They gathered in a conference room for the weekly management meeting, even though there was hardly anyone left to manage.
Chad Hartmann, president of Glenn Valley Foods in Omaha, pushed a few empty chairs to the side of the room and then passed around a sheet totalling the latest production numbers. “Take a deep breath and brace yourselves,” he said.
For more than a decade, Glenn Valley’s production reports had told a story of a steady ascent – new hires, new manufacturing lines, new sales records for one of the fastest-growing meatpacking companies in the midwest.
But, in a matter of weeks, production had plummeted by almost 70 per cent. Most of the workforce was gone.
RM Block
Half of the maintenance crew was in the process of being deported, the director of human resources had stopped coming to work, and more than 50 employees were being held at a detention facility in rural Nebraska.
Hartmann (52), folded the printed sheet into tiny squares and waited out the silence.
“So, this gives you a pretty good sense of the work we have ahead of us,” he said.
“It’s a wipeout,” said Gary Rohwer, the owner. “We’re building back up from ground zero.”
Trump target
It had been three weeks since dozens of federal agents arrived at the factory’s door with a battering ram and a warrant for 107 workers who they said were undocumented immigrants using false identification – part of a wave of workplace raids carried out by the Trump administration this summer.
The president’s advisers had set a target of 3,000 arrests a day, shifting the focus of enforcement away from the border and into the heart of the US economy.
Trump had vowed to pursue “bloodthirsty criminals” during his campaign, but he had also promised the “largest mass deportation in history,” which meant agents were rounding up hundreds of immigrants from restaurant kitchens, avocado groves, construction sites and meat processing facilities, where most of the workforce was foreign-born.
Rohwer (84), had always used a federal online system called E-Verify to check whether his employees were eligible to work, and Glenn Valley Foods had not been accused of any violations.
Rohwer was a registered Republican in a conservative state, but he voted for a Democrat for the first time in the 2024 election, in part because of Trump’s treatment of immigrants. He couldn’t square the government’s accusations of “criminal dishonesty” with the employees he’d known for decades as “salt-of-the-earth, incredible people who helped build this company,” he said.
Most of them had no criminal history, aside from a handful of traffic violations. Many were working mothers, and now they were calling the office from detention, asking for legal advice. Their children, US citizens, were struggling at home and in some cases subsisting on donations of the company’s frozen steak.
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“I’m still furious about what happened to our people, but we have to keep the machines running,” Rohwer said. “We need more people trained and ready to go.”
He looked out into the lobby and saw three women filling out applications. Glenn Valley paid well, with an average hourly wage of almost $20 (€17) and regular bonuses, but the work was repetitive and demanding.
Employees from Mexico and Central America stood on a manufacturing line for 10 hours a day, six days a week, and processed hundreds of pounds of meat through dangerous machinery in a cold factory.
Ever since videos of the raid spread across social media, Rohwer had answered dozens of calls from strangers who accused him of “stealing American jobs”.
But Nebraska was experiencing a work shortage, with only 66 qualified workers for every 100 jobs. Almost every one of the company’s new applicants was also a Hispanic immigrant.
“There are some jobs Americans don’t want to do,” Rohwer tried explaining to one caller. “We’re caught up in a broken system.”
The department of homeland security had accused many of the company’s former employees of working under stolen IDs, which E-Verify didn’t always catch if the ID number itself was valid.
When Rohwer met with officials after the raid to ask for a better system, they told him to keep using E-Verify. One agent gave the company a hotline number to call for hiring questions. Hartmann tried it once and waited on hold for 57 minutes before giving up.
“They said the only thing we can do is verify, verify, verify,” Rohwer said.
“But we’re already doing that,” Hartmann said. “How do we avoid ending up in the same situation?”
Hiring process
Their first step was to rebuild the hiring process, so one morning Hartmann met in his office with the company’s newest employee, Alfredo Moreno. It was Moreno’s second day as the human resources director.
He still didn’t have an office and he’d never seen the factory floor, but Hartmann had given him a stack of dozens of applications to review.
“How many people did you lose total?” Moreno asked.
Hartmann looked at his computer and tried to count. “They arrested 76, which doesn’t include the ones who were too shaken up to come back,” he said. “How does that happen if you E-Verify and do everything right?”
