When ICE Comes to Town
Alma woke before 6 a.m. She dressed quickly, roused her four children and packed a lunch. It was a chilly spring morning, a Thursday. Light bloomed across the low green hills of east Tennessee as she drove past tomato fields and cow pastures and old cemetery plots until she reached the slaughterhouse.
Housed in multicolored sheets of corrugated metal, the slaughterhouse had been built haphazardly, with its various wings and outbuildings jutting out at odd angles. Its stench drifted across the neighboring yards — rot, heat and manure, with a metallic tinge. Neighbors sometimes complained about the smell, about animal parts left on the road, about fouled wells and, once, a culvert filled with bright-red blood.
Alma, 37, started working on the kill floor more than two years ago. She is a small woman, with long black hair, a round face and almond-shape eyes framed by long eyelashes. Alma wasn’t new to meatpacking work — she’d previously had a job at a poultry processing plant — but this slaughterhouse felt dangerous. She’d heard of workers who were injured by panicked cows or by the knives they used to cut the fat from the meat. Sometimes blood splattered off the line moving above her. The chemicals that were sprayed onto the carcasses got into her eyes and burned. No one offered her goggles.
On that Thursday, April 5th, 2018, work was delayed by broken machinery. Around 9 a.m., a worker named Alberto, a compact man with a flattop haircut and deep smile lines around his mouth, was outside the slaughterhouse moving pallets with a forklift when two police cars pulled up. He thought that there must have been an accident inside. But then a fleet of cars arrived, and he heard the whir of a helicopter above him. Officers quickly surrounded the building, blocking every door. Some wore the black uniform of immigration agents, others military-style camouflage. Alberto recognized some of the men. He had seen them at the slaughterhouse a few days earlier, dressed as civilians and purchasing cuts of beef.
The Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents ordered the workers to line up and began to zip-tie their hands together. Ofelia, who cleaned internal organs, was descending a set of stairs when she tripped and fell. “Stand up!” she heard an officer yell. She looked up and saw the nose of a gun. A worker named Tomas was on a platform 10 feet in the air, where he’d been cutting carcasses. An agent shouted at him to come down with his hands raised, but Tomas couldn’t because he was tied into a safety device. “He just kept shouting at me,” Tomas recalled. “I was terrified that he would shoot me.”
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https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/ice-raid-tennessee-769293/