Migdalia* couldn’t sleep, couldn’t eat, her whole body ached. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me,” she told her children. She thinks the pains began in late June of 2019, around the time that President Donald Trump announced massive immigration raids across the country.

On August 7, 2019, the day Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers stormed her workplace, her feet ached. “I could feel it coming, that’s what was happening to me,” Migdalia said, her electronic ankle bracelet flickering on her leg. “When they arrested me the pain disappeared.”

For 14 years, Migdalia sliced chicken breasts and pulled entrails at the chicken processing plant at Koch Foods Inc. in Morton, Mississippi. She was arrested there in August, as ICE targeted seven factories owned by five different chicken companies around Mississippi, taking with them 687 workers, almost all of whom were undocumented Hispanics. It was the largest immigration raid in history in a single state.

A month after the raid, when Univision visited her home, some 300 people who were arrested in the operation remained detained at two ICE centers in Louisiana. The majority had not yet had the opportunity to defend themselves in front of an immigration judge. Among them, about 90 people were charged in criminal courts with a count of identity theft, for working with Social Security numbers that were not theirs.

Migdalia felt fortunate compared to them. She was released the night of the raid with an ankle monitor, but wasn’t able to continue working. In February 2020 she had her first appointment before an immigration judge, beginning a process that could end with her deportation to Guatemala, where she was born 38 years ago. She hasn’t been to her home country in 20 years.

“I’ve been here for a long time. My children were born here and I’ve given them a better life. But unfortunately [ICE] came in and now I don’t know what I’m going to do. I realize now the future has changed,” Migdalia said.

After the raid, her two American children sprung into action. The oldest, who is 14 and in high school, told her mother that she would quit school to work and pay the bills. And the 9-year-old, who had just joined the school band, said he preferred to return the trumpet he’d been loaned to avoid having to leave home for rehearsals.

They cry over small things, Migdalia said, and don’t want her to go out alone or to the store: “I tell them not to cry, that no one is coming for me. I don’t want them to miss school. I don’t have papers, but they are citizens. I don’t want them to be ruined like I am, working in those [chicken] plants. And I told them: ‘If something happens, you have to be together. If they send me to my country, you have to go there or come with me,’ because I don't want to be separated from my children.”

Migdalia was born in the state of Quetzaltenango into a poor family of nine sisters. When she was 18, she walked alone for 12 days to cross the southern border of the United States. She first arrived in Alabama, where she met the father of her children. He left her, four months pregnant, for one of her younger sisters. She then went to Mississippi to look for work in the chicken factories using documents she bought on the black market.

“I didn’t even know that I needed papers in this country. I got some that weren’t mine and I just worked there. I applied one morning and went to work that afternoon,” Migdalia recalled. Everyone did it and everyone knew about it. The undocumented workforce of which Migdalia was a part is what has kept the chicken factories in Mississippi operating for decades.

The immigrant community here has been established for four generations. Chicken companies began bringing workers from Mexico and Guatemala to Mississippi in the 1960s to work in the plants. Initially, most were Mexicans. But eventually, many of them moved on to better jobs in Jackson, the state capital. In the last 15 years, Guatemalans began to arrive, especially from the San Marcos and Huehuetenango departments, which border Mexico. With families of mixed legal status that risk being separated by deportations, their fear had grown sharper in the weeks before the raids.

In late June 2019, when Trump began talking about massive immigration raids, the streets, parks and churches of Morton, where Migdalia lives, grew increasingly empty as Hispanics feared arrest. “Trump is very racist, he treats us like animals here in this country, he has no pity on anyone," she says.

Since immigration authorities came to town, fear has multiplied among the entire community.

Days after the raid, Elena*, a Nicaraguan who owns a grocery store in Morton, said she felt as if the immigration agents had arrested her or her relatives. “I live in fear that they might come here or that my husband will be caught. I have lived in Mississippi for 18 years, and this is the first time I’ve seen this happen. I felt this was one of the safest towns and that this was a state where you wouldn’t see this type of thing.”

The Pew Research Center estimates that in 2016 about 20,000 undocumented immigrants lived in Mississippi — making up 0.7 percent of the state’s total population and 35 percent of the immigrant population. According to Pew, 21 percent of undocumented adults in Mississippi have been in the country for five or more years, and their children represent 1.8 percent of elementary and high school students in the state’s public schools. It’s unclear whether the undocumented population has grown or decreased in the last five years, but Pew reports that the number of undocumented immigrants in neighboring states like Louisiana has grown in that timeframe.

