Cactus, Texas is a small town an hour north of Amarillo on the plains of the Panhandle. Two weeks before Christmas in 2006, roughly 10% of the residents of Cactus disappeared.
That December, immigration enforcement officers conducted a workplace raid at the Swift and Company slaughterhouse on the northwestern edge of the city. ICE arrested 297 workers in Cactus as part of a larger rate of Swift facilities across the country, which is still collectively considered one of the largest ICE raids of all time.
With increased workplace raids promised by President Donald Trump, Jack Herrera of Texas Monthly looked into what happened after the raid in Cactus all those years ago. He said when ICE agents were spotted on site, pandemonium broke out.
“People were running. I heard stories from people who were in the locker room and they were pushing up the ceiling tiles to hide in the crawl space. Other people were hiding in the machinery. There were reports of people climbing into the carcasses of cows, the bodies waiting to be cut up,” he said.
“By the end of the day, almost 300 people had been arrested, zip tied, taken away. And that left a large number of children in the town of Cactus suddenly parentless. And so there was a huge push by the local Catholic church and school system to try and find homes for these suddenly parentless children.”
The town’s economy was also completely destabilized, Herrera said.
“The only real major employer in town is the slaughterhouse. Suddenly, they’ve lost half their workforce. And so the town’s economy at this moment is teetering on the brink,” he said.
“If the plant doesn’t get back up, the town won’t exist anymore. And so they call in every single hand they can. Every supervisor is putting on the gloves and working the line. And then Swift starts a nationwide hiring push.”
The company raised wages to try and attract more domestic-born workers.
“And mind you, wages were already pretty high, like these people were being paid well above minimum wage,” he said. “But they raise wages even higher with the idea that we need to get workers and to get them now. And over the first few months, no one shows up… They’re not getting new Texans. They’re not getting more Americans to show up to work this plant besides a token amount, not nearly enough to get the plant restarted.”
Herrera said what happened in Cactus after the raids gets to the heart of a common argument over immigration and jobs.
“You’ll hear people who are restrictionist and want less immigrants say immigrants basically are taking jobs. That if they weren’t working them, Americans could work them. And with greater competition, those jobs would pay better. So deportation leads to higher wages for Americans,” he said. “And then people who are in favor of immigration say, ‘well, no, immigrants are doing jobs that Americans don’t want to do.’”
Despite higher wages and open roles, however, Herrera said American-born workers were not showing up to slaughter cows for a living.
“That seems consistent in history. The meatpacking industry, when you think about it, in the 1800s, it was Germans and Poles working in those slaughterhouses — recent immigrants,” he said. “This is one of the best jobs if you don’t speak English, if you don’t have other options. It’s a great job because it pays very well. It’s good job security. They always need workers.”
But for workers with other options, jobs at a slaughterhouse are not necessarily appealing
“I’ll speak for myself, but like sawing a cow in half or slitting its throat to drain its blood or pulling the skin off a still warm corpse, there’s a lot of jobs that I’d like to do before I do that one,” Herrera said.
“It’s obviously respectable work. There’s a dignity in it, but it’s a job that I think a lot of people don’t grow up imagining themselves doing. That’s not the life path they see for themselves if you’re born and raised in this country.”
To find more workers, Swift turned to another source of foreign born labor: refugees. The company worked with resettlement organizations to hire people from Burma, Somalia, Sudan and beyond.
“In Cactus, a huge percentage of the workforce is foreign-born from all over the world,” Herrera said. “Over over half the town is foreign-born and over 97% of people speak a language other than English at home. It’s a town of 3,000 in North Texas, and it’s one of the most diverse towns by percentage of anywhere in Texas.”
However, Herrera said the option of seeking out refugee employees will be harder under President Trump’s new policies. This could impact towns like Cactus if workers become scarce.
“The next time around, if a meat packing plant is raided, or any worksite is raided, if the idea is ‘let’s go get refugees to fill that in,’ that’s no longer an option,” he said. “On his first day in office, Trump ended the resettlement of refugees in the United States, the program that last year brought 100,000 people. That program no longer exists. So you don’t have these new workers coming in.
There isn’t a source of legal immigration because just as Trump is deporting undocumented workers, he is really tightening the regulations that allow people who do have legal status, who have work permits. Those people are losing that status and newcomers aren’t being ushered in. So it’s a real question about what’s going to happen next if these worksites are going to be able to find workers.”
