On 19 June, Ice officers descended on Fresh Mark, a meatpacking plant in Salem, Ohio, and detained 146 workers. The scene was chaotic. “Nos cayó la tormenta,” one worker told me: the storm descended on us.

One minute, people were slapping labels on packages of bacon. The next, there were uniformed men shouting, “Go!” Many workers thought the building was on fire. They fled outside to handcuffs and the swirling lights of police cars. Three men hid in a storeroom, crouched on stacks of wooden pallets. They waited it out and escaped. All the other Hispanic workers were detained, even those with work permits.



US meatpacking workers face new hazard: threat of deportation by Ice Read more

Workers who could prove authorization were let go, though some were held for days. Pregnant women and women with small children were also released, a mercy bestowed only because of timing: earlier in June, after a large raid on an Ohio gardening center, hundreds of children had been stranded at daycare centers and schools when their parents were detained. The situation had caused public outcry, which Ice was keen to avoid this time around.

Many of the released women were given ankle bracelets and court dates; others were told to watch for papers in the mail. Meanwhile, the women held in detention disappeared. While the detained men were channeled to Youngstown and Cleveland and Michigan and began to strategize with family members via phone, the women vanished; more than a week after the raid, no one had any idea where they were.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) special agents arrested alleged immigration violators at Fresh Mark, Salem on 19 June 2018. Photograph: Smith Collection/Gado/Getty Images

In response, the labeling line at Fresh Mark sped up. The remaining workers had to compensate for missing bodies. Sandra, a Guatemalan mother of three who’d been detained in the raid and released because she was eight months pregnant, explained to me: “Los Americanos se van.” The Americans leave. The work is too much for them, the line too fast, she said, with the only hint of pride I saw light up her face. There were too few workers left: seven out of 11 in Sandra’s unit had been detained. The four who remained were viejitas, Sandra explained: little old ladies.

Fresh Mark produces meat products: the hot dogs sold at baseball stadiums across the midwest, the pepperoni on pizza, the bacon on Wendy’s Baconator. These iconic American products – bought at Walmart and grilled in a backyard on the Fourth of July, sizzled up for Sunday breakfast, chowed in the seventh inning of a Reds game – are carefully prepared by indigenous Guatemalans working long hours without papers.

The landing page on the Fresh Mark website is a banner of a little white boy taking a piece of bacon from a paper-towel covered plate, held out by an older white hand. The banner reads: “Feeding families is a great responsibility.” In the lower right corner is a circular stamp declaring: “Made With Pride, USA, Since 1920.” The Made in USA stamp travels with the scroll, standing firm in the right corner.

Scrolling down, the company announces over a supersized image of pepperoni pizza: “Like you, we take it very seriously. Some of the world’s most well-known grocery stores, food service companies and restaurants count on Fresh Mark.”

Scrolling a little further, the message concludes on a photo of a blonde, white girl eating a sandwich: “So our customers and yours,” the banner reads, “can focus on what really matters.”

•••

The Friday after the raid, I traveled to Salem with my friend Mary Jayne, who runs a non-profit that offers interpreting and translation services, to volunteer as an interpreter for released detainees and family members of the detained.

Approaching Salem from the south-east, we drove on a narrow seam between plots of corn and soybean. Passing through the small communities of Unity and Columbiana, the American flags came on quick and brash: 15, 20, 50 in rapid succession, until the excess was almost comical. Then, quick as they’d appeared, the flags were gone, and we were back in open land and sky.

Soon, we arrived at the Centro San Pablo, a charitable organization run out of the packed, overheated basement of Salem’s Saint Paul’s Catholic church.

Centro San Pablo is run by Sister Rene Weeks, a tall, thin white woman with close-cropped gray hair who manages to be everywhere and handling everything at once. She welcomed us before disappearing into the fray.

Two lawyers sat at a folding table with laptops and papers. The wait to see them was hours long. Women breastfed infants in slings, and many wore outfits that were Walmart incantations of indigenous Guatemalan dress: ankle-length skirts with floral prints, black flats with fake rhinestones. Several girls had combs in their long black hair, which fell to their waists. The men wore baseball caps, sleeveless tank tops and chanclas, open-toed athletic sandals. Most people were considerably shorter than my own 5ft 3in.

'Pray for my children,' she begged us, sobbing. 'Que van a hacer mis niños?' Flor, in Salem

The room held that distinctly Latin American energy derived from a whole lot of people waiting interminably for an obscure bureaucratic procedure that may never come to pass. There was an open box of sticky Dunkin’ Donuts. Stale coffee. Packages and packages of diapers. We joined the chaos.

