One of the largest workplace immigration-enforcement actions in American history upended the Panhandle town of Cactus in 2006. The recovery offers warnings about Donald Trump’s plans for mass deportations.
Two weeks before Christmas in 2006, roughly 10 percent of the residents of Cactus disappeared. That sort of calamity would devastate any place, but its impact was especially visible on the tiny, windswept town an hour north of Amarillo on the plains of the Panhandle. That’s because movements in the town were governed by what workers at the largest employer there called the chain. Cactus was then—as it is now—a meat-packing town. Life operated around the conveyor system inside the giant Swift and Co. slaughterhouse on the northwestern edge of the city, which carried thousands of cattle carcasses a day on meat hooks to stations where they were skinned, sawed in half, and then sliced into various cuts. The chain moved almost ceaselessly from 6 a.m. to midnight every day, and it determined when much of Cactus went to sleep and woke up.
In those days, a local named Pablo Valdez led the morning shift as one of the plant’s head superintendents. Valdez, a broad-shouldered man born to Mexican parents, has a Panhandle drawl when he speaks in English and a norteño accent in Spanish. He told me recently that everyone who worked in the plant had one basic job: “Don’t stop the chain.” The plant slaughtered around three thousand head of cattle a day, supplying beef across the country. If the line stopped long enough, the whole supply chain from feedlot to grocery store would be disrupted. Even if a worker got hurt—meat packing is one of the most dangerous jobs in America—someone would fill the spot immediately as the chain kept rolling.
Workers generally kept their cellphones in their lockers, and, in the cacophonous, windowless plant, they stayed cut off from town, so they had no warning of what was to come on December 12, 2006. That day, a couple of hours before lunch, Valdez’s radio crackled with his manager’s voice: “Shut down the chain!” Valdez was confused. A few moments later, his boss shouted again: “SHUT THE DAMN CHAIN OFF!” Valdez followed the order—and chaos ensued. As he walked toward the cafeteria to see what was going on, hundreds of workers suddenly began sprinting back into the guts of the plant. Many were shouting; others were crying. “Everyone was scared s—less,” Valdez recalled. His radio came back on, this time with one of the supervisors in the packaging department saying, “Everybody needs to get off the floor—there are guys back here with machine guns.”
Disoriented, Valdez ambled to the packaging department, near the end of the chain, where he saw men with guns and body armor emblazoned with the acronym for the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency. They were sweeping the area, peering behind machines to make sure no one was hiding. Valdez went up to explain to them that he was the man in charge. “Get the hell out of our way. We don’t care who you are,” he recalls one of the agents telling him. Valdez sprinted away to go check on his crew. In the locker room, where employees would normally go to change out of bloody clothes, workers wedged themselves into lockers and other hiding spots. Some removed ceiling tiles and climbed into the crawl space above. Back near the cutting tables, others reportedly hid inside beef carcasses. In the cafeteria, ICE agents lined up workers to take fingerprints.
After agents processed Valdez and let him go, he exited the dining area and passed scores of employees, their hands zip-tied behind their backs. He saw married couples whose children would be left without a guardian when they returned home from school; they shouted out, asking someone—anyone—to take care of their kids.
Before the raid, Valdez thought it was possible that some undocumented immigrants were working at the plant, but he had assumed that Swift’s on-site and corporate HR had been running everything aboveboard, checking Social Security numbers and work permits. Even as ICE agents combed the factory, Valdez assumed that after they left, he might be missing a handful of Guatemalan workers, who were the more recent immigrants. So he was stunned to see people he had known for fifteen years—long-term residents who owned their houses, who spoke English—being detained.
ICE ultimately arrested 297 workers. Cactus wasn’t the only plant the agency hit—it raided five other Swift facilities across the country, arresting almost 1,300 immigrants in what is still, collectively, one of the largest ICE raids of all time. In press conferences, the agency said “Operation Wagon Train” was necessary to enforce identity theft laws. Swift had indeed been checking Social Security numbers, but it’s not hard to use a fraudulent number.
Valdez stayed late after his shift along with other managers, trying to get the hanging carcasses processed before the end of the day. When he finally got in his truck that evening, a wave of anguish overcame him. “I was crying like a baby,” he said. He drove straight to the Catholic church, where community members were distributing food and helping now stranded children find places to stay. It was as if a bitter rapture had hit the town, leaving orphans in its wake.
President Donald Trump reassumed office in January with an unvarnished campaign promise: “Mass deportation now.” The 2006 Swift raids provide a model for the immigration enforcement that many of his supporters have been clamoring for—they were nationwide and high-octane, with hundreds of immigrants detained and deported. But the aftermath offers a less tidy example.
