MORTON, Miss. – As Thursday morning dawned hot and bright, Desiree Hughes soldiered through the 24th hour of her wait in a parking lot of a chicken processing plant here.

Two of her friends had been seized by immigration officials during a raid the day before, in an operation that resulted in about 680 arrests from seven different food processing plants across Mississippi. It was the largest workplace sting in at least a decade.

"(I'm) hurt. Heartbroken," Hughes said before taking a deep breath. "I just want our families to come home. Because without their mamas and papas, how are they going to take care of their babies? How are they going to get to school? How are they going to pay their bills? They're going to lose everything."

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Hughes was struggling to get through to her friends. She didn't have the special identification numbers needed to get information on them through a government hotline. Officials told her to search an online database run by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, but their names weren't showing up.

Immigration officials raided the plant just as the night shift was leaving and the morning shift was arriving, around 7:30 or 8 a.m., said Hughes, who is also an employee. Latino workers were gathered into one room, she said. Agents started questioning them, sorting those who had legal residency in the country from those who entered the U.S. illegally.

Hughes, who is a legal resident, was told to leave. She wasn't given a chance to speak with her friends before they were carted away in a bus.

Hughes' first concern: Her friends' young daughter and little brother. She made sure they had food, water, clothes and that they were in a safe location.

The brother, a naturally anxious kid, was panicking, she said. The little girl was too young to understand what was going on.

Then, she went back to Koch Foods. She and others whose loved ones were swept up in the raids gathered in nearby parking lots on Wednesday, hoping that buses would bring them back.

The crowd swelled to hundreds of people overnight, she said. They stayed for hours, anxiously and tearfully waiting to be reunited with family and friends.

"When the bus comes, oh, everybody was jumping for joy. It was very exciting. But at the same time, it was sad because a bunch of us waited for the loved ones to get off the bus and a lot of them didn't get off," she said.

A few buses returned with people who had been processed – but far fewer than the number who had been taken away, she said.

By Thursday morning, only a handful of people remained in the parking lot.

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In the group was a young woman wearing an ankle monitor. She said she was taken during the raid, processed and let go with a GPS tracker. When ICE agents came to seize workers at her plant, she tried to run away. She tripped and fell, leaving a mottled bruise along the length of her shin.

The woman's husband had also been taken to processing, but he still had not returned to Morton. A translator working with the woman said she heard her husband was on a bus headed for Louisiana.

On Thursday, ICE spokesman Bryan Cox confirmed that 300 of the people detained by ICE had been released. The remaining 380 are in federal custody.

At around 10 a.m. a security guard told the family and friends of the detained that they needed to leave Koch Foods' property if they weren't working.

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During Wednesday's raid, tears rolled down a 12-year-old girl's face as she clutched at a chain link fence surrounding the perimeter of the chicken processing plant. Her mother was somewhere in there.

The new school year had just started. Housemates pulled her out of class as soon as they heard that ICE agents were descending upon Morton, said Maria Tello, a close friend of the family.

They drove her to Koch Foods, hoping that the girl's presence might convince immigration officials to release the mother, the girl's only caretaker, quickly, Tello said.

It didn't work.

Tello said she has never seen the girl so upset. "She was just crying her eyes out."

That morning, the plant was surrounded by distraught people. Some wept, others tried to offer comfort, she said.

There were also a few people laughing at and mocking those in distress.

Tello heard people screaming, "Run, run," and "Take them away."

"Comments that were being made that just filled me with so much anger and sadness," Tello said. "We're all human beings, we're all children of God."

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Tello said she was supposed to report to work at Koch Foods at midnight for the night shift. However, with the majority of other workers in her department gone and hundreds of worried people gathered near the plant, she decided to stay outside and help.

"Fortunately I didn't have anybody taken, but these are my people and I'm trying to help them as much as I can," she said.

She translated, connected people with resources and offered comfort all night.

At around 7 a.m., family friends heard the mother was released in Sebastapol, a community about 30 miles away from Morton which had also been targeted by ICE.

A friend drove there to pick her up. Tello said the girl "nearly fainted" when she was reunited with her mother, the only parent in her life.

The child didn't attend school Thursday, not wanting to be separated from her mother again, Tello said.

The family, traumatized by the ordeal, is fearful of what's going to happen next, she said.

It's a feeling undoubtedly being experienced by countless others in Mississippi.

"You have a sense that you just can't relax. You have to try to fight, try to find a lawyer, try to get them out, try to fight the system because most of these people haven't done anything. They're just here to work," Tello said.

Rumbling 18-wheeler trucks jam packed with live chickens enter the Koch Foods plant in Morton. There, chickens are killed, their feathers are plucked, their bodies cut into pieces.

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However the day after the ICE raids, chickens were also leaving the plant alive and intact. Tello said it's probably because there are too few workers at the plant. Portions of the plant are not operational due to an employee shortage, she said.

She worries about what's going to happen to Morton, which she has called home for 10 years, if Latino immigrants decide to leave en masse.

"Maybe 20 years ago, there was hardly anything here," Tello said. "If (the immigrants) leave, it's gonna affect the economy, businesses and stuff."