For the next three hours, we asked people for their names and immigration histories: were you detained? Was a family member detained? Have you heard from him or her? Did you sign anything? Have you ever been arrested, deported, had any interaction with the law?

I snuck in extra questions on the side. I spent years living in Mexico, and my husband is from a tiny village that, 30 years ago, was much like the ones these people had fled. He and I have traveled throughout the remote mountain pueblos of Oaxaca, reporting on immigration, and in these Guatemalan workers’ faces I remembered those mountains – the smoke coming off comales, the señoras hurrying small children wrapped in fleece blankets through vast, empty plazas.

“Why did you come?” I asked one woman, whose name I carefully sounded out after she told me with shamed apology that she could not read or write. Her face was marked by the pale splotches that signify malnutrition. Like many of these migrants, her first language was K’iche’, and her Spanish was basic. She squinted to understand me and I leaned closer to understand her. There wasn’t enough food for her and her son in Guatemala, she said. “We were searching for herbs.” When I pressed further, she shook her head, closed her eyes. “No, no, I don’t want to talk about that time.”

She had come to the US with her brother, who was now in detention somewhere in the Midwest. She hadn’t heard from him since Tuesday. What could she do? she asked. I had no idea. “Gracias,” she said, and sat back to wait her turn.

One intake form after another: detained brother, uncle, husband, wife. Can I go back to work? the room wondered collectively in a dozen variations. Even those with work permits were hesitant; one 18-year-old waited hours just to sit with a lawyer and ask him if it was OK to go back.

“You have a work permit!” the lawyer told him. “Yes, yes!”

Around 5 o’clock, Sister Rene announced that we were done for the day. She asked for a closing prayer from a woman named Flor, who was a full foot shorter than me, with dark hair pulled back in a low ponytail. Flor had been detained in the raid but released. She had five children, including a six-month-old and a one-and-a-half-year-old. She stood in the middle of the room and smiled at us. Then she bowed her head and closed her eyes, thanking the sister and the volunteers, speaking to God with the notes of humility, endurance and misericordia that form the chorus of the migrant experience. When she opened her eyes, she began to cry.

“Pray for my children,” she begged us, sobbing. “¿Qué van a hacer mis niños?”

Flor

The next morning, Mary Jayne and I returned to the Centro San Pablo with another volunteer interpreter from El Salvador named Ximena. At 9am, families were already waiting to apply for assistance. Their breadwinners snatched, these families were suspended over a financial cliff. My day would be spent cataloguing need. “How much food do you have in your fridge right now?” “How much for rent?” “When is it due?” “Tienes biles?”

Most people who weren’t part of a large family lived with at least three or four others. Most did not know their landlord’s name, or the name of their electric, light or gas companies. Someone showed up on their doorstep once a month and they handed that person an envelope of cash. On time, no questions.

I had brought a bag of toys, and the second I put them on the ground they were descended upon by a small girl and boy. I gauged the boy’s age as about two, the girl perhaps four: she was the same height as my daughter. Their mother sat near them on a chair, shushing a tiny baby in a sling. She looked unbelievably young.

I am not a criminal. I’m fighting to eat, to give something to my children. I’m not stealing. Flor, in Salem

I beckoned her to come over: “Pase.” She spoke hardly any Spanish, only K’iche’. She smiled a lot. Her baby was barely three weeks old, and sick. Her little girl, whom I had thought was four, was seven. The boy was two. The husband had a job at a rancho, picking fruit or vegetables, but something had happened; I couldn’t make out specifics. Neither of them had been working at Fresh Mark but had noticed a fervor of help at this moment and positioned themselves near it.

She did not know her address or her phone number and I couldn’t fill out her form. I offered to help carry diapers and wipes to her house so that her husband could give me this information and the Centro could contact them later.

We set out across the hot parking lot. The mother walked quickly and the children kept up. The family crossed the streets diagonally, as if they were not streets at all but fields. Each time, I clutched the older daughter’s hand. The houses had chain link fences cordoning off tiny yards, soggy toys toppled in patches of grass.

At the house, her husband was surprised and cordial, with a mouth full of gold teeth. He, too, looked impossibly young, barely into his early twenties. He spoke Spanish and explained that he’d been working at a rancho – a farm or gardening center – picking tomatoes, but the work was sporadic, and lately he hadn’t had enough. He was too scared now to try Fresh Mark. He was looking for more work at ranchos, but two huge raids in the preceding weeks made this dicey. He gave me his address and phone number while I watched the seven-year-old carefully remove the two-year-old’s shoes.