By the time Valdez left the plant on the evening of the raid, he and Cactus faced an immediate crisis. The town’s economy relied on the beef plant—it wasn’t just the largest employer in town; it was one of the only major employers—and overnight, a significant percentage of the workers had been driven away in ICE buses. So over the next few weeks, Valdez and every supervisor and manager available joined the line, trying to keep the chain moving. Meanwhile, Swift started an enormous, nationwide hiring push. From a Trumpian perspective, this might seem to have gone perfectly. The theory of mass deportations is that once undocumented workers are kicked out, native-born Americans can take those jobs back, and competition for employees by employers will mean that wages go up.
But there’s a problem with that argument. Since the nineteenth century, the meat-packing industry has been a major employer of immigrants in the country for a simple reason: Many Americans don’t want to do the work, at least at the wages that are offered. Disassembling cows is dirty and dangerous. Laborers struggle with the monotony of repetitive tasks. The stench of blood, manure, and offal can be overpowering. Today some 40 percent of all meat-packing workers in the nation are foreign-born. According to one report, the proportion of workers who are undocumented at any given plant ranges from 14 percent to more than 50 percent.
After the raid, Swift reportedly raised wages by 8 percent. But the company still couldn’t find enough American citizens to staff the Cactus facility. So it went back to hiring workers from other countries. This time, it turned instead to a different immigrant population, one with legal status to work in the States: refugees. The company found numerous exiles from foreign wars and authoritarian regimes to help staff the plant.
Today, Cactus is one of the most diverse small towns in Texas: Fifty-nine percent of residents are foreign-born, 54 percent are noncitizens, and 90 percent speak a language other than English at home. While the undocumented population went down immediately after the raid, Valdez told me that just weeks later, he saw many of his old employees back in town, working in other jobs.
This January, when snow blanketed the town, I went to Cactus to see how it had evolved, almost twenty years after the raid. This part of the Panhandle is dry and flat; the sky makes up almost the entire horizon, save for water towers and industrial storage tanks, which are whipped by the wind and baked by the sun. On the west side of town, the plant looms on the skyline, several stories tall and sprawling. High blooms of white steam float from smokestacks at all hours. The facility is now owned by JBS, a Brazilian company and the largest meat packer in the world. (Representatives from the company declined to be interviewed and did not respond to multiple questions sent by email.)
On a windy, cloudless afternoon, I hung around the parking lot on the northern edge of the slaughterhouse. The machinery inside droned so loudly that even when I stood about a football field’s length from the plant, I had to raise my voice for anyone to hear me. As they left their shifts, I bumped into meat packers from Guatemala, Haiti, Myanmar, Somalia, and Sudan. The flags of Cuba, Eritrea, and Mexico (plenty of these) hung from rearview mirrors. Across the highway from the facility stands a mosque. An Asian grocer a few minutes’ drive away in town sells betel leaves and pickled quail eggs, among an array of Thai-imported shampoos and snacks.
In some ways, this isn’t new: Cactus has long been a town of immigrants. Valdez’s family first arrived in the seventies, when his father and uncles came from Ciudad Juárez to build Cactus’s vast slaughterhouse. After the plant was up and running, the family stayed to work the chain. Back then, Valdez says, the town’s population was almost entirely Mexican immigrants, and the only Anglos often were the supervisors in the plant. In the late seventies, Vietnamese and Laotian refugees resettled in town, and then more Mexican workers and those from Central America arrived, many fleeing war in Guatemala.
The historic struggle to hire American workers exposes the fallacy at the heart of the new mass-deportation push: We are not living through a time of mass unemployment, where a high percentage of native-born Americans are struggling to find jobs. We live in a time of historic labor shortages in many industries. And the industries that hire the greatest proportion of undocumented workers—agriculture, construction, food service, and manufacturing—tend to be the ones struggling the most to hire anyone to do the job at prevailing wages. The chamber of commerce in Nebraska, one of the largest meat-producing states in the country, reported massive job vacancies—there are only 39 workers for every 100 open jobs there—and argued that welcoming more migrants needed to be part of the solution to the crisis.
There’s of course a wage that slaughterhouses could pay that would attract more American workers—but that wage is probably high enough that the price of meat would rise steeply across the country. For better or for worse, the meat-packing industry relies on immigrants; changing that would likely require fundamentally changing how America feeds itself.
Today the Cactus facility pays better than almost any other business in this part of the Panhandle. Few employers other than the Valero oil refinery, to the southeast of town, can compete when it comes to wages for manual laborers. But not many native-born Texans have been persuaded to take the work. Meat-packing plants in the region have basically permanent job openings. Many workers stay just long enough to earn a payday and then move on, so plants constantly struggle with attendance, and management teams often hire dozens of new employees every week. Labor leaders I spoke with in Cactus said that it’s still a workers’ market: When a new contract comes up, the unions are usually able to negotiate higher pay.
