Heartbreaking images and videos of weeping children and loved ones spread rapidly on social media Wednesday night after Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested nearly 700 workers at several Mississippi food processing plants in a series of coordinated raids that were described as “the largest single-state workplace enforcement action in U.S. history.”
“Days after the El Paso massacre where a gun wielding maniac parroted Trump’s anti-immigrant hate, a battalion of ICE agents abducted 680 Latinx and immigrant men and women on Trump’s orders.”
—Greisa Martínez Rosas, United We Dream
Mississippi’s local WJTV reported following the ICE raids that “many children of those arrested across the state are now left homeless with nowhere to go.”
“These children,” WJTV reported, “were relying on neighbors and even strangers to pick them up outside their homes after school and drive them to a community fitness center where people tried to keep them calm. But many kids could not stop crying for mom and dad.”
Among those appearing on local television news cameras was 11-year-old Magdalena Gomez Gregorio, who pleaded that her father, among those missing after the raids, to be returned to her.
“My dad is not a criminal,” Gregorio said through tears. Watch:
As ProPublica reporter Dara Lind pointed out on Twitter, young children of immigrants have lived in constant fear of their parents being swept up at any moment by President Donald Trump’s deportation force.
“I’ve spoken to school employees in cities where there were no raids,” noted Lind, “saying that sometimes kids came in midday asking to call and see if parents were still home.”
In total, ICE agents carried out raids in six Mississippi cities, leaving outrage and despair in their wake. According to local news reports, workers suspected of being undocumented were rounded up, placed on buses, and sent to an ICE facility in Louisiana.
“Children finished their first day of school with no parents to go home to tonight,” reported the Jackson Free Press. “Babies and toddlers remained at daycare with no guardian to pick them up. A child vainly searched a workplace parking lot for missing parents.”
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