A month after dozens of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents surrounded a meatpacking plant in Morristown, Tennessee, and detained 97 men and women who worked there, the tight-knit rural community is still reeling, but the initial shock has seeped into a quiet pain, as families adjust to lives without work and their loved ones. As those shipped to immigration detention facilities across the country started appearing before judges for bond hearings this month, some families were reunited, though still facing deportation proceedings, while others braced for long separations. As of Thursday, 20 of those arrested on April 5 were released — but many more remained in detention. “Tragedy continues to unfold,” said Stephanie Teatro, co-executive director of the Tennessee Immigrant and Refugee Rights Coalition. “Some families are getting really terrible news.”

The Trump administration has promised more worksite immigration enforcement. In January, ICE’s Acting Director Thomas Homan said these operations would increase by “400 percent.” As The Intercept reported last month, ICE appeared to take workers at the Southeastern Provision plant into custody based on their ethnicity, rather than asking question to determine whether they were eligible for arrest and deportation. The day after the raid, about 550 children missed school. At least 160 children found themselves without at least one of their parents. On Tuesday, Attorney General Jeff Sessions said he is “not shedding tears” about the families torn apart by the raid. “You don’t get to get an advantage in this country by having large numbers of illegal workers working for you,” Sessions added, referring to the plant’s American owners. “You don’t get to benefit from being in this country and looking around the world for the cheapest worker you can find.” But while the raid was prompted by an IRS investigation of the family-run business, whose owners were accused of evading taxes, filing false tax returns, and illegally employing undocumented workers, so far, they have not been charged. The Tennessee raid was the largest immigration enforcement operation at a workplace in nearly a decade: Ten years ago today, 389 undocumented workers, including several teenagers, were detained at another meat processing plant in the small town of Postville, Iowa. The devastating impact of that raid lasts to this day and offers a glimpse of what may be ahead for Morristown.



A Homeland security bus containing employees from the nation’s largest kosher packing plant in Postville, Iowa, leaves the plant escorted by law enforcement officials in May 2008. Photo: David Lienemann/The New York Times/Redux



Pedro Lopez was 13 years old and sitting in class when he and his classmates heard the loud buzz of helicopters overhead — a curiosity in Postville, the rural town of 2,200 where he lived with his parents and two sisters. The kids rushed to the windows and watched the helicopters, but their excitement quickly turned to terror when someone said the helicopters were conducting an immigration raid at a local meat processing plant, the largest employer in town. 13 years old and sitting in class when he and his classmates heard the loud buzz of helicopters overhead — a curiosity in Postville, the rural town of 2,200 where he lived with his parents and two sisters. The kids rushed to the windows and watched the helicopters, but their excitement quickly turned to terror when someone said the helicopters were conducting an immigration raid at a local meat processing plant, the largest employer in town. Both of Lopez’s parents worked at the Agriprocessors kosher facility, alternating shifts so that “we could have somebody at home and not be left on our own,” he told The Intercept. Lopez, his parents, and his older sister were undocumented, as were many of those working at the plant; his mother was at work that morning. When a teacher confirmed news of the raid, Lopez sat at his desk, put his head down, and started crying. “There’s mom. Mom’s at the plant. She’s definitely working right now,” he remembers thinking. “I just wanted somebody to wake me up from this nightmare and tell me, everything is fine, it’s a bad dream, you’ll wake up, and everything will be back to normal.” It would be more than a year before Lopez would see his mother again. Nearly 20 percent of Postville’s population was detained that day. The helicopters circled around the quiet town for hours, as hundreds of armed agents swarmed the streets, blocking every entry with vehicles, lights flashing, driving after people who had tried to escape, chasing them into fields, and going into homes, “pulling people out of closets,” according to accounts of that day. Residents were so traumatized that a few days after the raid, when a truck delivering ice drove through the town, people panicked again, as they thought the word “ICE” painted on the truck meant that the immigration agents were back. As with the recent Tennessee raid, the Iowa one was prompted by fiscal violations by the plant’s managers, who also subjected workers to unsafe conditions and abusive treatment. Sholom Rubashkin, chief executive officer of the Postville plant, was eventually convicted of 86 counts of financial fraud and sentenced to 27 years in prison. President Donald Trump commuted his sentence last December.

Following the raid, workers were bussed to the National Cattle Congress, a facility two hours away normally used for livestock shows. Over the next days, they were brought before a judge, shackled, in groups of 10. Fearful that ICE would go back for her husband and children, Lopez’s mother told officials that she was in the country alone. That’s when the “where’s Waldo phase” began, said Lopez. Over the next six months, his mother was moved from one detention center to the next — in Iowa, Missouri, Georgia, and Florida — as her family scrambled to find out where she was. Then, on her husband’s birthday, she was deported to Mexico. With his mother gone and his father out of work as the plant shut down, Lopez’s modest but happy life in Postville ended overnight. “It affected my father so much because this was the very thing we were escaping in Mexico: poverty, the inability of having something,” says Lopez. “The house was just gloomy, it was dead, there wasn’t any life to it. The warmth that comes in a house wasn’t there.” Lopez started looking for work. He would sometimes say he wasn’t hungry, so his younger sister could have more food. The family lived in their home with their belongings packed up, just in case ICE came back and forced them to move back to Mexico — a prospect that terrified Lopez, who came to the U.S. as a toddler, speaks English without the trace of an accent, and says that when people ask him where he’s really from he responds that he’s “really from Postville, Iowa.” Postville itself was never the same after the raid.



The Agriprocessors kosher meat packing plant in Postville, Iowa, on Aug. 13, 2008. Photo: Charlie Neibergall/AP



“The course of our lives was changed forever,” said Lopez. “Most of these people came from nothing, and in Postville, they had a little bit of something. It wasn’t much, but it was their home. They put their blood, their sweat, their tears into it, and their dreams were cut short.” “The course of our lives was changed forever,” said Lopez. “Most of these people came from nothing, and in Postville, they had a little bit of something. It wasn’t much, but it was their home. They put their blood, their sweat, their tears into it, and their dreams were cut short.” After the raid, Postville’s economy tanked. The nearly 400 people removed overnight were followed by many who fled in fear of more ICE raids or because they had nothing left there — and with them vanished the money they had spent on rent, groceries, and laundromats. Local stores and restaurants shut down. The school came close to it. Immigrant families, but also Jewish ones who had relied on the plant for work, turned to the local church for help. The ripple effects stretched to nearby towns — like Decorah, where Postville residents would shop at the local Walmart. There were no more quinceañeras, bautismos, bodas, said Lopez, referring to the birthdays, baptisms, and wedding parties that made the town so vibrant. “We had two Mexican stores, a Guatemalan store, a Guatemalan restaurant, a Mexican restaurant, a pizzeria. … It was beautiful.” Last month, Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds signed an “anti-sanctuary” bill that cuts state funding to cities and counties in the state that refuse to cooperate with federal immigration authorities. The bill, which followed decisions by Iowa City and Johnson County officials to limit cooperation with ICE, has reignited fears in diverse communities, like Postville, that remain deeply traumatized by the 2008 raid. “If you actually look at where the communities that have the most immigrants are … these are really communities that have figured this stuff out,” said Matt Hildreth, political director of the immigrant rights group America’s Voice. “They don’t struggle with the national debate. There’s some tension, and I don’t want to downplay it, but largely, they go about their day, they get their job done. It’s not this hot-button issue.”

Photo: Charlie Neibergall/AP