a hefty cut of the worker’s pay, the workers say.
Carmen Hills, a spokeswoman for Homeland Security Investigations, the arm of ICE that carried out the raids, said the agency is committed to holding accountable “criminals who exploit people for profit while committing work-site violations and other crimes.”
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Morton and Carthage sit in solidly red counties that Trump won by double digits in 2020. Some residents said the raids punished people who were breaking the law.
Others have more complicated views, saying immigrants do the jobs others won’t.
“I know that they’re doing it because of the law and all,” said Patrick Kelly, the owner of a grocery store in Morton less than a mile from a plant targeted in the raids. “But I question, how can they go to sleep at night knowing that they done that to a person?”
After the raids, some of his longtime customers simply disappeared. His sales dropped.
Still, Mr. Kelly plans to vote for Mr. Trump, who he expects will lower inflation. He hopes Mr. Trump will assure undocumented immigrants with deep ties to the community that they’re not going to be “uprooted and sent back.”
The raid ruptured Mr. Orozco-Juarez’s family. After the raids, he was apart from his wife and children until March 2021. Their son still gets anxious when he’s away from his father.
Mr. Orozco-Juarez is now fighting deportation under a program to protect immigrant workers who report labor abuses.
For now, he waits, and goes to work. A couple times a year, he drives to the ICE field office near Jackson to prove he’s still living in Mississippi.
His next appointment is scheduled for Nov. 6.
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