ICE raids split families, leaving children without their parents
MORTON, MISS. — Leaning against the kitchen counter, Juana Andres, 12, rubbed her thumb and index finger anxiously across her father’s cellphone.
Beside her, her older brother Eduardo, 14, stared into his iPad, tears rolling down his cheeks.
It had been about 36 hours since federal immigration agents with guns had burst into the Koch Foods Inc. chicken processing plant in the heart of Morton, Miss., rounding up their mom and dad and fastening plastic zip ties to their wrists before packing them onto buses and hauling them off.
Some locals said the workers — immigrants without papers to live in the U.S. illegally — had been rounded up with little more dignity than the chickens that enter the plant in rumbling 18wheelers. But Juana had little to say about politics or race or immigration.
“I just want my mom and dad to come home,” she said quietly.
Juana still did not know where ICE had taken her parents — Guatemalans who have lived and worked in this small Deep South town for about eight years. She did not know if they would come back to their cosy four-bedroom ranch home, decorated with lavish shrines to Our Lady of Guadalupe, plush toys and cherub figurines. Her dad’s old AT&T phone was their only lifeline.
Hours after her mom and dad were taken away, it buzzed with an unknown number and Juana quickly handed it over to her uncle, Pedro Felipe.
It was her mom. Sobbing, Ana Andres delivered a simple message to her brother: “Take care of the kids and give them food.”
A sixth-grader, Juana had just started her second day back at middle school Wednesday when federal agents poured into the sprawling Koch Foods plant just a block away.
In a scene that played out at poultry and other food-processing plants across Mississippi, federal agents gathered hundreds of other Latino workers into rooms to question them and screen for anyone who was in the U.S. illegally. Across the state, about 680 workers were detained in the largest workplace raid in a decade.
Juana and her brother did not find out about the raid until that afternoon, when her uncle checked them out of school at the end of sixth period.
“ICE got your mami and papi,” Felipe told them. “They went inside the work and got them.”
After dusk Wednesday, buses began to arrive at the plant to return some of the immigrants after processing. By Thursday night, Immigration and Customs Enforcement said they had released 303 of the immigrants and presented them with charging documents that required them to appear in court before a federal immigration judge.
But still many children — not just Juana and Eduardo — were missing their parents.
As the only English speakers in the family, Juana and Eduardo took on the role of translators as their aunts and uncles struggled to navigate the immigration system, asking questions to find out where their parents were and pass on complicated information about processing centres.
Bypassing the crowds outside the plant Thursday, they headed straight to a local church with their uncle to get legal advice. After hiring an immigration attorney, they tried to pick up their parents’ black Tacoma pickup and silver Toyota Corolla from the plant’s gravel parking lot. The company’s security would not let them take the vehicles without paperwork, so they headed back home.
Juana’s parents, Martin Pascual and Ana Andres, are part of a wave of Latin American immigrants who have moved to Mississippi in the last 25 years to work in poultry plants.
In 1994, the Morton poultry plant, which was then locally owned and trying to tamp down union organizing among black workers, sent recruiters to Miami in search of immigrants who would be more accepting of low pay and poor work conditions.