State officials were left scrambling to cope with the human fallout after being kept in the dark about Wednesday’s mammoth immigration raids

Distraught relatives wept alongside distressed children in school lobbies this week, trying to grapple with the reality that agents from the United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency had taken their parents away.

Agents stormed the workplaces and loaded up about 680 employees whom they claimed were undocumented immigrants. The agents arrested and tased at least one US citizen.

The ICE raids, carried out under the leadership of a Donald Trump-appointed US attorney, took place at seven food processing plants in six Mississippi cities. Photographs of crying children left distraught when their parents were taken into custody immediately went viral worldwide.

Father Jeremy Tobin, a Catholic priest who works with the Mississippi Immigrants Rights Alliance (Mira), told the Guardian he had been flooded with worried calls and messages from immigrants, documented and undocumented alike.

Tobin, who was based in Carthage, one of the cities federal agents raided, from about 2005 to 2014, said he knows personally many of the families affected.

He said he spoke to one girl whose immigrant family members are all in the US legally. “She said her family is so torn up about this,” he said. “They all have [their immigration] papers. They all have green cards.”

Despite their legal status, the girl told Tobin, the family is living in a state of fear and anguish in the aftermath. “To see this happen, it’s so painful,” the girl told him. “And I’m glad you can understand.”

The raids on Wednesday came on the same day Trump traveled to El Paso, claiming he wanted to help unify the country after a suspected white supremacist gunman killed 22 people at a Walmart there. A manifesto attributed to the gunman said he was concerned about a “Hispanic invasion”, echoing rhetoric Trump has used on Twitter and in stump speeches. While Trump spoke of unity in front of cameras to the west, though, chaos unfolded in Mississippi.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A handout photo made available by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) shows police duirng a worksite enforcement operation in Canton, Mississippi, on Wednesday. Photograph: A Mason/Ice/Handout/EPA

The state’s child protective service agents were not notified about the raid in advance, nor was the state’s department of human services nor the Mississippi attorney general’s office. Caught unawares, school districts and daycare centers scrambled to figure out what to do with affected children in their care.

Luis Espinoza, a Mira organizer, said he had spent the past two days working with affected families. In some cases, a mother and a father worked at the same food processing plant on alternating shifts so one could stay home and care for the child while the other worked.

“In most of the cases now, the father was working and has been detained,” said Espinoza, who has been working with families in Canton, one of the cities Ice targeted for raids, just north of the capital.

Fears of returning to work

US attorney Mike Hurst, who fronted the Ice operation to media, said Ice released 300 workers on Thursday, including many parents who were swept up in the raids.

“But even if they have been released, they cannot go back to work because the plant is going to say, ‘No. We don’t want any problems any more,’” Espinoza said.

Even if they could, the parents who were not at work at the time of the raids are afraid of going back to work. Not all parents were released, and if another raid happened at the facility, or another workplace, it could leave the children with neither parent.

For those families, though, even if a parent has been released, they suddenly have no income, leaving them with no way to pay rent, buy groceries or get medications.

“Right now, the community [members] are helping each other,” Espinoza said, explaining that Mira is working with churches and other organizations in the targeted areas to help get food and other resources to distressed families.

Released detainees will have to wear ankle monitors. They will also need attorneys to help them fight their immigration cases.

The immediate aftermath of the raids left hundreds of children with no parents to go home to; infants at daycare centers with no one to pick them up; and children crying out for disappeared parents in workplace parking lots.

Child protective services in Forest, Mississippi, worked diligently on Wednesday evening to unite about 30 children with relatives. Then, on Thursday morning, Constance Slaughter-Harvey, the Scott county youth court prosecutor, watched as a handful of those children reunited with parents whom Ice had released.

“Some of them knew nothing about where their parents were. When their parents were reunited with them, they ran up and started hugging and crying, and it touched my heart,” Slaughter-Harvey, a longtime civil – rights attorney raised in Forest, told the Jackson Free Press on Thursday.

Like other child protective services agents, Slaughter-Harvey said the federal government gave her no warning about the imminent raids.

In the school districts affected, many of the children were at their first day of school when the raids happened. Tobin, the priest, said he thinks that date was intentionally chosen. The raids took months to plan. At a rally with other Mira organizers on Thursday, Tobin compared Ice to the Nazi-era Gestapo.

“This is totally unAmerican,” he said afterwards. “When I got up there and talked about the Gestapo, I meant that. We’ve got to abolish Ice. This is nothing more than a hit squad. It’s inhuman. The whole process is dehumanizing … These Trumpites just need someone to scapegoat.”

He compared Trump’s rallies to Adolf Hitler’s Nuremberg rallies. It is all about “white supremacy”, Tobin said.

“They’ve got to have somebody to hate. The weakest group in the country: undocumented immigrants. They can’t pick on black folks like that any more because we got laws passed, right? They’re citizens. But they can pick on the immigrant. And that’s what they do.”

Ashton Pittman is the state reporter for the Jackson Free Press. Twitter @ashtonpittman