Didn't I warn yall of this ad nauseam?
nytimes.com
After ICE Raids, a Reckoning in Mississippi’s Chicken Country
MORTON, Miss. — Juan Grant strode into the Koch Foods chicken processing plant for his new job on a Wednesday morning,
joining many other African-Americans in a procession of rubber boots, hairnets and last cigarettes before the grind.
At 20, Mr. Grant was too young to remember the days of a nearly all-white work force in Mississippi’s poultry industry, or the civil rights boycotts and protests that followed. He was too young to have seen how white workers largely moved on after that, leaving the business of killing, cutting and packing to African-Americans.
He did not know the time before Hispanic workers began arriving in the heart of chicken country by the thousands, recruited by plant managers looking to fill low-paying jobs in an expanding industry.
But Mr. Grant clearly remembered Aug. 7, the day the Trump administration performed sweeping immigration raids on seven chicken plants in central Mississippi. He remembered the news flashing on his phone: 680 Hispanic workers arrested. He remembers seeing an opportunity.
“I figured there should be some jobs,” he said.
He figured right.
The raids were believed to be the largest statewide immigration crackdown in recent history and a partial fulfillment of President Trump’s vow to remove millions of undocumented workers from the country. The impact on Mississippi’s immigrant community has been devastating. For nonimmigrant workers, the aftermath has forced them into a personal reckoning with questions of morality and economic self-interest: The raids brought suffering, but they also created job openings.
Some believe that the undocumented workers had it coming. “If you’re somewhere you ain’t supposed to be, they’re going to come get you,” said a worker named Jamaal, who declined to give his full name because Koch Foods had not authorized him to speak. “That’s only right.”
But there was also Shelonda Davis, 35, a 17-year veteran of the plant. She has seen many workers — of all backgrounds — come and go. But she was horrified that so many of her Hispanic colleagues were rounded up. Some of them, she said, wanted to work so badly that they tried to return the next day.
Juan Grant was able to get a job at the Koch Foods plant after the raid,
earning about $4 more an hour than his previous work at a cookie factory.
“I’m glad that I see my people going to work,” she said of her fellow African-Americans. “But the way they came at the Hispanic race, they act like they’re killing somebody. Still, they were only working, you know?”
Some of the new replacement hires also felt conflicted. While the roundup “gave the American people their jobs back,” said Cortez McClinton, 38, a former construction worker who was hired at the plant hours after the raids, “how they handle the immigration part is that they’re still separating kids from their families.”
Devontae Skinner, 21, denounced the raids one recent morning while finishing up his first turn on the night shift. “Everybody needs a job, needs to work. Provide for their families.”
Then there was Mr. Grant, only two years out of high school and still finding his way in the world. He said it felt good to be earning $11.23 an hour, even if the new job entailed cutting off necks and pulling out guts on a seemingly endless conveyor of carcasses. It was about $4 better, he said, than what he used to earn at a Madison County cookie factory.
But he also called the raids “cruel” and “mean.” There were moments when the necks and guts and ambivalence and guilt all mixed together so that he wondered whether he wanted to stick with the job.
“It’s like I stole it,” he said, “and I really don’t like what I stole.”
The New Cotton Fields
The story of poultry work tracks closely with the 20th-century story of race relations in Mississippi.
White women dominated the lines until the 1960s, when African-Americans pressed for their rights. In Canton, African-Americans called for a boycott of the local chicken plant over its refusal to hire black workers, according to Angela Stuesse, an associate professor of anthropology at the University of North Carolina and author of the 2016 book “Scratching out a Living: Latinos, Race, and Work in the Deep South.”
By the end of the 1960s, black workers predominated on the lines.
It was an important win for African-Americans looking for an alternative to housework in wealthy white homes, or for those who had seen fieldwork dry up in an increasingly mechanized agricultural sector.
“The chicken plant,” Dr. Stuesse quoted a civil rights veteran saying, “replaced the cotton field.”
But
as American chicken consumption boomed in the 1980s, manufacturers went in search of “cheaper and more exploitable workers,” Dr. Stuesse wrote, chiefly Latin American immigrants.
At the time, the Koch plant in Morton was owned by a local company, B.C. Rogers Poultry, which organized efforts to recruit Hispanics from the Texas border as early as 1977. Soon, the company was operating a sizable effort it called “The Hispanic Project,” bringing in thousands of workers and housing them in trailers.
The raids profoundly changed Morton, a city of 3,600 whose poultry industry dates to the 1930s.
A 2016
study on the effects of immigration on the United States economy found that immigration had “little long run effect” on American wages.
But some wonder whether Hispanic immigrants displaced black workers in central Mississippi, the heart of the state’s multibillion-dollar chicken industry.
Some black Mississippi workers, Dr. Stuesse said, took advantage of less-dangerous new job opportunities in retail, fast food, construction and auto parts. But “an eager pool of black labor did indeed exist,” she wrote, noting that a black labor force moved in when a large number of Hispanics were fired from a Carthage chicken plant in the mid-2000s.
And yet much of the outrage over the August raids has come from leaders in Mississippi’s black community. Constance Slaughter-Harvey, a renowned local lawyer and civil rights activist who was the first black woman to receive a law degree from the University of Mississippi, called the raids a “Gestapo action.”
