John,
I’ve spent the last 24-hours in Mississippi following one of the worst ICE raids in the history of this country.
Here’s what I saw.
In Canton, a small community about a half hour outside of Jackson, I met with about 25 women, a couple of men and their very young children. The women are undocumented. Most of the kids are U.S. citizens. Their husbands were all apprehended in the ICE raid and they now have no idea when or if they are going to see them again. They also don’t know how they’re going to pay the rent, afford an attorney, or pay for school supplies. Of those needs, money for rent is most important. All of them mentioned it repeatedly.
An amazing local store owner seems to be the hub of the immigrant community — everyone trusts her, everyone looks to her for help. It was in her store that I met with the affected families.
One woman, wearing an ankle monitor or grillete said to me, “We have never been a burden. Some people claim that immigrants take public services. I’ve never taken assistance or help in my life. I came here to work, and every day I work. My husband works the night shift, I work the day shift. Now that he’s detained and I’m not working, I have nothing, no way to support my family. I don’t want anyone’s help, I just want to work.”
A young woman, 18 years old, told me about her parents. She told me that they luckily both left the chicken processing plant just before the raid took place. She started to cry when she told me that they are still working, because they have no other choice. She told me she was crying because she doesn’t know if one day when she’s at school she’ll come home to find that they’re gone. They’ve lived here and worked here for her whole life, they’ve raised a strong, smart, caring woman — a U.S. citizen, someone who should be able to focus on her studies, her career, her future instead of worrying about whether her parents will be deported for the crime of working in a chicken processing plant for $12 an hour.
Nearly 700 families were broken up in these raids. Hardworking, family-focused people.
I went to the home of a young woman who lived on the outskirts of town. She used to sell tamales to the workers at the chicken processing plant. She arrived in this country four years ago seeking asylum, and has been wearing an ankle monitor ever since. It’s heavy, gets hot, irritates her skin, but she’s had it on every day for four years. She’s raising four beautiful children, the oldest of which sometimes helps her to sell tamales. Now that that the immigrants have been rounded up and are no longer working in the chicken processing plants there’s no one to buy the tamales.
She’s worried that she’ll be deported back to Guatemala or, with no income and no ability to pay the rent, that she will have no other choice but to return. She showed us her scars from stab wounds she suffered when she lived there, and said she had received a call recently from a gang leader in Guatemala who told her that her husband had been murdered for outstanding debts and that the gang wanted her children as additional payment. She is certain that if she returns she will lose them.
We went to a Catholic church in Forest that was providing help for families torn apart by these recent raids. In addition to the priest and nuns who were tending to the children, there were a number of attorneys from Arizona who had flown in to provide free legal help to the families. They were also helping to take care of the kids. People willing to do this work are my heroes. It doesn’t pay, it’s tough mentally, it’s tough emotionally, but it is so necessary.
One of the families they were helping was really struggling. I met a dad of a four-month old and a very sweet, polite 11-year old. The father told me that his wife was picked up in the raid and that she is having a hard time in detention. She is depressed, and her breasts are painful and swollen, as she was still breast-feeding when she was picked up. She can’t bond out — I don’t think they’ve even set bond for these families.
I met another woman at the church. She was in detention for the last week and was only released yesterday when ICE realized that they had also detained her husband at another facility, leaving her children on their own without either parent. She told me about the conditions in the facility, the depression that she felt while she was there, missing her family, not knowing how they were doing. She talked about the day of the raid, one of her co-workers punched in the face by an agent (“he was scared and he started to run, so they ran him down and punched him”). She talked about workers being cuffed and their cuffs tied to ankle restraints, like you’d tie a hog. I asked her how she felt now. She told me “I’m just happy to be with my son. That’s the only thing that matters to me.”
This cruelty, this terror felt by this community of hardworking immigrants, is the policy of Donald Trump. His hope is that he can inflict enough suffering for these immigrants to get them to leave, or perhaps go back to the countries they fled in the first place. He’s trying to show he’s tough by preying upon the vulnerable and the defenseless.
I came to see it for myself. I am disgusted that we could treat people like this in a country of immigrants. But I’m inspired by the way that people have come together to help these families.
My hope is that the more America learns about this the more we as Americans will do to change this. As hard as this is to see, I’m glad I came here — glad to be able to bear witness to what is being done in our name to immigrants in this country. And I’m more determined than ever to help lift up the stories of those who are suffering, and the stories of those who are rising up to meet this moment.
If you’re wondering what you can do, please make a donation to the Mississippi Immigrant Rights Alliance. Here’s the link:
https://act.betoorourke.com/go/26296?t=2&akid=49476%2E3323508%2EqgeZPx
- Beto
