Rina Salado’s coworkers had just popped confetti.
They surprised her with the news that she’d been promoted to supervisor at the credit card manufacturing plant where she’s worked for nearly three years. Her team asked her for a photo so they could blow it up and post it on the wall with her new title.
Elated and overwhelmed, Salado, 25, ran outside to her car to retrieve a photo on her phone and call her family. She couldn’t wait to share her big update.
But then her world stopped. She saw a stream of missed calls and voicemails from her mother. A barrage of texts from her family members. A wide range of people trying to alert Salado that her mother had been detained. Her mom, Rina Ramirez, had been swept up that morning by immigration officials in a raid at Glenn Valley Foods, a meatpacking plant cross town in Omaha — the largest worksite enforcement operation in the state since President Donald Trump was inaugurated in January.
Salado called her mom right away, and to her surprise, she answered. She was in a room with other employees at the plant where she’d worked for 13 years, surrounded by armed federal agents with their faces covered, but still able to use her phone.
“My mom said, ‘Take care of yourself, take care of your sister. Immigration is here. I don’t know what will happen,’” Salado told CNN, describing the conversation.
Salado returned to her coworkers in tears. She told them she had to go and walked out bawling, with no explanation. “I didn’t even clock out. I just left,” she said. She raced to her mother’s home to be with her father and younger sister. “I don’t know how fast I was driving, but I felt I couldn’t drive fast enough.”
Salado’s mother was one of more than 70 workers detained by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement last Tuesday. Salado said her mom, a Mexican national, has been in the US for 25 years, working and raising a family, and never even receiving a speeding ticket.
Many of those detained from the plant could be charged on various issues including misuse of visas, illegal reentry, resisting arrest, and misuse of social security numbers,according to federal authorities.
That morning, news of the raid spread fast. Immigrant rights groups followed through on plans they’d made after Trump won his second term in November. About a dozen organizations formed Omaha Rapid Response, arranging legal support and private “safe spaces” for families to meet up. The coalition had also raised money to help families with things like rent, supplies and childcare when a family’s principal breadwinner is taken into custody.
Juan Carlos Garcia, director of Hispanic outreach at the Missionary Society of St. Columban, said their work was not finished.
“There will be more raids. We have to adjust to what ICE is doing,” he said. “We have to be tactical as well.”
Even those without a close connection to the raid were frightened. Some businesses in South Omaha immediately shut down upon learning that ICE was in town, according to residents. A library and a community college closed their doorsdue to “public safety concerns.”One day after the raid, city officials cited reports from employers in the region’s construction, food and agriculture industries, saying many of their workers didn’t show up. Some students didn’t arrive for summer school.
It was like a “shockwave” of fear, said Lina Traslaviña Stover, executive director of Heartland Workers Center, a group that’s been educating workers on their rights. At a news conference on Wednesday, the city’s mayor said the raid created “chaos.”
Attorneys and legal groups learned Thursday night that 63 of those in custody, including Salado’s mother, were transported to North Platte, Nebraska — nearly 300 miles away. So far, Salado’s mother has only been charged with a civil immigration violation of being in the US without authorization, her attorney told CNN on Monday. She has a bond hearing scheduled in Omaha next month.
Another 11 were deported or sent to other locations for processing, according to the Center for Immigrant and Refugee Advancement in Omaha. For much of last week, attorneys were unable to speak to those in detention, raising concern about due process and representation, they said.
On Thursday, Olga Lorenzo Palma got a surprising phone call from her husband, who’d been taken during the raid along with her brother, and she learned that he had already been deported to Mexico. She said she still hasn’t heard any update on her brother.
Lorenzo Palma said her husband worked at the meat packing plant for two years.
“It was the worst day of my life,” Lorenzo Palma said, while sobbing. “They have left me destroyed.”
The couple’s 1-year-old girl is too young to understand but their 6-year-old daughter has been asking why their father hasn’t come home from work yet. “I tell her he went to work someplace else and that he will be back for us soon,” Lorenzo Palma said.
Her husband signed paperwork for immediate deportation, Lorenzo Palma said. He told her on the phone call that immigration agents had told him he was facing charges of identity theft, and that even if he spent a lot of money on lawyers, he would likely end up being deported anyway.
“The suffering is too great,” Lorenzo Palma said. “You fight it, and you get deported anyway is what he told me.”
It was a typical morning at Glenn Valley Foods when a group of federal agents showed up at the front entrance, around 9 a.m. Men wearing tactical vests and camouflage neck gaiters over their faces approached the front door with a battering ram, but set it down on the ground, as seen in edited video released by ICE.
They knocked on the door, and a stunned plant manager let them in, according to company president, Chad Hartmann. The agents served the company with a federal warrant, then began searching the property — a process that Hartmann called “extremely uncomfortable.”
“It was a complete surprise to us. We had no idea this was going to happen,” Hartmann told CNN.
