By Richard Fausset
MORTON, Miss. — From a distance on Friday morning, the parking lot of PH Food could have been hosting a flea market. Scores of vehicles were haphazardly parked, and a throng of people milled around. A woman sold tacos al pastor and tacos de asada from the back of a food truck.
But something far less festive was unfolding. On the asphalt, a few feet from the taco truck, bright yellow cartons overflowed with knives and sharpening tools, used to debone chickens, left behind by 99 workers who were swept up in a massive federal immigration raid at the plant on Wednesday morning.
Many of the people who flocked to the parking lot on Friday were relatives of the detained. They had come to claim the tools or drive away some of the dozens of abandoned cars. Others were workers who were documented, or simply not working the Wednesday morning shift when the raid occurred.
Friday was also payday, and the only thing open in the chicken plant was the office that cut the paychecks.
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Mostly, people wanted to know what would happen next, when they could return to work and whether the doors that this chicken processing plant had opened for them would close. The raid had been part of a sweeping crackdown across Mississippi at seven work sites, the largest single-state operation of its kind in recent memory,
“Look, I have faith that I’m going to survive, but not 100 percent” said Betzabeth Carachure Hernandez, the taco vendor, who has parked her truck in the chicken plant lot for 15 years. “Not if most of the Latinos don’t come back.”
In the public imagination, the mythos and moral failures of this state are wrapped up in cotton. In reality, modern Mississippi is a poultry state, accounting for nearly $3 billion of the state’s $7.7 billion agriculture industry in 2017, compared with $623 million for cotton, according to Mississippi State University’s extension service.
Over the last decade or so, in small country cities like Morton, population 3,500, it has been Hispanic workers, many of them undocumented, who have been most willing to deal with the blood and guts and stench of the business.
They came to Morton to work at PH Food, or to work at the big Koch Foods chicken plant up Highway 80, which spreads its scent around town with the shifting breeze — the smell of dead things not yet rotten. Hispanics made up 13 percent of the population in 2000 and now account for about a quarter of it.
The numbers are in line with the wave of Latino immigration that has transformed the Southern United States. Between 2008 and 2018, the South saw an increase of 33 percent in its Latino population, more than any other region.
Morton is in Scott County, east of Jackson, historically in the heart of cotton country. Nine lynchings of black residents took place here between 1877 and 1950.
Today, Morton is a mash-up town not unlike many other small Southern cities. There are signs for boiled peanuts and Envios de dinero — money transfers overseas. There’s a Sonic Drive-In, Maria’s Mercado, a Pizza Hut. A Chinese food place on Fourth Street has signs for English lessons and Spanish lessons. A bilingual sign at City Hall — “Here in — aqui en — Morton” — beckons residents to a circus in town this weekend.
But the raids across the state now have scores of families wondering where they belong, which members might stay and who might be forced to leave. In a store Friday morning, a 36-year-old woman named Juana — who like many undocumented people declined to give her last name because she feared being targeted by the authorities — clutched a bouquet of cilantro, trailed by her 2-year-old daughter, Emily.
Her husband had been picked up on Wednesday, she said. He talked to her on the phone on Thursday. He was going to be deported, he said.
“It’s horrible. I’m afraid. I’ve lost him,” she said in Spanish. She motioned to her little girl, in pigtails and wearing a shirt that declared, in English, “I’m a princess worth waiting for.”
“She is going to be without her father,” Juana said.
Emily, the little girl, was born in the United States. Juana said it made sense for the two of them to try to stay and make it in America.
“I don’t want to go back” to Guatemala, she said. “There’s violence everywhere.”
In the PH Food parking lot, a Mexican man named Omar, 39, had come for his wife’s tools. She was apprehended on Wednesday and transferred to a detention center in Louisiana.
He said he would try to get a lawyer. His wife does not have a criminal record, he said, and so he thinks she might have a good chance of being released. And besides, he said, their life is not in Pachuca, the old mining town in south-central Mexico where he grew up and left years ago. It was here in Morton, the only world they know, where they had a house — “paid off,” he said proudly — and raised three American-born children, ages 11, 9 and 6.
On Friday, pallets were stacked high with packing materials and high-grade sodium phosphate inside the chicken processing plant, but the chicken lines were not running.
A supervisor named Jorge Mazariegos took a call on his cellphone. “Monday morning, I’m open, six o’clock, day shift,” he said.
Mr. Mazariegos did not think there were enough workers to bring the chicken plant up to full capacity. Perhaps 30 percent, he said. He did not know what the future might hold.
“I think people are going to leave this state out of fear,” he said — but not necessarily return to Latin America. “They’ll go to Atlanta, or Memphis.”
Beyond the Hispanic community, it was easy to find an alloy of emotions. People said they were empathetic. But they also said they wanted immigrants to stop violating federal immigration law.
“I kind of hate to see it,” said Gerald Neil, a 61-year-old ponytailed bass player and a fan of President Trump. He said that he worked with Hispanics and that he hated to see families torn apart. “But it comes down to, ‘Are we going to be a nation of laws or not?’”
At a Subway sandwich shop on Highway 80, Markhenry Brauch, 54, of Wheatland, Mo., said he had been coming to town as a trucker for two years, hauling in chicken feed and hauling out chicken meal.
“At first I got scared,” he said — not so much for the detained people but for the entire industry, from the chicken growers to the millworkers who make the feed. But he was relieved to see that the Koch plant was operational Friday morning.
Mississippi’s immigrant rights infrastructure is as weak as its chicken industry is strong, and this week, activists and lawyers were pouring in from around the Southeast and beyond to offer expertise, representation and succor.
But there has always been an informal network here of Americans looking out for noncitizens during hard times. Sara Ramos, 42, a homemaker, had driven down to Jena, La., to bail out a family friend in detention there. Her son had sent her links to the news that Koch Foods would be hosting a job fair on Monday in the city of Forest, Miss., about 11 miles east of Morton, where many workers were swept up in the raids.
Ms. Ramos huffed. “I wanna see how many American citizens are going to want to take those jobs,” she said.
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