After terrifying ICE raid, Mississippi is still fighting back

Until recently, Mississippi was a backwater in the immigration wars roiling the country — so far from the battlefield of policy debate that we lack an immigration court in the state.

That came clattering to an end when the Trump administration sent hundreds of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents to descend on the morning shift at chicken processing plants in five rural towns. Nearly 700 Mississippi poultry workers were rounded up in the largest statewide workplace immigration raid in U.S. history.

The raid was meant to inspire terror, pure and simple. And in this, it succeeded.

More than a month later, 300 workers remained locked up in remote detention centers far from their homes, immigrant advocates and legal aid. All have been stripped of their jobs and the incomes their families relied on.

They are desperate to get back to their loved ones and the responsibilities of their day-to-day lives. On the day of the raid, a detained mother of three was taken into ICE custody and transported hundreds of miles to a Louisiana detention center to be processed and await deportation. She was separated from the baby girl she was breastfeeding. Now, she hasn’t seen or breastfed her daughter in more than a month.

POLICING THE USA: A look at race, justice, media

ICE did a poor job of ensuring that all children were safe and cared for in the aftermath of this dramatic raid. In one case, it took the government more than a week to realize that they had arrested and detained both parents of two children. ICE left a 12-year-old and a 14-year-old to fend for themselves — alone and terrified without either parent — until their mother was eventually released.

Those left behind have a share in the terror caused by the raids. Deep fear has rippled through the immigrant communities clustered around the very poultry plants that, a generation ago, recruited them to work here. My clients — workers in those plants and their families — are afraid to leave their homes. Mothers are locked in their trailers with the shades drawn, only leaving to pick up food for their children at a pre-arranged time. Children are scared to go to school, because their loved ones could be snatched away by ICE before they return.

Each of these workers and their families urgently need legal representation to challenge constitutional defects in the raids and to raise other defenses. But geography is destiny when it comes to access to justice in America, and there is still far less of it in Mississippi than almost anywhere else. Immigration authorities are targeting Mississippi precisely because access to legal help is so limited.

The Trump administration might have assumed that our Mississippi communities lacked the will to fight back. Perhaps they thought they could beat the spirit of our immigration attorneys, too, already reeling from the transfer of vast numbers of asylum-seekers from the southern border to our bursting-at-the-seams private prisons.

Boy, were they wrong.

These raids prompted a response I have not witnessed before in my eight years helping asylum-seekers navigate the immigration system. Children returned from the first day of school only to find their parents taken by ICE and no information about when, or whether, they would ever see their caretakers again. But neighbors ensured that children were fed and had a place to sleep, because immigration authorities didn’t. Churches opened their doors for community organizing and legal clinics.

COLUMN: When officers bring danger, not safety, to school campuses

The raids created legal need far beyond what I and the few other immigration lawyers in Mississippi could take on ourselves. Many of these cases are going to be long. They might take years to finish. And yet, none of these attorneys flinched from the call to action. Even a retired hard-nosed Mississippi federal prosecutor has stepped up to volunteer in our legal clinics because she was so outraged by the ICE raid. Dozens of other Mississippi lawyers are among the 500 lawyers across the nation who have already volunteered to provide legal support — an outpouring of support from the country’s legal community that echoes what happened after Hurricane Katrina ravaged Mississippi's coast.

The breastfeeding mother has a pro bono attorney to fight for her release and reunification with her children. And we won’t rest until we find long-term representation for every one of those workers who need it.

But nothing is inevitable: We still need support in Mississippi, whether it’s providing legal assistance, donating to legal funds, or calling your representatives, not only to aid those detained in the raids but to help prevent another, even bigger, one. The rule of law and the future of hundreds of families depend on it.

Amelia McGowan is a staff attorney at the Mississippi Center for Justice and directs the Mississippi College School of Law Immigration Clinic.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: After terrifying ICE raid, Mississippi is still fighting back