“These people are afraid to talk, to go out, they don’t want to be seen. I am taking the risk by talking because I want people to hear us, to realize that we are all going through a very difficult time. Many people may think that now things are calm, but that’s not true. Many people are detained and they don’t know if they’ll get out of this or if they’ll be sent back to their country,” Elena said. “As things stand, the future is very uncertain for us Hispanics.”

The parakeets go wild when Félix* brings the phone close to the cage and they hear Crescencia’s voice. A week and a half after the raid, she called from the LaSalle Detention Center in Louisiana, where ICE agents were holding her. This is the only way they’ll sing, Félix said. She might be telling Félix that she can’t sleep because her cell is too cold, that she’s been forced to shower naked in front of other detainees, or that she cries because she doesn’t know how or when she’ll get out. But the birds still sing when they hear her.

They barely whistle for Félix in the mornings, when he returns home alone and covered in the stench of feathers after working all night at Koch Foods, the largest chicken processor raided by immigration authorities last year.

Crescencia and Félix met at work and got married. She is from Mexico, and he is from Guatemala. They had both entered the U.S. without a visa and were hired by Koch more than 10 years ago, despite not having papers. Crescencia chopped dead chickens until 8:00 a.m. on August 7, when she was arrested by ICE agents at the plant. Félix still transports live chickens on the 10:00 p.m. and 6:00 a.m. shift.

“I was inspecting breasts, thighs and legs, and that’s when they came in. When we were leaving our shift, they had everyone surrounded. In all my years working there, I never had a problem and that’s how I kept working, right up until they caught me,” Crescencia said in a phone call from LaSalle, which is four hours by car from the trailer she shares with her husband and their birds in Morton, Mississippi.

On that August day, ICE raided seven chicken processing plants, belonging to Koch Foods, PH Food, Pearl River Foods, Peco Foods and A&B. The town of Morton was deeply affected. At least half of the 687 immigrants detained that day — most of them Hispanic — worked in the town.

Crescencia is among the hundreds who are still arrested. “A girl who knows how to read well told me that she had to pay a $471 fine for working with someone else's papers (a false identity),” she said from detention. “We were told that the judge has to decide whether or not we are going to be deported. But we don't know when we’ll go to court.”

Meanwhile, Félix maintains hopes that his wife will be released. He continues to work as usual at the plant, earning $9.50 an hour. “I want her to be released,” he said. “I ask that the president release people and stop the raids.”

Félix, who has been working in the plant for a decade, says it now feels empty. “There were 40 people in my line. Now there are only 15, and we’re not doing the same job as before. A lot of production has been lost. A lot of the chickens are dying from heat — now almost half are alive and half are dead. If there is another raid, the company would close.”

About 250 people were detained at the Koch Foods plant in Morton alone, covering two full shifts. As soon as that happened, the company contacted the state employment agency to find substitutes, but only 30 people applied to fill the vacant positions.

Another of Morton's raided chicken processing companies, PH Food, faces the same issue. Immigration agents detained about 90 people there on the day of the raid, and another 100 a week later.

"Since the raids, everyone in this town is scared," says Keri Risher, a 30-year-old white woman, born and raised in Morton, who volunteers with her 11-year-old son Hunter to collect food and supplies for immigrant families affected by the ICE raid. "Is this how Donald Trump intends to make America great again?" she asks.

If Carmen could ask Donald Trump one thing, it would be to let her work a few more months. “We don't even have money to leave,” she said.

She doesn’t want to return bankrupt with three daughters to the poor town she left 15 years ago. But the way things are — with high unemployment, mass raids and shootings like that in El Paso, where Hispanics were targeted — she's almost as afraid to stay in the United States as to return to Guatemala.

Carmen, who came from Huehuetenango directly to work in the chicken plants, is undocumented and no longer has a job. A single mother, she pays $500 per month in rent and $200 for water. On August 7, 2019, she was narrowly saved from being taken in a raid, but now she lives in fear that she’ll be picked up by immigration authorities.

Her daughters, aged 14, 11 and 3 and all born in the United States, also worry. “They say: 'If they come to get you, mommy, who are we going to stay with, if we don't have relatives here?’ I always take them to school and bring them home."

The raid coincided with the first day of school and several of the girls’ classmates were left alone or forced to stay with family members because their parents were arrested.

“There is no work, my town is very poor. If there was work there, why would we come here?" she says.