“I think I can help you with that part,” Moreno said.
He had spent the past 25 years hiring for pork plants and chicken factories across the midwest, and he’d shown up at Glenn Valley unannounced a few days after the raid, convinced he understood their problem.
Over the years, Moreno had reviewed hundreds of applicants through E-Verify, checking their ID and social security numbers against federal records to confirm they were eligible to work.
In his experience, E-Verify was good at checking numbers, not people. The government maintained that Glenn Valley employees had been using IDs that were stolen.
One number belonged to a nursing student in Missouri, who lost her student loans as a result of the identity theft. Another came from a disabled man in Texas, who could no longer get his medications.
Moreno told Hartmann that the only way to truly prevent fraud was to scrutinise IDs with black lights and magnifying glasses to make sure they weren’t fake, and interview each potential employee in person.
He had memorised regional accents and studied the geographies of Central America, Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic. He estimated that about half of the people he interviewed for meat processing jobs lied about their documentation.
“I ask where they were born, what town, where they travelled,” Moreno said. “Does the person on paper fit the person in the chair? I don’t want to say I interrogate, but I ask very specific questions without discriminating.”
“Yes. I like that,” Hartmann said. “Because we can’t go through this again. Honestly, it was very traumatic for everyone involved.”
The ICE raid
Hartmann started to tell Moreno about that Tuesday morning, when the company was humming through one of its best months in 12 years.
More than 130 workers walked into the factory at 7am. All five manufacturing lines started moving at full speed. Hartmann was taste-testing a new meat product with the sales team when he heard a knock on the front door.
He walked into the lobby and saw several agents in tactical vests, carrying nightsticks and wearing bandannas to cover their faces.
His first thought was that maybe one employee had got into trouble, but then he glanced outside and saw several government vans, a drone circling the roofline and dozens more agents surrounding the property. “We’re going to be busy here,” one of the agents said.
They moved past Hartmann into the factory, shouting instructions in Spanish, telling workers to come out with their hands up. Most complied, but a few dozen people started to scream and run.
A group of five women clambered up stacks of packing pallets. Other workers enclosed themselves inside industrial freezers, only emerging after they lost feeling in their arms and hands.
Hartmann saw a maintenance worker named Marvin Zepeda (37), scamper into the rafters with his tool belt. Zepeda was responsible for cleaning offices, and his colleagues had once nominated him for employee of the month because of his ability to laugh and tell jokes even while checking mousetraps.
Now Zepeda squeezed into a crawl space in the ceiling and resisted orders to come out, holding agents off by displaying his box cutter and other tools. An agent shot him with a Taser. Zepeda pulled the probes out of his leg, retreated farther into the crawl space and threw tools in the direction of the agents. They shocked him again and threatened to send in a dog.
Finally, a factory manager went into the crawl space, calmed Zepeda down and helped persuade him to surrender. Agents restrained his wrists and led him out of the factory. Zepeda spotted Hartmann in the lobby and flashed him a smile and a thumbs-up as the agents walked him toward a bus with the windows blacked out.
“The whole thing just gutted me, and obviously I had it easy,” Hartmann told Moreno.
“It’s terrible for everyone,” Moreno said. “I’ve seen whole companies go under after a raid. The supply chain stalls. Beef prices go up. Consumers pay more.”
“The ripple effects,” Hartmann said, nodding. He pulled up a roster of the company’s former employees and started to read through names: Ruiz. Gonzalez. Hernandez. Rodriguez.
“That’s the part I keep thinking about,” Hartmann said. “What happens to these people?”
Detention centre
It had taken three days for Elizabeth Rodriguez’s family to figure out where she was. Her children had seen the raid on Facebook and watched videos that showed Rodriguez (46), being marched on to a bus in her factory smock and hard hat.
Her eldest son, Omar (23), searched detention records and contacted her co-workers, police and local politicians.
“Where are they taking her?” he kept asking, until his mother finally called from a detention centre across the state.
“This call will be limited to 15 minutes,” a recording warned, and his life had been revolving around those phone calls ever since.
Now, Omar felt his phone ringing again in his pocket and checked the number. “Mom Jail,” the caller ID read. He answered and waited for the line to connect.
His parents had spent the past 25 years in Omaha, building a life with such care and stability that to Omar it started to feel “normal, even stable,” he said.
