Mostly, people wanted to know what would happen next, when they could return to work and whether the doors that this chicken processing plant had opened for them would close. The raid had been part of a sweeping crackdown across Mississippi at seven work sites, the largest single-state operation of its kind in recent memory,

“Look, I have faith that I’m going to survive, but not 100 percent” said Betzabeth Carachure Hernandez, the taco vendor, who has parked her truck in the chicken plant lot for 15 years. “Not if most of the Latinos don’t come back.”

[ICE Raids in Mississippi Leave Fear and Uncertainty in Their Wake]

In the public imagination, the mythos and moral failures of this state are wrapped up in cotton. In reality, modern Mississippi is a poultry state, accounting for nearly $3 billion of the state’s $7.7 billion agriculture industry in 2017, compared with $623 million for cotton, according to Mississippi State University’s extension service.

Over the last decade or so, in small country cities like Morton, population 3,500, it has been Hispanic workers, many of them undocumented, who have been most willing to deal with the blood and guts and stench of the business.

They came to Morton to work at PH Food, or to work at the big Koch Foods chicken plant up Highway 80, which spreads its scent around town with the shifting breeze — the smell of dead things not yet rotten. Hispanics made up 13 percent of the population in 2000 and now account for about a quarter of it.