That day, Selena first felt a draft. She put down her knife, turned around and saw men coming in black, gun in hand, screaming in Spanish: "Hands on the head, nobody moves or we shoot! ". The 39-year-old Mexican took a brief look at the two others, out of her chicken cutting plant: they were already blocked.
Thus began, Wednesday, August 7, in the Mississippi campaign, around the city of Jackson, the biggest net strike launched in recent years by the Federal Agency for Immigration Control (ICE), for Immigration and Customs Enforcement ). Seven hundred agents deployed to search seven factories in the region and arrest 680 undocumented workers, mostly Guatemalans, sometimes Mexicans. 671 were prosecuted, 377 imprisoned. Among them, Selena, whose American dream suddenly collapsed.
Nearly four months after this operation hailed by the Trump administration, between 50 and 200 illegals would still be under lock and key. Selena, she was released after forty-three days, and can receive us in his white house, provided it does not disclose his identity, his testimony may be held against it.
A job, a house, a family
His career is that of so many Latinos. In 2002, she left her hometown, north of Mexico City, and gave nearly $ 1,000 to a smuggler to cross the desert to the United States. Here she is on the Pacific coast, in Oregon, then on her way to Mississippi, where her brother settled legally. On the spot, Selena is hired at the Koch Foods Chicken Factory, owned by Republican billionaires known for making and defeating the Midwestern elections. When she presents an ID that Oregon provides to the undocumented, she is not asked more questions. But in 2009, without warning, the company dismissed her for lack of a work permit. Selena then trades a fake US social security card, sesame on the job market, and manages to get hired from its competitor, PH Food.
Even if she does not speak a word of English, her life is organized: she has, with her husband – clandestine, too, in the building – a clean house, surrounded by greenery, poorly furnished but with thick carpet and a big fridge, in a mixed neighborhood, poor but ok for the Mississippi. His children, a 15-year-old teenager and a 10-year-old girl born in the United States, go to the nearby school. Everything is going well, until this fatal Wednesday, August 7th.
