Morton, Mississippi, a quiet city of a few thousand residents, lies around forty miles east of Jackson, on the edge of Bienville National Forest. Tito Echiburu, the senior vice-president of finance at the Bank of Morton, has lived in the town since 1973. In the nineteen-sixties, he was a top junior tennis player in Chile. He got a scholarship to play at Mississippi State University, where he ended up studying business and accounting. A few years after graduating, he took a job as a tennis pro at a country club in Jackson, where he met John Rogers, whose father founded B. C. Rogers Poultry, one of several companies that operated chicken-processing plants in and around Morton. When John took over the company, after his father’s death, he asked Echiburu, who had returned to Chile, to become the company’s chief financial officer. Echiburu’s young family moved back to Mississippi, and they became, he believes, “the first Hispanic family” in Morton. Today, around one in four residents of the town speaks Spanish or a language indigenous to Central or South America.

B. C. Rogers began hiring Latino immigrants to work in its plants in the late seventies, but few of those early hires stuck around. In the early nineties, John Rogers saw a TV news report about high unemployment among Latinos in Miami and decided to recruit them to Morton, Echiburu said. The company set up a small office in the Miami area, and Rogers sent Echiburu there as a company representative. “The only reason he asked me was because I spoke the language,” Echiburu said. “I wasn’t in human resources.” The company also began running Spanish-language newspaper ads in Florida and Texas. They called the recruitment effort the Hispanic Project.

B. C. Rogers spent millions transporting workers to central Mississippi and housing them there, Echiburu said. The Hispanic Project only lasted a few years; B. C. Rogers was sold to Koch Foods, one of the country’s largest poultry-processing and distribution companies, in the late nineties, and Echiburu left soon afterward for his job at the bank. But, in the meantime, the effort brought thousands of workers to chicken plants in Morton, first from Cuba and later from Mexico, Guatemala, and elsewhere. Echiburu’s daughter, Ana Maria Tyrrell, is thirty-six and now lives in Chicago. When these workers first started arriving, other people in town thought they were “part of our family,” she told me. Most of those who came did not stay in town for good, but word spread about the work that could be found there. “That opened the door for Hispanics,” Echiburu said. “They kept coming on their own, telling others to come.” Eventually, immigrants began to settle down in Morton, and in the surrounding towns—Forest, Canton, Carthage, Pelahatchie—that also have chicken plants.

“All of Central America is here,” a seventeen-year-old, whom I’ll call Danny, told me in August, standing in the parking lot of a plant owned by P H Food, where he used to work. (The names of undocumented Morton residents have been changed throughout this piece, to allow them to speak freely.) Danny’s family moved to Morton from Guatemala about five years ago. His mother’s sister came first. “She was here and said it was a really calm place,” Danny said. “That’s why we came. And for the work.” Danny was used to working. In Guatemala, he started shining shoes for eight dollars a day when he was eight years old. When they arrived in Morton, his parents got jobs working the morning shift at the P H Food plant, and Danny took eight-hour shifts after school, earning two dollars for every forty pounds of chicken he chopped. “At least half of us were minors,” he said, of his co-workers. “Most people had no papers. But the people who hired us didn’t care back then.”

Danny spoke to me in Spanish, one of the four languages he uses, along with English, which he’s still working on, and two indigenous dialects. He wore a baseball cap, backward, and a long-sleeved T-shirt that read “Every Man Dies Not Every Man Truly Lives!” A light rain was falling. Danny said that he gave the money he made at the plant to his parents, and they gave some of it back to him as an allowance. He used it to buy clothes, dye his hair, pay for gas, go on dates. Lately, he’d been trying to write poetry, in English, for a girl at school he liked.

The plant appeared empty, but the lights were on, and Danny gave me a brief tour. It was cold inside, and the air had a sour reek. “From the chickens that have gone bad,” he said. “We have to chop them anyway.” You get used to the smell, he added. We walked through the room where the chicken carcasses are hosed down and through another room with loud fans, where a lone man was spraying a disinfecting mist. Another room was full of the large yellow containers that Danny used to fill with chicken legs. The jobs in chicken-processing plants are notoriously dangerous, and I noticed a scar on Danny’s forearm. “I got it here after six months of work,” he said. “It was so deep, I could see the white inside the skin.” When he saw the blood, he quickly removed himself from the line, he said. “When the guy managing the floor noticed, the first thing he did was check if the chicken had been contaminated with blood. He didn’t check on me. I got pissed off. I grabbed my things and left for the night.”

Danny recently started his junior year at Morton High. On the first day of school, in early August, a janitor came to his classroom to tell the students that ICE agents were raiding the chicken plants. Danny looked outside, minutes later, and saw two helicopters circling the P H Food plant. More than six hundred ICE agents had come to seven Mississippi cities to carry out what a U.S. attorney later described as “the largest single-state immigration-enforcement operation in our nation’s history.”

Echiburu was on vacation with his wife, in Norway. They were having dinner when “strange messages began popping up on her phone,” he said. They were texts about the raid, about the families being detained. Echiburu’s wife began to cry. She called Tyrrell, who is a lawyer and specializes in employment- and family-related immigration law. Tyrrell, in turn, contacted a nun she’d known in Morton, who connected her to people in town who could help organize aid for the families.

Danny’s parents were at work; ICE agents came into the plant while they were on the line. “They said, ‘Put your hands on your head and leave all the knives exactly where they are,’ ” Danny’s mother, Isabella, told me. “They tied up all the men’s hands behind their backs, but not the women.” The workers were kept in a cafeteria and were directed, one by one, into an office, “to give a declaration,” Isabella said. The agents wanted to know who had told the workers that they could find jobs at the plant. “I told them that we came here to fight for our family,” Isabella said. “To put my children ahead. In Guatemala, there’s no future, no nothing. I couldn’t work there; I was a house mother. . . . I never went to school. I don’t know how to read or write. I don’t want to give that same type of path to the kids. I want to see their future.”