ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:
President-elect Trump has promised mass deportations in the next four years. The plan includes workplace raids like those that took place during his first term at chicken processing plants in rural Mississippi. In the town of Morton back in 2019, I met a woman who asked to be identified as Elisa. She was one of nearly 700 people arrested in those operations.
ELISA: (Through interpreter) A lot of people aren't leaving the house. The truth is nothing will be the same here. Now we're just living with fear.
SHAPIRO: To understand the impact these raids had on Mississippi and what the next four years could look like, we called Cliff Johnson. He's an immigration attorney and director of the MacArthur Justice Center at the University of Mississippi. He told me the 2019 raids had repercussions that were significant and horrific.
CLIFF JOHNSON: You know, this was the first day of school for more than a thousand children impacted by these raids, and they learned at the end of the school day that there may not be anybody at home waiting for them. Families were torn apart. People were terrified because of an investigation that purportedly was focused on chicken processing companies, in this case, that employed folks. But the evidence of the bad acts, the items seized in the search warrant, were actual human beings who'd been living here among us for years and years.
SHAPIRO: When I visited Mississippi, I spoke with ICE special agent Jerry Miles, who helped organize the operations, and he told me this.
JERRY MILES: We're building a criminal investigation against a target. And pursuant to that criminal investigation, we encountered and detained undocumented workers.
SHAPIRO: But many people have observed that company executives were not detained that day. Only the workers were.
MILES: That's why we keep saying it's an ongoing criminal investigation.
SHAPIRO: That was five years ago. So to this day, has anyone high up in the companies that employed these undocumented workers faced legal consequences?
JOHNSON: I think the key term there is high up. In these cases, I think there may have been a handful of mid-level managers who've been held accountable, maybe sentenced to probation. But the notion that the corporations themselves or anybody high up in the corporations, having been prosecuted and sent to prison or punished severely - that's just not what this was about. And I don't think it's what it was about from the very beginning. This wasn't a response to an outcry from a local community where folks were arguing that immigrants were committing crimes and making us less safe. We were co-existing happily with these people. We've known them from our public schools and from our Little League fields. And this was about somebody far away making a decision to do this.
SHAPIRO: What reason do these companies give for continuing to hire undocumented workers even as they've experienced raids in the past and know there could be more in the future?
JOHNSON: I don't know what they would say publicly. My expectation and understanding is that they first and foremost need somebody actually willing to do the job. And jobs like these are done by people who don't have lots of other choices. If they could get jobs that didn't require them to stand on that line and deal with those smells and deal with the messiness of that work, they would take those jobs. These are the types of employees who don't have significant power when it comes to negotiating wages. These are workers who are easily controlled and who will work extremely hard in order to support their families and to meet their basic needs.
SHAPIRO: How has the community organized since 2019 to be prepared for what the next four years might bring?
JOHNSON: When these raids took place in 2019, we didn't have even the ability to know who had been hauled off. They don't leave you a list of people that they took. What this looks like now is there are people who have literal raid packets - information that's been provided to them about the information they should have readily available for people who seek to provide aid, where they can keep their identification documents together, where they have a plan for the care of their children, where there is a network of people prepared to provide transportation to and from detention facilities and where advocacy organizations like ours are working to even conduct a dry run of a mass raid.
None of that was in place in 2019. And what's so important to note is, you know, these organizations that have been doing this are grassroots communities of largely immigrant women who have decided that we're not going to get caught off guard like that again.
SHAPIRO: What do you say to somebody who doesn't want to see families separated, doesn't want to see people suffer but wants to see accountability for people who cross the border illegally?
JOHNSON: Look. I've always recognized that this is a difficult question on which, you know, people of good faith can disagree. What I'd say is there are tremendous implications for taking the people who are already here and ripping them away from their local communities and from their families. It affects, you know, the local businesses where those people shop. It affects the companies that employ them - areas of construction and agriculture, manufacturing and food processing. The landlords who rent them homes and apartments are impacted. The richness of our culture and community in places like small-town Mississippi are negatively impacted. So there are consequences of this.
SHAPIRO: That's Cliff Johnson, director of the MacArthur Justice Center at the University of Mississippi. Thank you very much.
JOHNSON: Thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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