The town is more diverse now, and that baffles Barb Otto. She wonders if the Hispanic immigrants she sees in the streets and who avoid eye contact actually do speak English—and simply act as if they don’t so they won’t have to greet her. A friend who works at the bank told her that on Fridays the branch is full of day laborers who cash their checks and then go to Western Union to send money to Mexico and other countries.

“Little things like that start to change my town and my life doesn't have to be like this,” said Otto, sitting in her living room. “I would never go to your country and expect things to be done my way.”

According to Otto, immigrants and the large food corporations that hire them are decimating the traditions and livelihood of rural America and generating rapid demographic change that will soon have political consequences. Like many others here, she supports the construction of a border wall and the immigration raids promoted by President Donald Trump.

But not everyone in town agrees with her views on immigration.

O'Neill is a small, white, conservative community of less than 4,000 who have lived off agriculture for generations. But as they age, it’s getting harder to take care of the fields alone and many have grown to depend on immigrant labor. Trump won this county with 85.9% of the vote in the 2016 presidential election. Even some of his supporters disagree with his immigration policies, which they say make it harder to find laborers to work the land.

The Irish Catholics who founded the town—which prides itself on being “the Irish capital of Nebraska”—cultivated timber on what is now Otto’s ranch. When she was a child, families had four or five children who worked in the fields. Now they may have two, who go off to college and likely don't come back. Even if they do return, Otto says it’s hard for them to shake off the liberal ideas they learn in the city. "The young people are gone. We are stagnant in population growth,” she said.

Otto is 71. She and her husband, a retired Air Force pilot, handle the cattle and care for the ranch alone. Both of them were born in Nebraska but lived across the country until he retired 15 years ago, when they returned to O'Neill. Since then they have seen their town crumble. Where there were once 20 bars now stand two, and many shops on main street have gone bankrupt.

Otto is scared. “Now that the 2020 census is coming, I am concerned that we will lose two of our rural senators,” she said. “If that happens, we will lose our voice even more and the big companies will come, they will start buying land again.” The Mormon church and CNN magnate Ted Turner are already powerful landowners in Nebraska.

Job boards in town constantly advertise vacancies at large pig and cattle ranches and at tomato, pepper and potato plants, especially around harvest time. They’re hard, dirty jobs that pay $15 an hour. High school boys used to scoop them up, but now nobody from town seems to want them. So undocumented Hispanics have filled the gap, working for $10 an hour.

"I imagine that’s why ICE came and raided the tomato plant,” Otto said. “The reality is that whenever an employer can hire cheap labor, they will.”

On August 8, 2018, over a hundred of undocumented workers were arrested at the O'Neill Ventures tomato plant during a massive immigration operation. That same day, raids took place across Nebraska and Minnesota, at potato producer Elkhorn River Farms LLC and pig farmers Christensen Farms and GJW LLC. It was one of the largest immigration operations in the Donald Trump era and the largest ever to occur in the two states.

Otto heard about the operation from a friend, who noticed that something was happening in O'Neill when she went to walk her dog and saw police cars speeding towards the tomato plant. "The raids shed light on something illegal that was happening and that needed to be fixed,” she said. “That's just black and white for me. There was a bad man there. [The raid] was perfectly legal and the right thing to do."

For over a year, the ICE Homeland Security Investigations Office (HSI) had planned to detain Juan Pablo Sánchez Delgado and his associates, who were providing undocumented labor to the food production companies. Sánchez, who is Mexican and also undocumented, used three contracting companies, a grocery store and a Mexican restaurant called La Herradura as a front.

Otto ate at Sánchez’s restaurant several times: "He had good food and we’re quite limited here with restaurants."

Sánchez seemed cordial, she said, but at a certain point he started wearing gold chains and seemed to change. According to Otto, she started to notice new waiters at the restaurant, unable to explain the menu to her in English. "And that's not how things are here,” she said. “Here you know the person who serves you."