The kitchen was small and smelled of cooking oil; next to it was a living room of the same size, bare except for scattered objects around its edges, with a linoleum floor. I couldn’t see any other rooms, or furniture. The husband thanked me and I waved goodbye, the mother smiling the same smile – innocent or weary, I couldn’t tell.

Flor, who’d led the prayer on my first afternoon in Salem, told me: “We ran away from one thing in Guatemala, and now another thing is happening to us.” Everywhere these migrants went, they worked – the most difficult and least appreciated work – and everywhere they went they were loathed for it.

When Flor was detained, and she waited for hours panicking about whether she’d ever see her children again, she thought, I am not a criminal. I’m fighting to eat, to give something to my children. I’m not stealing.

When the national conversation tends to revolve only around the “illegality” of immigrants – the role of various agencies in immigration enforcement, what that enforcement should look like and how much it should cost, and most of all, whether or not to give “amnesty” – no one actually has to acknowledge their labor.

Amnesty is the most ironic term of all: Republicans rage and Democrats cower at the idea of granting “forgiveness” to the people who have, for decades, been powering the US economy. Here the absurdity of their invisible labor reaches its nadir: when we, driving on roads they have built, offering our toddlers the blueberries they have plucked, eating the meat they have slaughtered and cleaned and processed, ask: “Should we or should we not pardon them for their work?”

Sandra, Francisco and Isabel

A week later, my husband and I returned to Salem to talk to families affected by the raid and try to get a bigger picture of its effects. The Centro San Pablo was quiet. The detained were still gone – perhaps for years. The released were lying low, trying to decide whether to return to work or pack up and head elsewhere. Several families had already left for Alabama, where there was work in the chicken plants.

In the mid-afternoon, a family wandered in. The father, Francisco, was tall and broad-chested. The mother, Sandra, was short with a big gap-toothed smile. (Sandra and Francisco, as well as their children, are identified by pseudonyms.) Sandra was noticeably pregnant and trailing three little girls. They knew most of the small smattering of people in the room and said their holas and como estás before settling in.

Sandra was waiting to see what would happen after her release, whether she’d get papers in the mail. Francisco, who had finished his shift at Fresh Mark just before the raid, was trying to decide if and when to go back to work.

They had both grown up near the Guatemalan border with Mexico. When she was a baby, Sandra’s parents and grandparents had fled with her to the southern Mexican state of Chiapas to escape the massacre of indigenous peoples by Guatemalan government forces during a devastating civil war. When Sandra was six, her father died, and her mother remarried and started another family. Sandra’s grandparents moved back to Guatemala, taking her with them. She stopped school before second grade, and began work at age seven, harvesting plums, peanuts, hibiscus. “Trabajas por ti mismo,” she told me: you work for yourself.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Migrants use a makeshift raft to cross the Suchiate river, natural border between Mexico and Guatemala, in Ciudad Hidalgo, Chiapas state, Mexico. Photograph: Yuri Cortez/AFP/Getty Images

At 14, Sandra’s grandfather died, and her uncle took her in, but not for free. He was a sharecropper in Chiapas. He would take her and other workers in the back of a truck across the Mexican border to his plots of land, where they would shuck and degrain corn all day. She wasn’t paid. She was simply earning her keep. At 18, she decided to join Francisco, whom she’d met in the village, in San Diego.

She walked for four days through the desert. Towards the end, her group ran out of water. They used their hands to scrape the needles from cactus leaves and crack them open. The water inside was so sour it was hardly drinkable, but it kept them alive.

In San Diego, she and Francisco rented a room for $550. The room was in an apartment with four other rooms, each filled with three men splitting the rent. She bought a small refrigerator and the landlord charged her $25 extra per month for it. She took care of a little boy, and Francisco worked in landscaping, but the money was barely enough. When an uncle told her about rents in Salem – where, for around the same price, Sandra and Francisco could rent a whole house and their family could live alone – they decided to make the move.

Francisco had already been in the US for 14 years. He had also started work in Guatemala at seven. In the morning, he would go to school, and in the afternoon his family would assign him a plot of land to work. He was not allowed to rest or do homework until finished, at which point it was dark. “I used to study by candlelight,” he said.

