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Every day for the last month, Aneth's 3-year-old daughter has asked her the same question: "When is Daddy coming home?" She searches every room in the house for him and wonders why he wasn't there for her birthday. Aneth cannot bring herself to tell her youngest child that her father was detained by immigration authorities in what advocates say was the biggest workplace raid in a decade.

It's been more than a month since Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers detained 97 people at a meatpacking plant in eastern Tennessee, upending dozens of families and leaving many fearful of what could come next.

“It hurts so much," said Aneth, 38, a resident of Morristown, Tennessee, who asked that her last name not be used, or the names of her children, out of concern for her family's safety.

"I don’t even know how to explain it to them because they wouldn’t understand,” said Aneth, who also has a 5-year-old son and an 11-year-old daughter who is old enough to know that her father, Alberto, remains detained in Louisiana awaiting a bond hearing this week.

“We used to do everything together,” Aneth said of her husband of 15 years.

The raid appeared to be part of ICE's recent efforts to step up enforcement of immigration laws in workplaces.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions mentioned the raid in a speech on Tuesday, saying that he wasn't "shedding tears" over it.

"You don’t get to gain a competitive advantage in this country by having large numbers of illegal workers working for you so I’m not shedding tears about that," he said in remarks at the Gatlinburg Law Enforcement Training Conference in Tennessee.

Immigrant rights advocates said the Tennessee raid was the biggest since a 2008 raid in Postville, Iowa, where nearly 400 immigrants were detained at a slaughterhouse.

"It certainly feels, in many ways, that history is repeating itself," Stephanie Teatro, co-executive director of the Tennessee Immigrant and Refugee Rights Coalition, said during a call with reporters on Monday. "The impact of this raid extended well past those 97 workers who were arrested."

Hundreds of people gathered at a church in the days after the raid, desperately trying to find their family members. Nearly 600 children from the district missed school as fear spread through the tight-knit immigrant community when it became clear that dozens of fathers, mothers, siblings, sons and daughters weren't coming home.

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“These events are just so big, they create such chaos,” Jessie Hahn, a labor and employment policy attorney at the National Immigration Law Center, told NBC News. “It touches everyone in a community even if they don’t directly have a family member who was working at this work site.”