Since the raid, companies that long hired undocumented labor to work in Morton, Mississippi, are no longer hiring undocumented workers — neither Koch Foods, where she worked for four years chopping chicken, nor PH Foods, where she worked for the two years before the raid.

“When we were working we had money to buy the kids food and now we don't,” she says. “What we’re experiencing is very sad.”

Mississippi is one of the poorest states in the U.S., where 30 percent of children live in poverty. Although Hispanics make up only 3.4% of the population, the raids represent a severe blow to a precarious local economy.

“This is devastating and I am frankly terrified of what will happen for these families who have been deprived of any income. It’s a serious crisis of poverty, despair and fear,” said Cliff Johnson, director of the MacArthur Justice Center at the University of Mississippi.

Johnson began providing pro bono services to affected immigrants in the days following the ICE raid. Many of the immigrants who have sought legal help in his mobile office at the Sacred Heart Catholic Church have lived in Mississippi for 15 or 20 years. They are paying for mortgages and cars and have restricted access to medical care because they cannot afford it.

Some families had one main provider who is now gone, and in others, neither parent can work. Very few families had any savings. “People have a very thin margin every month, living from paycheck to paycheck, just as many of us do. And when you take that money away, everything falls apart,” Johnson said.

In Father Roberto Mena’s masses, half of the parishioners are missing. “I have half the readers, half the choir, half the board. Many of our parish leaders were directly affected by the raids,” the priest said in a sermon two weeks after the ICE raids.

More than half of the detainees and their children, parents and partners are from Morton and Forest, the two towns that Father Mena serves. And although authorities hail the raid as a success, Morton and the nearby town of Forest feel as if they have been hit by a tornado: abandoned houses, empty streets, bankrupt families. Parents disappeared from one day to the next from their children’s lives, and those who were spared live in anxiety and in a panic that it could happen again at any moment.

“The stories I have heard sometimes come back to me in my nightmares — the suffering and pain of the people. They are difficult and sad stories,” the priest confessed in a sermon.

Many of those arrested were released the night of the operation with electronic shackles on their ankles. Many are still in shock. Children still have trouble eating, parents can’t sleep.

Like other churches in the area, Mena’s became a refuge for affected families. Lawyers and psychologists from Arizona, Louisiana and Georgia arrived to help. And although most of them have years of experience dealing with raids in the country, they say what is happening in Mississippi is like nothing they’ve seen before.

“Everyone here who helps others is experiencing this same stress: It’s happening to lawyers, to everyone who is volunteering. Everything is affecting them personally,” said Mena. “For my own mental health, when I get home I have to rest, meditate, think about other things, talk to other people.”

Mena has been a pastor in Morton and Forest for a year and a half. He is originally from Guatemala, like many of his parishioners.

“They are practically forced to come here,” Mena said.

Many migrants are driven by drought, unemployment and drug trafficking violence. Crops of corn, beans and coffee don’t grow anymore; seasonal jobs on the Guatemalan coast have disappeared; and in their villages, Mexican drug traffickers extort them. In Mississippi, on the other hand, there were jobs and many had family members.

“When President Donald Trump said there were going to be massive raids, people kind of prepared themselves psychologically for what was going to happen. There were people who were very afraid of these raids, and we had fewer people at mass that weekend, both here in Forest and in Morton,” Mena recalled.

After authorities came to town, the fear multiplied: “They just go from home to work, from work to home. They don’t go anywhere else. Only on Sundays, they go to Mass,” Mena said.

Dr. Ángeles Maldonado traveled from Arizona to Mena’s church to support the families affected by the raids. She is an educator, and for 17 years, she has studied the effects of these types of operations on those who suffer them, especially under the notoriously anti-immigrant Sheriff Joe Arpaio in her state. One of the reasons why she chose this line of work is her own family experience: she immigrated to the United States with her family from Mexico when she was eight years old. She once saw immigration authorities detain her father.

“That experience marked the rest of my life. For a long time I felt ashamed of who I was and what had happened to me, I thought there was something wrong with me or my family," she recalls.

On her first visits after the raids, Maldonado observed that same fear among children. Hundreds of children did not find their parents when they returned home. Some did not want to go back to school in the days that followed.

“I know I can't go back to when I was a kid and tell myself that everything will be fine. But I can talk to a child who is going through the same thing, who feels ashamed, and tell them: ‘Be proud of your parents. What you're going through is unfair, but don't let them rob you of your will to fight.’”