Undocumented workers were once considered an acceptable part of our economy. Now they are demonized.

'It’s like they’re selling fruit:' Fake IDs easy to get, even easier to use to get a job.

Hanging live chickens is a dirty job but not as bad as what many immigrants face back home.

"The immigration raids broke a community," says the man who helped bring immigrants to Central MS.

The Guatemalan couple crossed the Rio Grande, stepped into Texas and gazed out across miles of farmland.

Behind them, in their hometown of Comitancillo, was a 2-year-old daughter with expensive medical bills. The young couple planned to leave the girl with a relative and travel north to find work in central Mississippi chicken plants. They told each other they would send money for their daughter's hospital expenses and eventually save enough to move back to Guatemala’s highlands and build a home.

The couple had spent days riding buses through Mexico, and once hid from federales in a forest. For the next two days, they hiked deeper into Texas. They had no food or water. They paused at a horse trough to drink the dirty green liquid. They worried for their lives, but they were just as concerned that border agents would catch them.

Their next goal was Houston, where they knew someone who would drive them to a new life in Mississippi, complete with a job at a chicken plant.

The woman in this story, who now lives in the Carthage area, is one of dozens of people the Clarion Ledger interviewed since U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents raided seven poultry plants in central Mississippi, arresting 680 people in what authorities have called the largest single-state immigration crackdown in a decade.

She and others provided an in-depth look at how the poultry industry has played an integral part in transforming central Mississippi into a home for undocumented residents and led to the immigration crisis now facing the state.

This couple's journey eight years ago is similar to thousands of undocumented people from Mexico, Guatemala and other Central American countries who have come to work in Mississippi's massive poultry industry.

They helped build poultry into Mississippi's richest agricultural commodity, now bringing in more than $2.5 billion a year. And they helped companies such as Koch Foods and Peco Foods — both of which were raided last month, yet still face no charges — rake in billions in revenue.

How it all began: ‘We are gonna form The Hispanic Project’

Luis Cartagena would never have to come to Mississippi from Chile if his brother-in-law weren’t so good at tennis.

And the wave of Latino immigration might never have come here — or at least been delayed — had it not been for Cartagena.

His brother-in-law, Tito Echiburu, came to play tennis at Mississippi State University in the 1960s. While working as a tennis pro, Echiburu had befriended John Rogers, whose family owned the B.C. Rogers chicken processing plant. Echiburu would eventually become CFO at the plant.

Cartagena’s sister and parents came to Mississippi next, and Cartagena joined them in 1990 after waiting seven years to legally immigrate.

Despite holding a history degree from a university in Chile, his first job was working in the cooler of the B.C. Rogers plant.

Besides Cartagena and Echiburu, there were very few Latinos in central Mississippi — but that was about to change.

The chicken plant had hundreds of open jobs and was struggling to hire American workers, when John Rogers saw a program on PBS about unemployment in Miami.

Cartagena said one day his boss approached him and said, “OK, Luis, I will consider that you’re ready.”

“For what?”

“We are gonna form ‘The Hispanic Project,’” Cartagena said his boss told him. “...You’re going to be the coordinator.”

In 1993, Cartagena began flying to Brownsville and McAllen in Texas and to Miami, where he would go to local unemployment offices and interview Latinos.

Cartagena would fly back to Mississippi, and busloads of new hires would arrive days later.

Workers were provided a few weeks of free rent, beds and a bedsheet, Cartagena said. At one point, B.C. Rogers had 166 apartments for Latino workers.

“I offered them a job," Cartagena said. "I offered them where to live. A lot of people like it. They came, but finally when they start working in the plant — it’s a hard life, working the plants — a lot of them quit.”

Are the jobs really so bad most Americans won’t do them?

For years chicken plants have struggled to fill jobs. The most-stated reason is the jobs are so difficult, dirty and low-paying that most Americans don’t want them.

The Occupational Safety and Health Administration notes poultry workers face a slew of hazards. Some, like long hours, loud noises, dangerous machinery and dangerous chemicals, are found in other industries. But some are unique to the poultry industry, such as floors that are often slick not just from water used in processing but from raw chicken scraps.

Poultry workers suffer serious injuries on the job at a rate almost twice that of private industry as a whole, according to OSHA.

The industry is known to be so tough and to have such poor wages that many new hires leave within weeks or even days.

