Bernarda Rodriguez remembers the chaos when U.S. immigration officials raided the Mississippi chicken factory where she worked in 2019 as they looked for undocumented migrants.
“Everybody started running and screaming … they wanted to get out … but the doors were closed,” said Rodriguez, who came to the U.S. illegally from Mexico in 2004 seeking work.
“I was scared and I was trying to hide,” she told CBC Radio through a translator.
Rodriguez scrambled behind some boxes with other workers, but officials spotted their hiding place.
“They told us to get out, that they weren’t going to hurt us, that they just wanted us to get out,” she recalled.
Rodriguez was one of the 680 workers arrested by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers on Aug. 7, 2019, when they raided seven poultry plants in central Mississippi.
‘It’s like a disaster that hit’
Six years later, undocumented migrants across the United States are bracing for the mass deportations pledged by U.S. President Donald Trump in his campaign for re-election.
In 2019, Rodriguez’s hands and feet were shackled and her phone was confiscated before she was moved to an immigration detention facility in Louisiana. She was held for a month, during which time she had little contact with her children, who were with their father and scared about when they would see her again. She was eventually released, and officials decided not to deport her.
The ICE operation in Mississippi remains one of the biggest workplace raids in U.S. history and has left a lasting impact on communities in the southern state. It’s estimated that up to 400 people were deported, while others are in limbo amid a clogged-up immigration system, waiting to have their cases heard.
“Families [were] obviously ripped apart,” said Michael Ann Oropeza, executive director of El Pueblo, a non-profit that serves Mississippi’s immigrant communities.
“There are people now that if you talk about the raids, they’re going to get emotional,” she said. “It’s like a disaster that hit.”
In his inauguration speech on Jan. 20, Trump said that “we will begin the process of returning millions and millions of criminal aliens back to the places from which they came.”
CBC Radio asked ICE for an interview, but no one was made available, and questions submitted by email went unanswered. The law enforcement agency reported making 3,500 arrests last week, in the first days of Trump’s second presidency.
U.S. President Donald Trump is quickly following through on his promise to crack down on illegal immigration with raids and deportation. Trump is now pushing for a massive increase in spending on border security and immigration reform.
Trump calls migrants ‘dangerous’
The number of migrants crossing into the U.S. without authorization has grown steadily since the COVID-19 pandemic. U.S. officials recorded 249,741 “border encounters” — or apprehensions of migrants — in December 2023, according to data from the Pew Research Center.
While Joe Biden initially took a gentler approach to immigration after he was sworn in as president in 2021, he imposed fresh restrictions to curb crossings last June. Coupled with increased enforcement in Mexico, border encounters dropped 77 per cent to 58,038 people in August.
In a video posted online in February 2024, Trump characterized migrants as “dangerous illegal aliens” coming “into American communities to prey on our people.”
Randy Rushing, a member of Mississippi’s House of Representatives, said he doesn’t mind migrants coming to the U.S., but they must use legal routes to do it.
“A country without borders is not a secure country,” said Rushing, a Republican. “If we don’t know who’s here and what they’re up to, then … the citizens that live here aren’t protected.”
Oropeza, of El Pueblo, said it’s not so easy to immigrate to the U.S., where complex laws can change “like a pendulum with whoever’s in office.”
“If you’re unskilled or … you don’t have family members here, you don’t have the finances — it’s very difficult to come here,” she said.
Most undocumented migrants just want to provide for their families, and immigration is not about “opening doors to criminals or insane asylums,” she said.
Mike Lee is the sheriff of Scott County, where many of the ICE raids occurred in 2019. While he supports Trump’s plans to tighten the U.S.-Mexico border, he said the president’s words about “dangerous illegal aliens” don’t match what he sees in Mississippi.
“We hold 100 people a day here at the Scott County jail, and a very small portion of those would be immigrants from other countries,” Lee said. “By the time they get here to Mississippi, you know, they are here to work.”
Children left waiting at school gates
On the day of the ICE raids in 2019, Yeison Burduo finished his first day of Grade 5 and headed home with his two brothers — completely unaware that their mother, a single parent, had been arrested.
“My mom didn’t come home,” said Yeison, now 15. He got more and more concerned as time ticked by, until a phone call came informing them their mother had been detained.
Civil rights lawyer Cliff Johnson said his phone started ringing off the hook as news of the raids got out.
“People didn’t know who to talk to, but they knew something really serious was happening and something bad,” said Johnson, director of the MacArthur Justice Center at the University of Mississippi’s law school.
The ICE raids coincided with the first day of school, and Johnson said it became immediately apparent that many children were left waiting at the school gates for parents who weren’t coming. That left school staff scrambling to find out whether kids had anyone waiting for them at home and trying to arrange care for those who didn’t.
“I remember very well feeling this urgency, first and foremost, in trying to figure out what do we do about these kids,” Johnson said.
Yeison didn’t see his mother for six months. He and his brothers stayed with a family friend until her appearance in court, where he saw her shackled and wearing a prison jumpsuit. “I just started crying at that moment,” he said.
His mother was released not long after that. Yeison said he doesn’t know the specifics of her current legal status, and his mother was not available for an interview.
ICE did not respond to questions about how many people were deported as a result of the raids, but Johnson estimates between 300 and 400 people were removed from the U.S. within months.
He said others were released with ankle bracelets to track their movements and are awaiting final decisions from an immigration system that has a backlog of three million cases.
The Current spoke with a young woman from Arizona who came to the U.S. from Mexico with her family when she was a baby. She only learned she was an undocumented migrant when she turned 16. The CBC is not naming her or her family over their fears of being deported.
Growing up without their dad
Conn Carroll, commentary editor for the Washington Examiner, said Trump knows how important immigration is to his supporters, but some of the things he’s pledged should be taken with “a grain of salt.”
“If you are one of those people who are hoping that Trump is going to deport 12 to 20 million people … I think you’re going to be disappointed,” said Carroll, a former communications director for a Republican senator.
“However, if you are hoping that Trump will shut down the border and … start working with local jurisdictions to remove those aliens who have criminal convictions … I think that is what you’re seeing,” he told The Current last week.
The Current24:18Migrants living in fear of Trump’s mass deportation threat
Adalis Fontanez moved to Mississippi 15 years ago in search of better wages. She’s a U.S. citizen from Puerto Rico, but her husband — whom she met working at a chicken plant — is an undocumented migrant from Guatemala.
They married in 2010 and have two daughters, but he was arrested in the 2019 ICE raids and deported to Guatemala.
They haven’t seen each other since. Their daughter Aleida, 13, worries he’ll never come back.
“He calls us and he says he just wants to be with his family, stuff like that. He just gets sad and emotional that he’s not with his family,” she said.
Carroll argued that immigration laws have to be enforced.
“Hard lines like this are difficult to enforce, both politically and emotionally often. And there are tough cases, but tough cases are not excuses to make bad law,” he said.
Oropeza, from the non-profit El Pueblo, said she wants the system to recognize the humanity and contributions of undocumented migrants and help them come out of the shadows.
“There’s a fear that you can’t describe or you can’t really empathize with unless you know what it’s like to be undocumented — and to live that fear every day,” she said.