On November 27, 2019, he was sentenced to 10 years in federal prison for money laundering and conspiring to harbor undocumented workers. He’s also required to pay a $100,000 fine and will be deported upon release. Meanwhile, the representatives of the companies that used Sánchez’s services to hire undocumented workers were not held in custody during their trials. After two years, all were acquitted.

"I guess the downside was that people who didn't understand were taken advantage of and got caught up and paid the price,” Otto said. “The people who hired them should pay. The facility owners barely got a pat on the wrist, and those are the people who should be responsible for this kind of thing.”

Of the 130 people arrested in the 2018 raids, the majority were undocumented immigrants from Mexico and Guatemala with no criminal record who had long worked as day laborers in the United States. Though most were released the same day, they now have cases open in immigration courts and are waiting to see if they will be deported. Some have since received work permits, but the companies that previously gave them jobs no longer want to hire them. Many live solitary lives in mobile home parks on the poorest streets of O'Neill, on the brink of bankruptcy. They barely go out, not even to the two bars left in town.

"We have survived thanks to the Methodist church, which helped us pay our rent, electricity, gas, even insurance on cars and telephones, which was essential for us to communicate with lawyers," said Miguel, an immigrant who was detained and released, during an interview in July 2019. Almost two years after the raid, he is still waiting for a work permit. Meanwhile, he is a volunteer at the church.

Just after the raid, Methodist pastor Brian Loy opened a food pantry at his O’Neill church with donations from businesses and money out of his own pocket to help affected families. Some in his congregation—largely the older white population—did not take it well, he said. The church was split between those who agreed to help Hispanic families and those who thought it was a crime to help immigrants who had entered the country illegally.

“Is the community divided? Yes, very divided,” Loy said. “The way people reacted was political. In rural America we have become so comfortable in our little world that we do not welcome foreigners very well. But if we separate our political points of view and simply observe the value of human life, everything takes on a different vision.”

Loy tries to practice what he preaches: to put his own religious beliefs above his political sympathies. "I think Donald Trump has the best interest of our country in mind,” he said. “I don't agree with every step he takes, but I think deep down he wants the best for the United States of America.”

“As a Christian, a pastor and as a human being, my goal is to help these people achieve their goals in life,” he adds, “so they can return to work, obtain their citizenship and support their family, fulfill their dreams."

Loy claims to have personal ties to the family of Vice President Mike Pence, who he describes as a pious man who, like Trump, does what he believes is best for the country. But he also thinks the government should integrate immigrants into society instead of forcing them into the shadows. “People go where they want. The economy and industry dictate that and that is what attracts immigrants,” he said. “They are here, they are part of the community.”

After the raid, O'Neill Ventures hired personnel with work visas. The company put them up in a motel and transported them to the plant each day in a white bus. Otto suspected they were Somali, but they were actually from Mexico and Guatemala.

Before the 2018 operation, the Hispanic labor force spent more money in town than they do now. Employees who were hired by Sánchez were paid $10 to $12 and most had lived in the United States without documents for several years, using their wages to pay mortgage, rent and for food in O'Neill. Now, workers brought in from abroad on work visas sign six-month contracts, renewable for a further six months. Then they must return to their home countries and wait three months before signing a new contract. They are paid $14.38 an hour, which they save or send to their home countries.

Otto believes that legal immigration is the way to solve the labor shortage in town and even thinks the state should consider providing documents to the undocumented workers who have been in the country for decades. "Green cards (for residence) or work visas of some kind… there has to be a way to provide them documents," she said.

What worries her most is the idea that there is no way to stop migrants who continue to arrive on the southern border of the United States without visas.

"The only thing the border guard could do to stop them is shoot them,” she said. “But these people, the immigrants, know that the guards will not do that so they keep coming."

To Otto, the best option is to reinforce border security with the construction of a wall, as proposed by President Donald Trump.

"That is why I have this bracelet that says 'silence implies consent', '(we must) secure the border,’” Otto said. “That's what I think, that's why I'm willing to talk about these issues, because I don't consent.”