In one role known as “live hang” workers grab live chickens by the feet and attach them to moving metal hooks, often being attacked and defecated on by the desperate birds.

In the “deboner” role, workers use a knife to slice through various parts of the chicken and remove bones.

Cartagena said he hired about 700 people in his first year as a coordinator for The Hispanic Project and only about half made it more than a few weeks before quitting.

But Latinos kept comingfor jobs and started to put down roots.

After 1993, Cartagena said he no longer had to fly to unemployment offices to recruit Latino workers. The word was out, and prospective employees started showing up, a trend that continues today.

Finding a job: ‘The jobs are not so hard like they are in our country’

Within three days of arriving in Mississippi in 1999 — weak, tired and with nothing but the clothes on his back — a 19-year-old from Guatemala found work at a Tyson chicken processing plant.

The man, who asked to be identified as E. Miranda because he entered the U.S. without permission, had a friend in Carthage who worked in a chicken plant.

Miranda had grown up in a home made of dirt and wood with no electricity, where his entire family slept in a single room. His friend had described an entirely different existence in America and lent him about $4,000 so Miranda could pay smugglers and come to Mississippi.

“He said that here in the United States, the jobs are not so hard like they are in our country. You get more pay, you get more money working here,” Miranda said.

Miranda went with his friend to a Tyson plant, received an ID badge and started working as a chicken cutter.

After his first day on the cutting floor, his arms were sore, his hands hurt, but he didn’t quit.

“That was the reason we were here. We continue working, even if it was so hard.”

Cartagena said by the time Miranda arrived in Mississippi, several chicken processing plants were competing for Latino workers.

Plants would pay 10 cents more an hour to poach Latino workers from competing plants, he said.

Cartagena said he only ever hired documented workers. He said B.C. Rogers trained him to detect fake documents, and he personally checked to make sure everything was legal.

Obtaining fake documents: ‘It’s like they’re selling fruit’

By the mid-to-late 90s, chicken plants in the area seemed to stop caring about documentation, Cartagena said.

"Things start changing,” he said. “They start accepting whatever (documentation)."

Fraudulent documents were easy to come by. Social Security cards and fake IDs were sold at laundromats and convenience stores in the communities surrounding food processing plants, according to law enforcement affidavits and interviews with undocumented workers.

One woman, who asked not to be identified, said it used to be that immigrants could go to the Walmart parking lot in Forest and people would be there asking, “Do you need papers?”

“They don’t hide. It’s like they’re selling fruit,” she said.

The fake IDs used by immigrants in the area are unsophisticated, according to Scott County Sheriff Mike Lee, who was chief of police in Forest before being elected sheriff.

Oftentimes, the age, weight and height on the card do not match up with the individual, he said. Lee said the average person can look at an ID and quickly realize it's a fake.

“This is not like a James Bond, change-your-ID-type of operation. This is pretty much taking advantage of your own folks. They charge you $500 and say, ‘Here’s your ID and Social Security number.’ And it’s pretty much printed on card stock, regular card stock,” Lee said.

Romeo Ramirez, an undocumented worker living in Leake County, described contractors who helped arrange papers and jobs — for a price. The prospective employees paid less than $100 up front and agreed to contribute 25-50 percent of their wages to the contractors for a set amount of time.

Others, like Miranda, described showing up for work — no questions asked and no documents required.

Mississippi small towns transformed with growth of immigrant community

From 1990 to 2000, the Latino population increased by more than 1,000 percent in Scott County, which researchers Angela Stuesse and Lauren Helton call the "home of Mississippi's Poultry industry." It again roughly doubled between 2000 and current day, according to data from the U.S. Census Bureau.

Increasingly, immigrants to central Mississippi are from Guatemala, community members say, where jobs are scarce and pay is low. Of the more than 300 people not immediately released after the recent ICE raids, nearly three-fourths are from Guatemala.

Yolanda Soto, originally from Mexico, moved to Forest in 1996. She followed her brother’s husband, who had found work in the town.

Back then, Soto said there were only a handful of Latino families in the area. Few of the native residents spoke Spanish, and she didn’t speak English. If she had to go to a doctor, her husband had to write a note in English explaining what was wrong.

“There were no tortillas in the stores, no chilis, nothing,” she said. “I cried all the time because I wanted to go back home.”

She knew things had changed when she was clicking through TV channels one day and discovered the local cable provider had added a Spanish-language station. She marveled as Mexican restaurants started opening, grocery stores with Spanish names appeared and whole sections of Forest were filled with Spanish speakers.

