By Rebekah Diamond and William D. Lopez, Slate, May 28, 2020
On Monday, the Washington Post reported that cases of coronavirus infections among front-line workers in the food processing industry continue to surge. As the Post noted, the number of workers who have died from COVID-19 across the country has at least tripled, while the number who have been infected at three of the country’s largest meat processing companies—Tyson Foods, Smithfield Foods, and JBS—in the past month has increased from 3,000 to more than 11,000. As undocumented immigrants, many of these front-line workers faced the threat of both detention and deportation long before the pandemic began. And though the coronavirus did not create the dangerous plight of the immigrant essential worker, it certainly augmented it, adding the risk of infection to the immigration enforcement process. The story of Maria Domingo Garcia, an undocumented mother arrested in a raid and deported to Mexico, shines a spotlight on the suffering of many undocumented essential workers, forcing us to examine what it takes to put meat on American tables—and whom we are willing to sacrifice to do so.
Last August, Immigration and Customs Enforcement conducted the largest coordinated immigration raid in our country’s history, arresting 680 undocumented immigrants across seven food processing plants in central Mississippi. For Domingo Garcia, that morning in August was the last time that she saw her three children in person and that she was able to nurse her then 4-month-old daughter. After the raid, Domingo Garcia was taken 180 miles away from her family, where she was detained in LaSalle Detention Center in Jena, Louisiana. In December, she was deported to Mexico.
When her plane touched down in Mexico—the country where she was born and maintains citizenship—Domingo Garcia planned to apply for the paperwork needed to return to Guatemala, where she lived from age 9 to 18, and where her mother was born. Her husband, a Guatemalan citizen who also has a deportation case pending in the U.S., planned to send their two youngest children to Guatemala so that they could reunite with their mother.
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