Bernarda Rodriguez remembers chaos when US immigration officers attacked the Mississippi chicken factory, where they worked in 2019 when they were looking for migrants without papers.
“Everyone started running and screaming … but the doors were closed,” said Rodriguez, who came to the USA illegally from Mexico in 2004.
“I was afraid and tried to hide,” she said about a translator to CBC radio.
Rodriguez crawled behind a few boxes with other workers, but officials discovered their hiding place.
“They told us that we should not hurt us, that they just wanted us to get out,” she recalled.
Rodriguez was one of the 680 workers arrested from US immigration and customs officials (ICE) on August 7, 2019 when they attacked seven poultry plants in the center of Mississippi.
“It’s like a disaster that hit”
Six years later, migrants without papers in the United States took into account the mass deportations added by US President Donald Trump in his re-election campaign.
In 2019, Rodriguez ‘hands and feet were tied up and their phone confiscated before it was moved to an immigration finding facility in Louisiana. It was held for a month. During this time she had little contact with her children, who were with her father and devastated when they would see them again. She was finally released and the officials decided not to deport them.
The ice operation in Mississippi remains one of the largest raids in the workplace in the history of US history and has left a lasting influence on the communities in the southern state. It is estimated that up to 400 people have been deported, while others are in a blocked immigration system and are waiting to hear their cases.
“Families were obviously torn apart,” said Michael Ann Oropeza, managing director of El Pueblo, a non -profit association that serves Mississippis immigrant communities.
“There are people who are now emotional when they talk about the raids,” she said. “It’s like a disaster that hit.”
During his term on January 20, Trump said: “We will return the process of returning millions and millions of criminal extraterrestrials to the places from which they came.”
CBC Radio Bat ICE for an interview, but nobody was made available, and the questions submitted by e -mail were unanswered. The law enforcement authority indicated 3,500 arrests Last week, in the first few days of Trump’s second presidency.
US President Donald Trump quickly pursues his promise to act against illegal immigration with raids and deportation. Trump is now pushing for a massive increase in expenditure for border security and immigration reform.
Trump calls migrants “dangerous”
The number of migrants who crossed the United States without permission has grown steadily since the Covid 19 pandemic. US officials recorded 249,741 “border encounters” or fears of migrants – in December 2023, so Data from the PEW Research Center.
While Joe Biden initially pursued a gentler immigration approach Fresh restrictions To curb about the intersections last June. In connection with an increased implementation in Mexico, border encounters 77 percent dropped to 58,038 people in August.
In A Video online published in February 2024Trump described migrants as “dangerous illegal foreigners” in American communities to hunt our people “.
Randy Rushing, a member of the Mississippi House of Representatives, said that he doesn’t mind getting migrants to the United States, but they have to use legal routes.
“A country without borders is not a safe country,” said Rushing, a Republican. “If we don’t know who is here and what they are going to do, then … the citizens who live here are not protected.”
Oropeza by El Pueblo said it was not so easy to immigrate to the USA, where complex laws can change “like a pendulum with who in office”.
“If you are unskilled or … you have no family members here, you don’t have the finances – it is very difficult to come here,” she said.
Most undocumented migrants only want to take care of their families, and immigration is not about “opening doors for criminals or crazy and annoying institutions,” she said.
Mike Lee is the sheriff of Scott County, where many of the ice attacks took place in 2019. While he supports Trump’s plans to tighten the border between the USA and Mexico, he said that the President’s words about “dangerous illegal foreigners” do not match what he sees in Mississippi.
“We have 100 people a day in the Scott County prison, and a very small part of it would be immigrants from other countries,” said Lee. “If you come to Mississippi here, you are here to work.”
Children waited in front of school gates goals
On the day of the ice attacks in 2019, Yeison Burduo finished his first day of the 5th grade and drove home with his two brothers – completely without knowing that her mother, a single parent, had been arrested.
“My mother didn’t come home,” said Yeiison, now 15.
Cliff Johnson, a lawyer of civil rights, said his phone started to hook the hook when the messages over the raids out.
“People didn’t know who they could speak to, but they knew that something really serious and something bad happened,” said Johnson, director of the Macarthur Justice Center at the lawyer of the Mississippi University.
The ice attacks fell together with the first day of school, and Johnson said it immediately became clear that many children were waiting for parents at the school boards who did not come. The school staff tried to find out whether children were waiting for them at home and tried to arrange care for those who did not.
“I remember very well that this urgency has primarily tried to find out what we are doing against these children,” said Johnson.
Yeiison has not seen his mother for six months. Until his appearance, he and his brothers stayed in court with a family of the family, where he captivated them and wore a prison. “I just started crying at that moment,” he said.
His mother was not released long. Yeiison said he did not know the details of her current legal status and his mother was not available for an interview.
ICE did not answer questions on how many people were deported on the basis of the raid, but Johnson estimates that between 300 and 400 people were removed from the United States within months.
He said others had been released with ankle arm bands to pursue their movements and are waiting for final decisions from an immigration system with a deficit of three million cases.
The current language spoke to a young woman from Arizona who came to the USA with her family from Mexico when she was a baby. She only learned that she was a migrant without papers when she became 16. The CBC does not call its or family about their fears of being deported.
Without growing up her father
Conn Carroll, commentary editor of the Washington Examiner, said Trump knows how important immigration is for his followers, but some of the things he had pledged should be taken with “a grain of salt”.
“If you are among people who hope that Trump will be deported to 12 to 20 million people … I think you will be disappointed,” said Carroll, former communication director of a Republican senator.
“However, if you hope that Trump will close the border and … will start working with local jurisdiction to remove the extraterrestrials who have criminal convictions … I think that’s what you see,” said he to extraterrestrials The current one Last week.
The current one24:18Migrants who live in fear of Trump’s mass protection threat
Adalis Fontanez moved to Mississippi 15 years ago to look for better wages. She is a American citizen from Puerto Rico, but her husband, whom she met in a chicken plant, is a migrant without papers from Guatemala.
They married in 2010 and have two daughters, but he was arrested in the 2019 ice attacks and deported to Guatemala.
You haven’t seen each other since. Her daughter Aleida, 13, fears that he will never come back.
“He calls us and he says he just wants to be with his family, things like that. He only becomes sad and emotionally that he is not with his family,” she said.
Carroll argued that immigration laws had to be enforced.
“Hard lines like this are difficult to enforce both politically and emotionally. And there are difficult cases, but difficult cases are not excuses to make bad law,” he said.
Oropeza from the non -profit El Pueblo said that the system recognizes humanity and contributions from migrants without papers and helps them get out of the shadow.
“There is fear that you cannot describe or cannot really empathize, unless you know how it is to be undocumented – and this fear of living every day,” she said.