One afternoon in the parking lot, I met a born-and-raised local named Juan Lara. Lara, with strong forearms and braces on his teeth, was in his early twenties, and he had graduated from Dumas High School, fifteen miles south of the plant. He worked on the kill floor, where he used a huge electric bone saw to split cattle carcasses in half. Hired right out of high school, he started at $24 an hour—which meant he could make well more than $50,000 a year, with plentiful overtime. But when I asked Lara if many of his high school classmates worked in the plant with him, he shook his head. “Less than ten,” he replied. “There are people from the other side of the world working there though.”
Many locals take jobs at the facility briefly, before quickly transitioning out. In 2020, during the pandemic, Eduardo Valdez, Pablo’s bespectacled nephew, was finishing high school. He got hired in packaging—largely considered one of the easiest roles. The pay was nearly three times what he was making in his previous job at McDonald’s. “But I only lasted three weeks,” he told me laughing, as we spoke in a bar in Dumas. He couldn’t hack it. He worked from the afternoon well into the night in the windowless plant, and the lack of natural light made him blue. Inside, it was cold from the refrigeration, and the drone of the machinery was loud. He said other locals consider working at the facility the “worst job” in town, despite the pay, and he has nothing but respect for those who can make do there. “You do it if you have to.”
Pablo Valdez had to learn the hard way that workers are difficult to replace. After starting his career in management in the packaging department, he took a raise to lead the cutting tables. He fancied himself a hard-ass, and during his first week, he fired four employees. In packaging, it hadn’t been hard to fill vacancies. But when he went to his supervisor and told him he needed four new workers on the tables, his manager was annoyed. “Do you think we can just find someone off the street who knows how to bone strips?” Valdez recalls him asking. Valdez had to start slicing carcasses himself. He told me it was the hardest work he’s ever done: “I got beat like a dog.”
Valdez said the 2006 Swift raid was one of his more painful memories. But he doesn’t think there will be a similar ICE action under Trump. In fact, Valdez is a passionate Trump supporter. Indeed, most locals cast ballots for the GOP nominee last November: Eighty-three percent of the surrounding Moore County voted red. Valdez is confident that the forty-seventh president won’t order any large-scale workplace raids. “It would ruin the economy,” he told me. As of press time, Valdez’s bet is correct. There has been no wide sweep in Cactus.
If the Trump administration targets plants with a Wagon Train–type operation, this time companies would have few options to find new workers. The Cactus playbook—hire refugees—has been hampered by the new administration. On his first day back in office in January, Trump signed an executive order indefinitely suspending the nearly fifty-year-old U.S. Refugee Admissions Program. If his administration deports large swaths of undocumented workers in meat-packing plants, the president could accomplish something he has long accused climate-focused Democrats of trying to do: hollowing out the American beef industry. There’s really one way to stop the use of undocumented labor in meat packing: Give those workers a way to get on paper and work legally.
One Thursday, in a local grocery store, I chatted with Mariana Galaviz, an immigrant from Chihuahua, Mexico, who worked the till. She rang up bottles of soda and beer for meat packers coming off the first shift, their eyes still adjusting to the sun. Galaviz happily told me about how many languages she hears in the store: Burmese, Mandarin, Mayan, Somali. As Galaviz and I spoke in Spanish, a man at the counter next to us speaking Haitian Creole used Google Translate so that another employee could help him wire money back to the island. When a tall man with a large mustache came into the store, Galaviz waved him over excitedly, telling me he was a long-term resident. “This is a reporter writing about immigrants here,” she told him. The man turned, looked me in the eyes, and didn’t smile. “Everyone here has papers,” he said. I told him I believed him, then asked him what sort of changes he’d seen in Cactus since the 2006 raids. “Everyone here has their papers,” he told me again. He had nothing else to say.
The Largest Immigration Raids in Texas
The 2006 ICE operation in Cactus, during the Bush administration, was the largest-ever raid in our state. Three of the next-biggest operations were carried out during the first Trump administration:
Allen
April 3, 2019
Immigration officials arrested 284 workers at a North Texas technology repair company—mostly women and largely from Mexico.
Sumner
August 28, 2018
Four years after the company was fined for hiring some 179 unauthorized foreign workers, more than 300 federal agents descended upon a trailer-manufacturing plant in northeast Texas and arrested around 160 employees. Leaders, accused of aiding and abetting document fraud, agreed to pay $5 million in a 2023 plea deal.
Austin
February 9–12, 2017
Three weeks into the first Trump administration, ICE arrested 132 immigrants during a four-day operation in the Austin area. Agents detained them outside construction sites and at fast-food restaurants, as well as other locales in Latino-majority neighborhoods.
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