Two of Soto's brothers-in-law came and found jobs in plants. Then her cousin came, then her cousin’s sister-in-law, then Soto’s sister, then her mother and father-in-law.

"Now I don't want to go back to my country," she said. "I want to stay here."

Immigration issue: From a path to citizenship to polarization

For a time in the mid-2000s, it looked as though undocumented immigrants such as the Latinos in central Mississippi might become U.S. citizens — or at least be left alone.

Then the issue became increasingly polarized and politicized.

President George W. Bush had a plan to grant legal status to millions of undocumented immigrants, but senators from his own party killed his comprehensive immigration bill in 2007.

In Mississippi, former Gov. Haley Barbour supported comprehensive immigration reform that provided undocumented workers the opportunity to remain legally, often citing their importance to local, state and national economies.

After losing the presidential election in 2012, the national Republican Party authored an “autopsy” that recommended Republicans “embrace and champion comprehensive immigration reform.”

But President Donald Trump won office in 2016 by doing the opposite: demonizing immigrants, particularly Latinos who had crossed the southern border.

Under the Trump administration, ICE last year reported quadrupling workplace investigations and employee paperwork audits, and made 2,304 workplace arrests of undocumented immigrants, up from 311 the year before.

But the number of managers arrested stayed flat, and 49 managers were convicted, fewer than the prior year, according to the Associated Press.

Even the size of the raids has steadily grown in recent months, including 21 arrests at numerous 7-11 stores, 97 people detained in a raid of a Tennessee meat-packing plant and 280 taken into custody earlier this year at a Texas technology company.

And then last month, federal immigration officials targeted Mississippi.

The raid: ‘We’re hungry, the bills are piling up and we’re all out of work’

Of the 680 people arrested on Aug. 7, 300 were released within 27 hours. More since have been let out on bond, some equipped with ankle monitors. Though no longer behind bars, they face immigration court hearings. Some have been accused of federal felonies, mostly related to the use of fraudulent Social Security cards.

So far, no charges have been brought against managers or owners of the companies that were raided.

Maria Elodia Anton Ramirez, a mother of four and no relation to Romeo Ramirez, said she no longer feels safe in Forest after the raids. She followed her sister from Guatemala to Forest in 2011, joined a church and sent her kids to the local school.

Ramirez, her 22-year-old daughter and her husband were all arrested by immigration officials. She and her daughter were soon released, but they lost their jobs, can’t find work and are stuck waiting for an immigration hearing.

“That’s the worry — we’re hungry, the bills are piling up and we’re all out of work,” Ramirez said.

Ramirez is among hundreds of people who are now unemployed in the wake of the operation.

"The immigration raids broke a community," Cartagena said.

The woman who drank from the horse trough said her husband was arrested in the raids and is still in ICE detention in Louisiana. She said they came to Mississippi because they couldn’t support a family in Guatemala.

Their daughter, now 10, still lives there with her grandmother. The couple also has a second child, a son born in Mississippi, for whom she must care alone.

Moving forward: ‘Helping this country … to be great’

Miranda, the man who paid smugglers to get him here from Guatemala, said his wife was arrested during the raids and recently released on a $3,000 bond after nearly a month in detention.

While locked up, she didn’t eat well, was cold and cried every day, he said.

Miranda had to stop working to take care of their three children. He seemed most concerned about how the raids impacted one of his sons.

According to Miranda, the boy saw President Trump talking on the news a year ago about a zero-tolerance policy towards undocumented immigrants. The child told his parents he could not deal with the situation and threatened to kill himself. Miranda said he and his wife took the boy to a psychologist for treatment.

On Aug. 7, the child screamed and wept when Miranda told him what had happened to his mother.

Even so, “I love American people. I love America,” Miranda said. “That’s why we are here.”

Miranda doesn’t understand why people think undocumented immigrants get things for free. The opposite is true, he said.

They pay sales taxes when they shop at Walmart. They pay income tax when the chicken plants withhold money from their paychecks. And Miranda said he paid more than $1,000 in property tax to Leake County on the ranch-style home he owns on a quiet dead-end street in Carthage.

But he can’t file for a tax refund. He’s not receiving any public benefits. And he can’t qualify for Medicaid.

“We been spending our life here, and we’re helping this country — like the president says — to be great,” Miranda said.