He had been deported twice. The first was not long after he arrived; he and four friends had the extraordinary bad luck of taking a wrong turn onto a military base. He had no idea at the time that he could avoid deportation because he was a minor. He told the authorities he was Mexican, so they sent him to Tijuana, where he crossed immediately back into the US.

The second time, he and Sandra were in Salem and the three girls had been born. He was driving in the snow and the car lost traction and slid up onto a sidewalk, where it was stranded. The police officer who came to help asked him for his license, and that was that. In detention, he said to the Ice officer: “I have my daughters,” and the officer replied: “You’ll have to call them.”

Telling me this, he sighed. He crossed his arms over his chest. I asked him if he wanted to stay in the US.

“She wants to stay here for the girls’ education,” he said, gesturing at Sandra.

“You’d like to go back to the pueblo?” I asked.

“Sí, claro, sí, el pueblo,” he replied, like it was a no-brainer. When I asked him what they would do in Guatemala if they went back, he widened his eyes, pursed his lips and shrugged. It was absurd. It was like asking my daughter what she would do with a million dollars: an unimaginable concept. There was no work. He might, if he were scrappy, be able to run a small subsistence farm that would feed his family. But schools? And where he lived near the Mexican border, he said, narcos were constantly killing each other.

We were interrupted by a waitress from Jalisco’s, a nearby Mexican restaurant that had provided free meals for the workers affected by the raid. The waitress, Isabel, was dressed in a teal uniform straight out of a telenovela. She had a pale, heart-shaped face and a sturdy sense of conviction.

In Guatemala, Isabel said, the people don’t even have potable water. They live in cardboard houses with tin roofs. There is no money for anything, not even clothes. She pointed to a certificate on the wall, thanking Jalisco’s for contributing funds for a town’s school. The mayor of that town, she told us, had spent money on that certificate for Jalisco’s when the kids at the school didn’t even have notebooks.

“Americans have not seen the poverty [Guatemalans] live in,” Isabel said. “People don’t even earn three dollars a day. Three dollars: how much is that?” She was leaning over one of the low tables. “The children are malnourished. They eat once a day. Their teeth …”

Francisco nodded. Sandra was on the floor, putting together a butterfly puzzle with Jorge and the girls.

“I lived in rough poverty. I know what it is to live through hard times, to get by day to day.” Isabel had come to the US at 25 and started working in a restaurant. There were weeks, she said, when she had nothing to eat; weeks she slept as much as possible, so she didn’t feel hungry. Eventually, her sisters had joined her here and they’d opened Jalisco’s. She’d married an American citizen. They had two children.

“Here,” she told us, “It’s easy to raise a child who thinks they’re better.” She tried to guard against it, telling her kids, constantly: tú tienes todo. You have everything

Ashley, Tiffany, and Kelly

Sandra and Francisco gave their three girls American names.: Ashley, Tiffany and Kelly.

The night Sandra was detained, she called Francisco, crying, saying: “Take care of my children.” He was sick with fear. He did not tell the children that their mother might be sent back to a country they did not know. But they picked up on it anyway. On TV, they saw police cars with flashing lights outside their mom’s workplace. The oldest asked why her mother wasn’t home, what was going on. Now, when they see a police car passing, they run inside and hide.



Sandra and Francisco work six days a week: he on the am shift, from 6 to 2.30, she on the pm shift, from 3.30 to midnight. He walked to work at 5am so he wouldn’t have to drive. I asked what they did on the weekends and they looked at me for a moment as if trying to grasp the question. The one day they had off – Sunday – they woke, cleaned the house, went to Walmart to buy groceries, then headed to the lavandería to do laundry.

That was it. That was their American life.

Americans consume their labor, literally – in protein – and figuratively, in the ongoing enthrall to corporate profit. Yet a significant percentage of Americans want to give absolutely nothing in return. Not a fair minimum wage. Not health care. Not decent education in public schools. Not even the most fundamental right of legality.

At a candlelight vigil for separated immigrant families in DC, a Sikh priest repeated: “We are not separate. We are not separate. We are not separate.” Greed grows out of separateness, out of a belief that I am more deserving of the luxury of comfort, of security, of my house full of light and books than the African who has crossed an ocean and a continent to get here, than the Honduran man who picked my cherries.

Flor told me that while she was waiting in detention, she couldn’t eat, she couldn’t drink. She had no idea if she would see her children again. She had spent $15,000 to get her family here, to this tiny town in Ohio, where there was a job on the line. All she wanted was to work and be with her children.

“I want to give them the best,” she told me. “You know?”