Consider This from NPR - Undocumented workers brace for ICE raids, mass deportation under Trump

Episode Date: November 25, 2024

President-elect Trump's promises more ICE workplace raids like the ones in 2019. This time, advocates and undocumented people want to be prepared.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

The issue that President-elect Trump hammered most on the campaign trail was immigration. We will begin the largest deportation operation in the history of the United States. His plans aren't only focused on the border or on people who've committed violent crimes. He's also preparing to resume workplace raids, arresting people who may have been in the country for years far from the border. Trump's incoming border czar Tom Homan spoke on Fox earlier this month about why he views those raids as necessary. Where do we find most victims of sex trafficking and forced labor trafficking at work sites? Those operations were a big part of Trump's first term too. In my 19 years living here, I've never seen anything on a scale so big.

Patty lived in Morton, Mississippi when I visited there in 2019. A few months earlier, immigration and customs enforcement had arrested 680 people working at chicken processing plants in the area. Patty asked us to only use her first name because everybody in the community was afraid ICE agents would make a return visit.

This is a small town, so people are really suffering. The Latino community here was holding up the chicken plant, not anymore. What changed after the raid in August? I feel different. Every day we think we'll leave the house and not come back. It's hard. It's very scary.

When I met Patty, she was working behind the counter at the small shop she owned called Mercadito. A woman shopping for groceries asked to be called Elisa out of fears similar to those Patty expressed. Elisa told me when ICE agents burst into the plant, she was at work deboning chickens. I have three kids, so that was the most painful part for me because my baby, who was six years old, suffered a lot.

He cried, begging me to come back to them. Her husband wasn't at work the day of the raids. When he did show up at the plant, he was fired. Whenever I leave the house, my little boy worries if I'll come home, he cries. If you could talk to the ICE agents, what would you say to them? If you could talk to the ICE agents, what would you say to them?

Quite simply, I'd tell them you ruined our lives. If I have to leave the country, for example, I had plans to buy a house, to start a business, and with what happened, all those plans are lost. That was five years ago. Now Trump has named Tom Homan to be border czar. He was acting director of ICE during Trump's first term. And he recently told Fox and Friends he is eager to get to work. I think the calling is clear. I got to go back and help because every morning I get up, every morning I'm pissed off about what this administration did to the most secure border in my lifetime. So I'm going to go back and do what I can to fix it.

Consider this. The ice raid of Mississippi chicken plants upended lives five years ago. Now, people in the town of Morton are preparing for the possibility of a sequel. From NPR, I'm Ari Shapiro. It's Consider This from NPR. To understand the impact these raids had on Mississippi and what the next four years could look like, we called Cliff Johnson. He's an immigration attorney and director of the MacArthur Justice Center at the University of Mississippi. He told me the 2019 raids had repercussions that were significant and horrific.

You know, this was the first day of school for more than a thousand children impacted by these raids. And they learned at the end of the school day that there may not be anybody at home waiting for them. Families were torn apart. People were terrified because of an investigation that purportedly was focused on chicken processing companies in this case that employed folks, but the evidence of the bad acts, the items seized in the search warrant, were actual human beings who'd been living here among us for years and years. When I visited Mississippi I spoke with ICE Special Agent Jerry Miles who helped organize the operations and he told me

this. We're building a criminal investigation against a target and pursuant to that criminal investigation we encountered and detained undocumented workers. But many people have observed that company executives were not detained that day, only the workers were. That's why we keep saying it's an ongoing criminal investigation. That was five years ago.

So to this day, has anyone high up in the companies that employed these undocumented workers faced legal consequences? I think the key term there is high up. In these cases, I think there may have been a handful of mid-level managers who've been held accountable, maybe sentenced to probation. But the notion that the corporations themselves or anybody high up in the corporations, having been prosecuted and sent to prison or punished severely, That's just not what this was about. And I don't think it's what it was about

from the very beginning. This wasn't a response to an outcry from a local community where folks were arguing that immigrants were committing crimes and making us less safe. We were coexisting happily with these people. We've known them from our public schools and from our little league fields. And this was about somebody far away making a decision to do this.

What reason do these companies give for continuing to hire undocumented workers, even as they've experienced raids in the past and know there could be more in the future? I don't know what they would say publicly. My expectation and understanding is that they first and foremost need somebody actually willing to do the job. And jobs like these are done by people who don't have lots of other choices. If they could get jobs that didn't require them to stand on that line and deal with those smells and deal with the messiness of that work, they would take those jobs.

These are the types of employees who don't have significant power when it comes to negotiating wages. These are workers who are easily controlled and who will work extremely hard in order to support their families and to meet their basic needs. How has the community organized since 2019 to be prepared for what the next four years might bring?

When these raids took place in 2019, we didn't have even the ability to know who had been hauled off. They don't leave you a list of people that they took. What this looks like now is there are people who have literal raid packets, information that's been provided to them about the information they should have readily available for people who seek to provide aid, where they can keep their identification documents together, where they have a plan for the care of their children, where there's a network of people prepared to provide transportation to and from detention facilities, and where advocacy organizations like ours are working to even conduct a dry run of a mass raid.

None of that was in place in 2019. And what's so important to note is, you know, these organizations that have been doing this are grassroots communities of largely immigrant women who have decided that we're not going to get caught off guard like that again. What do you say to somebody who doesn't want to see families separated, doesn't want to see people suffer, but wants to see accountability for people who cross the border illegally? Look, I've always recognized that this is a difficult question on which people of good faith can disagree.

What I'd say is there are tremendous implications for taking the people who are already here and ripping them away from their local communities and from their families. It affects the local businesses where those people shop. It affects the companies that employ them, areas of construction and agriculture, manufacturing and food processing. The landlords who rent them homes and apartments are impacted. The richness of our culture and community in places like small town Mississippi are negatively impacted. So there are consequences of this.

That was Cliff Johnson, director of the MacArthur Justice Center at the University of Mississippi. This episode was produced by Tyler Bartlem, Brianna Scott, Connor Donovan, and Mark Rivers. It was edited by Courtney Dornig and Sarah Handel. Our original reporting from Mississippi back in 2019 was produced by Gus Contreras and Dave Blanchard. Our executive producer is Sammy Yenigan. It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Ari Shapiro.