The “chaos and cruelty” of Trump’s worksite immigration raids

On September 4, federal, state, and local officers conducted the largest single-site immigration worksite raid in US history. The months-in-the-making enforcement operation by the Trump administration targeted the construction site of a Hyundai-LG electric vehicle battery plant in southeast Georgia. As “word of the raid spread across the property,” CNN reported in the days after, there was “a scramble among workers who attempted to flee, with some running to a sewage pond and others hiding in air ducts.”

The sweeping raid resulted in 475 arrests, including more than 300 nationals of South Korea and 23 of Mexico. Most of those taken into custody were reportedly transferred to the Folkston ICE Processing Center more than 100 miles away, close to the Florida border. The South Korean government then negotiated the release and return of its citizens. But amid reports that South Korea is looking into possible human rights abuses, President Donald Trump has had to reiterate that foreign workers are “welcome.”

In the aftermath of the raid, officials from Homeland Security Investigations said the workers had entered the United States unlawfully, overstayed their visas, or weren’t authorized to work. But internal government documents obtained by the Guardian show that immigration officials knew at least one South Korean worker was legally working in the country with a valid visa.

Large-scale worksite raids are not new: The first Trump administration carried out several operations between 2018 and 2019—mainly in meatpacking and poultry processing plants across the Midwest and South. Worksite raids are often framed as a crackdown on unlawful employment practices. But instead of punishing employers, the administration is doubling down on hurting workers as a tool for mass deportation.

These operations have not been without controversy. Earlier this year, ICE raids at a garment manufacturer and outside a Home Depot in Los Angeles gave rise to widespread protests. Soon after, the federal government dispatched the National Guard in response. Still, following the Georgia raid, Trump’s border czar Tom Homan vowed to do more worksite operations.

The enforcement operation in Georgia marks a “significant moment of escalation” in the history of US worksite raids, said William D. Lopez, a clinical associate professor at the University of Michigan’s public health school and author of an upcoming book, Raiding the Heartland: An American Story of Deportation and Resistance. Looking at the impact of worksite raids during the first Trump administration, Lopez writes that the “millions of dollars and hundreds of agents mobilized to descend on a particular location” in a particular moment summarily led to “separated families, collapsed local economies, [and] kept hundreds of children out of school.”

Mother Jones spoke with Lopez about his timely book, the impact and aftermath of immigration worksite raids, and the Trump administration’s enforcement tactics.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

In your new book, you write that immigration worksite raids have occurred throughout history, recently during the Bush presidency and then under the first and second Trump administrations. How have different US administrations approached this type of immigration enforcement?

Not every administration uses them. But worksite raids have been a common tool of different political administrations. For example, we can go back to the fairly big raid in Postville, Iowa, in 2008 during the Bush administration. But there was so much political fallout after that worksite raid that [President Barack] Obama stopped. After Obama, we saw Trump embracing them again.

Immigration enforcement always tells a story, and the administration is very aware of what story their particular enforcement strategy is telling. The chaos and cruelty of a worksite raid is exactly what Trump wants to show: lots of money and militarization poured into small communities to arrest people and remove them, no matter what the cost.

These massive worksite raids often require months of planning, but they also rely on an element of surprise and unpredictability. How did you see that play out in affected communities during the first Trump administration?  

When we went to the six communities that were the sites of large-scale worksite raids in 2018, in the first Trump administration, it was very evident that locals were still looking for the words to describe them. Community members often started by comparing these things to natural disasters—something like a tornado that wipes out people in the middle of town.

Once folks had kind of tried to work through this natural disaster analogy, you got the sense that they realized it wasn’t enough, and they would say things like: If a tornado wiped out the town and kids suddenly didn’t go to school, the governor would respond right away. But here, there is no governor responding, no support from politicians—no support for anybody who’s been affected.

Interviewees would then compare them to very public events of tragedy such as 9/11, the Challenger explosion, and school shootings. One individual said: I remember seeing my granddaughter buried, and [during the raid], all of these parents being taken and all of these children without their parents—it ranks up there as among one of the saddest days of my life.

One of the things that’s easy to miss about worksite raids is that nobody in a community is really sure when they’re going to happen. If it didn’t happen today, it might happen tomorrow. And if it didn’t happen today here, it might happen today somewhere else. Part of what we see among folks in these communities is this extreme hyperarousal or hypervigilance of always worrying about the next tornado to hit their town.

After that Bush-era Postville raid—then the largest in history, in which 389 immigrant workers were arrested at the Agriprocessors kosher meatpacking plant—about a third of the population left and the plant shut down. Can you talk about the impact of these raids, particularly in smaller rural towns?

They send communities scattering in the aftermath, wondering if their family members were taken and trying to figure out what to do with the kids whose parents won’t be around at the end of the school day. We know absenteeism goes up in the school district; we saw it in Bean Station, Tennessee, and throughout Mississippi, where the next day and week, the classes were empty of Latino students after raids there during the first Trump term.

People are poorer and people are hungrier after this type of enforcement. It’s often the father who gets picked up. There’s this sudden acute poverty because the breadwinner is removed. We see community events stop happening quite as much. People shrink into their homes and refuse to leave out of fear. When immigrant communities stop going out and stop buying things, that takes an impact on the economy.

This month, there was a large-scale worksite raid at an electric vehicle battery plant in Georgia, where hundreds of workers were arrested. Has anything stood out to you about that raid?

Worksite raids are never meant to be invisible, but more so with Trump, there’s just meant to be this heightened visibility. They make for incredibly useful photo ops for the administration of officers in their militarized garb and of long lines of immigrants shackled together. Postville is an interesting example, because after everyone was deported, another group of folks, also immigrants, were brought in and given permission to work. In this case, I wouldn’t be surprised if jobs are filled by other immigrants, undocumented or perhaps with a work visa, who then, when the time comes and the administration needs to show that they’re expendable, will remove them, too.

What do you expect to see in the aftermath of this raid that took place in Georgia?

Communities don’t sit around and let removal and separation happen. There’s always some type of response, even if we don’t know what the next evolution of deportation or resistance is going to be. Mass deportation is going to require involvement at so many levels. It will require lots of us being willing to watch it happen and consent to parts of it in our job. Many of us will have to decide, if I’m in one of those companies, what is my role in being part of the machinery of mass deportation?