Wesley Odom, 79, president of the Scott County N.A.A.C.P., spoke of the family members separated — the Hispanic mothers and fathers who remain in custody, as well as the moments, on the day of the raids, when some schoolchildren must have wondered whether they would walk into empty homes.
“The blacks were witness to that same thing as slaves,” he said.
Jere Miles, a special agent in charge with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, recently told a congressional committee that the Mississippi raids would deter future illegal immigration.
He also said the authorities discovered 400 instances of identity theft that had been perpetrated against legal United States residents. The conservative columnist Henry Olsen, citing high poverty rates and low incomes in the area, argued that the undocumented Mississippi workers
were taking jobs from Americans.
Koch Foods representatives did not return requests for comment. The company, which has said it did not knowingly hire undocumented workers, has challenged the raid on its Morton plant in federal court, calling it an “illegal search” and demanding the return of seized property and records.
Bryan Cox, a spokesman for ICE, said there was a continuing criminal investigation into the operation and hiring practices at all of the Mississippi plants. No executives from the targeted companies have been charged.
Patrick Barlow was hired to work at the plant in August.
‘The Smell of Money’
The Koch Foods plant is in the heart of Morton, a rural community with about 3,600 residents, about a quarter of whom are Hispanic. The parking lot at shift change can feel like the most social place in town, outside of church and school sporting events.
A sleepy clutch of downtown blocks hugs the opposite side of the highway. There are a few fast-food places, trailers and ranch houses, and several markets and businesses that cater to what has been for several decades a growing Hispanic population. A smaller chicken processing plant, owned by the company PH Food, was also raided in August.
Sometimes the smell of chicken hangs over the place. But the longtime residents hardly notice anymore. “Of course, the joke in Mississippi is that’s the smell of money,” said David Livingston, a real estate appraiser who grew up in town.
Today, the unknowable future for the Hispanic workers and their families hangs heavy over Morton and the nearby city of Forest, the county seat roughly a 15-minute drive away. Signs of pain and fear are everywhere; most of the people affected declined to give their full names for fear of government retribution.
On a recent afternoon in a quiet Latin grocery,
an undocumented 46-year-old woman named Mariela said she had no choice but to shut down the taco truck she once stationed at a workplace that had been raided. She burst into tears as she realized she was unable to afford a basket of cilantro, radishes and pumpkin seeds.
At the Trinity Mission Center, a church in Forest that serves as a crisis response center, a man who was swept up in the raids stood by his van, rifling through confusing legal papers, unsure of his next court date. The man, Victoriano Simon-Gomez, 32, said he had a disabled child and was afraid she would receive insufficient care if he was forced to return to Guatemala.
At the church entrance, a 31-year-old Guatemalan mother of two named Eva waited to pick up a donated lunch. She had been detained at a chicken plant in Carthage and was wearing an electronic ankle monitor, now a common sight around Scott County. She referred to it as “la grilleta” — “the shackle.” She said she was going to fight to remain in the United States with her children, 13 and 9, who are American citizens.
She knew it was going to be difficult. “The president doesn’t want us here,” she said. But she said she harbored no ill will toward the people who have taken jobs like hers. “I’m not mad.”
More than one-third of the 680 arrested workers across Mississippi were picked up at the Koch plant in Morton. In an affidavit taken a few weeks after the raid, Robert H. Elrod, a vice president of human resources, said
272 of the 1,170 employees there were Hispanic.
Marquese Parks, who works for a staffing agency that helped Koch Foods find new employees
after the raids, said applicants included “a lot of African-American, a lot of white, Caucasian. Latinos, not so much.”
He said potential hires were being subjected to strict identification checks.
Mr. Parks, who is black and grew up in Morton, said he never wanted to work in the chicken plants. He went away to college but later found himself in the industry anyway, first as a poultry supervisor and now at the staffing agency.
He said he did not know how long the new non-Hispanic recruits would last on the job.
“I honestly don’t think they will stay because of the simple fact that the jobs are that hard,” said Mr. Parks, 28. “It’s something they didn’t see themselves doing growing up. Something they don’t want to do.”
But the opportunity to earn more than $11 an hour can still turn heads in this part of Mississippi. Mr. Grant was not the only person to jump at the chance the raids provided. Niah Hill, manager of the Sonic Drive-In in Morton, said 10 of her workers quit soon after the raid at Koch Foods.
“When they heard about the raids they all went over there and got jobs right away,” Ms. Hill said. Carhops at this Sonic make $4.25 an hour — three dollars less than the state’s minimum wage — plus tips, she said.
Yet the belief that native-born Americans are not sufficiently motivated to work persists, even among some African-Americans. Jeff White, a Morton-based builder and rental property owner, said so many chicken plant jobs became available in the 1980s because American-born residents “didn’t want to work, period.”
Mr. Grant with his girlfriend, Keishona Miller.
He added that he quickly learned he was not chicken plant material after landing a job at one shortly after high school. “I worked there three hours and 20 minutes,” he said, chuckling. “I didn’t even get the check. It’s too hard.”
For a while, Juan Grant said the hard work was worth it. With his better wage, he was starting to finally save a little. He talked about buying a used Honda, and about getting serious with his girlfriend.
But Morton was 75 miles from his trailer home in rural Holmes County, and after a while it proved to be too much. He showed up late one too many times, and in November, he said, Koch let him go.