His parents met in Mexico and eventually crossed the border together on foot in their teens. They married in Nebraska, found work and bought a small house on the outskirts of downtown where they could raise their four children, all US citizens.
A few months earlier, Omar had encouraged his mother to hire a lawyer to help her explore a path to citizenship. She had a “perfect case,” the lawyer wrote: No criminal record. Long-standing ties to the community. A steady job with good reviews.
She took on extra hours to pay legal fees and nursed sores on her feet. It wasn’t in her nature to complain, not even now, about the raid, the detention centre or the lawyer she could no longer seem to reach.
“How are you?” Omar asked in Spanish, once Elizabeth came on the line. Her children crowded on to the couch and gathered around the phone.
“I’m fine,” she said. “Tell me about all of you. Are you eating? Sleeping?”
“Don’t worry,” Omar said. “Everything’s OK.”
This was how they survived these calls: each side reassuring the other even as they continued to unravel. Omar was working the graveyard shift at a call centre to help pay for groceries.
His two younger sisters, aged 17 and 13, were trying to cook for the family from their mother’s recipes. Omar’s younger brother, aged seven, was waking up at night short of breath, wheezing and choking, until Omar took him to the emergency room.
Doctors said he was suffering from panic attacks. He had never spent a night away from Elizabeth, and he didn’t understand what it meant to be detained or deported for lacking legal status. The family had decided it was best to tell him that his mother was still at work.
“I’ll be home soon,” she told him now.
“When?” he asked.
“I don’t know yet,” she said. “I’m trying my best.”
“You have five minutes remaining on this call,” the automated voice said.
Omar took the phone so they could talk through the logistics of her case. She had declined the government’s offer of $1,000 (€859) and a free plane ticket to self-deport back to Mexico. Omar was trying to come up with $5,000 (€4,293) to pay for her bond so she could be released to her family while her deportation case played out in the courts.
They had all begun drafting letters to submit on her behalf. Omar’s oldest sister, 17, had written about how her mother had supported her through episodes of depression, helping her find a therapist and switch schools.
“I am still alive because of my mother,” she wrote to the judge. “Now that she’s gone, it’s like I’m breaking a little more every day. I fear what will happen to us if she can’t come home.”
“You have one minute remaining,” the automated voice said.
“Are you still there?” Omar asked.
“Yes. I’m here. I love all of you,” she said, and the children took turns saying goodbye.
“Everything is going to work out,” Omar told her, but the line was already dead.
Skeleton crew
The factory was empty. The machines sat silent. Back orders continued to pile up as a skeleton crew arrived at 7am to restart the manufacturing lines.
Hartmann walked through the lobby, handing out coffees and greeting eight new employees who were reporting for their first day. They had been interviewed and hired, but they couldn’t start until they were authorised to work through E-Verify, so a manager named Daisy Hernandez took their IDs and I-9 forms into her office and started punching in the numbers.
None of the eight new hires were US citizens. They had submitted paperwork based on green cards, alien registration numbers, temporary visas and work authorisations. Hernandez tried to log into E-Verify, but her password didn’t work. She tried again, and the account was locked.
“How’s it going?” Hartmann asked, as he stopped by her office, but the answer was implied: the new employees were playing games on their phones in the break room. The manufacturing lines were falling further behind.
Hernandez called Glenn Valley’s former HR manager for help, and a few minutes later Hernandez was logged back into the account. She typed a new set of names into the same system and checked the first employee.
“The information entered did not match DHS records.”
“Down to seven,” Hernandez said. She set the application to the side and moved on to the next.
“Alien authorised to work,” it said.
Cruz. Rivas. Lopez. Dominguez. “Authorised to work,” it said, and even if the system had failed them before, it was still what the government suggested they use.
Hernandez printed out a batch of company IDs and brought them into the break room, where seven new employees were waiting for their final words of training.
“Thanks for being here in our time of need,” Hartmann said, as he glanced around the room, registering all the people who were still missing. “We want to thank you for joining our family.”
A manager briefed the employees on food safety and handed out white smocks and construction hats. Then he opened the factory door to a rush of cold air and the clatter of machines. The workers lined up alongside a company slogan printed at the entrance.
“Together we achieve more,” it read, and they stepped on to the factory floor.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