Despite the Department of Homeland Security’s crackdown on immigration this year, Hartmann said he never thought Glenn Valley would be in the mix. He was using DHS’ own system, E-Verify, to vet his workers. E-Verify allows employers to check an individual’s eligibility to work in the US.
“We are not like other companies,” he said. “There are some companies that do not E-Verify.”
In a statement, the office of US Rep. Don Bacon, a Republican whose district includes Omaha, said it confirmed with ICE that Glenn Valley Foods complied with E-Verify and was not being charged with a crime, describing the company as “a victim in this as well.”
As the agents spread out across the facility last Tuesday, many employees scattered into hiding spots, some reportedly taking cover in a freezer. First responders could be seen tending to those workers and warming their hands, according to the edited video released by ICE. In another clip, a federal agent draped a space blanket around a person’s shoulders.
Agents coaxed people out from large storage areas, demanding to see their hands. They walked past tables with large slabs of red meat and wrangled workers into a cafeteria. The video also showed agents escorting workers to a white bus with their hands bound with handcuffs and zip ties.
Local law enforcement officials cooperated with federal requests to block certain streets and create a perimeter around the facility. When word spread of an ICE operation, concerned community members began showing up. Some people arrived with legal documents for their friends or family members, according to Sara Schulte-Bukowinski, a faith leader who came to the plant and held up a sign that read, “We are friends of the immigrants.”
“People were just clearly upset and not able to get in contact with their loved ones,” she said. “They were just kind of frantic, wanting to get information.”
All told, about a dozen state and federal law enforcement agencies were on the scene. As they started to depart later in the afternoon, theFlatwater Free Presscapturedvideo of three people trying to stop a black SUV from driving away.
Hartmann, the company’s president, said only 30% of his workforce came to work the next day. The rest had either been detained or were too scared to return. With dwindled resources, the plant – which processes beef, pork and chicken for restaurant chains and grocery stores — could only operate at 20% capacity, he said.
“These are wonderful people that I’ve had a chance to work with over the years that now aren’t going to work here anymore because of what happened,” he said of those detained. “And not knowing or expecting that — it’s like losing somebody you care about. It’s out of your control. It’s very uncomfortable. It’s unfortunate. It saddens me.”
Officials and residents say the fear is palpable across Omaha’s immigrant community and those with ties to it. Ally, a 21-year-old citizen who’s afraid to use her last name because she’s worried for undocumented family members, said eight of her aunts and uncles were detained in the Glenn Valley Foods raid and other recent ICE incidents.
She said she’s been picking up groceries for her remaining family members who worry that if they go to their local Mexican grocery store, they won’t come back. “They’ve just been staying home for fear of anything happening to them and being torn apart from their families.”
Ally grew emotional thinking about her large family cookouts and parties suddenly shrinking. “We’ve always hung out together and to think that in the future, half of them would be gone or maybe none of them would be here at all is just very scary to think about.”
On the border with Iowa, Omaha is one of the largest cities in this part of the country that relies heavily on immigrant workers in the agricultural and food industries, particularly pork and dairy producers. Nebraska farms were part of a large, multistate ICE raid during the first Trump administration in 2018. And in another large-scale raid across six states in 2006, known as Operation Wagon Train, more than 250 people were detained at a meatpacking plant in Grand Island, Nebraska.
Still, the June 10 raid in Omaha — in the face ofprotests in Los Angelesagainst the administration’s deportation push — rattled a community in this corner of Nebraska and raised fear to new levels, officials said.
“Family members were not expecting to have their spouses and mothers disappear,” said Roger Garcia, a Douglas County commissioner. “That’s how it leads towards trauma in the wider community. Nobody expected this to happen when they were just going to work.”
The incident hit close to home for Garcia. His wife’s aunt was among those detained at the plant, someone who’s worked here for decades and raised her family here, he said.
“She definitely does not fit the profile of a high-level criminal or criminal of any kind,” he said. “She’s just somebody that went to work on Tuesday morning and got caught up in all this.”
Last Tuesday afternoon, after her mother was taken from Glenn Valley Foods to a DHS holding facility, Rina Salado went to the plant to pick up her mother’s pink lunch bag. She spotted it in aphoto that went viral, showing a table full of lunch containers left behind.
Salado said after she came home from her 12-hour shift, her mom would make fresh tortillas every night.
“I feel so guilty even sleeping on a bed,” Salado said. “I don’t know where they have her sleeping. I feel like I’m not able to enjoy things because I don’t know where she is. I don’t know in what kind of conditions they have her. I just worry about her.”
Salado was a child when she was brought to the US and is protected from deportation through the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program initiated by the Obama administration. But as a DACA recipient, leaving the country is risky and not allowed without meeting strict criteria.
She was last with her mother on June 8, two days before the raid, when she sat at the dinner table for an hour to catch up with her parents. She fears that might have been — unknowingly — their final time together.
“I can’t go to Mexico. She can’t come here,” she said. “I don’t know what’s next.”