Federal immigration officials raided several food-processing plants in Mississippi on Wednesday and arrested approximately 680 people believed to be working in the United States without authorization. Multiple reports are calling it the most massive immigration raid in the U.S. in at least a decade.
According to The Associated Press, more than 600 ICE agents were involved in the raids surrounding an area, near Jackson, where the processing plants were located. The effort was made to prevent workers, mostly Latino immigrants, from escaping.
The raids were reportedly conducted by the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Homeland Security Investigations “at seven agricultural processing plants across Mississippi,” according to an ICE statement. In addition to the arrests, agents seized company business records.
The arrested workers were bused to a local Mississippi National Guard hangar, where they were interviewed about their immigration status, including whether they already had deportation orders.
“Today’s raids are part of the ongoing war against immigrant families and the communities in which they live,” Julia Solórzano, an attorney with the Southern Poverty Law Center, said in an emailed statement to the AP. “It is especially sickening that days after immigrants were targeted by a gunman in El Paso, Texas, workers at plants across Mississippi witnessed armed agents descending on their workplace,” she said.
According to the Washington Post, dozens of immigrants have been released, after being detained but not before children of arrested detainees spent a night homeless with nowhere to go.
Children as young as toddlers were left with neighbors, and in some cases, even on strangers to pick them up from school and drive them to a community center, where community leaders tried to reassure them amid the chaos.
One 11-year-old girl pleaded with the Trump administration to “show some heart,” telling broadcaster WJTV the government should let her parents and those of other children go free.
“I need my dad and mommy,” the young girl said. “My dad didn’t do anything; he’s not a criminal.”
Meanwhile, those who have “already received due process and have been ordered to be removed,” the agency said in a press release, will be processed for deportation.
