http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/nation/4065682.html

July 22, 2006, 11:27PM


Deportations resented in Bible Belt town
An Arkansas community feels immigration raid took away friends and neighbors
By MOLLY HENNESSY-FISKE
Los Angeles Times

ARKADELPHIA, ARK. - The immigration agents arrived at the Petit Jean Poultry plant just before the 7:30 breakfast break. They went straight to the room where more than 100 Mexican workers in tan smocks were cutting up chicken, then shouted in Spanish for everyone to freeze.

Some workers started crying. The plant manager watched as 119 workers — half his day shift — were bound with plastic handcuffs and taken to a detention center, from which most would be deported to Mexico.

Immigration officials said they were cracking down on document fraud and illegal hiring. But what happened after the raid last July came as a surprise to many people in this conservative, Bible Belt region: Instead of feeling reassured that immigration laws were being enforced, many felt that their community had been disrupted.

The Petit Jean workers had come to be more than low-wage poultry processors. They were church friends, schoolmates and competitors in the local softball league. And so some residents responded to the raid by helping workers fight deportation, driving them to court and writing to lawmakers for help. Others donated money, food and clothing to the families of workers detained or sent back to Mexico.


Far-reaching effects
Today, one year after agents arrived at the poultry plant, the Petit Jean crackdown shows how the effects of an immigration raid can reach far beyond the illegal workers and businesses involved. Many residents say they feel more sympathetic to undocumented workers and angry at the government.

The government's critics range from prominent Arkadelphia citizens to Republican Gov. Mike Huckabee and Democratic Sen. Blanche Lincoln. Even officials charged with enforcing the law in Arkadelphia have criticized the raid for removing people who belonged to their community.

"We take them into our public schools. We accept them into our churches. They play on our football, soccer teams," said Troy Tucker, the county sheriff at the time of the raid. "And then one day Immigration comes in and sweeps them all away."

The crackdown at Petit Jean also raises questions about the effectiveness of immigration raids. According to two community leaders, about 60 percent of the deported Petit Jean workers have returned to southwest Arkansas and are working again.


First resistance
The first sign that immigration agents would draw resistance came a few weeks before the raid, when they visited the county prosecutor, Henry Morgan. The agents knew that someone had sold Social Security cards to a number of Petit Jean workers, and they wanted Morgan to charge the workers with forgery, a step toward deportation.

Sworn to uphold the law, Morgan was an unlikely advocate for undocumented workers. But a few years earlier, he had met the son of one of the illegal Petit Jean employees and had seen a bit of the world through the eyes of the workers.

Morgan told the agents he'd think about their request, meaning no. Then he called Sheriff Tucker across town, who backed him up.

When the immigration agents raided the plant two weeks later, they did not warn Morgan, the sheriff or other county officials.


Knew little of debate
Arkadelphia residents Wesley and Debbie Kluck said they had not thought much about the national immigration debate before the raid. They didn't even know that they knew an illegal immigrant. They simply knew Juanita Hernandez.

The Klucks invited the Hernandez family to their home for the holidays.

After the oldest Hernandez daughter was admitted to Ouachita Baptist University, where Wesley Kluck recently became a vice president, the Klucks raised $20,000 to pay her tuition. They did the same for her younger sister.

The day Juanita Hernandez was caught in the Petit Jean raid, her oldest daughter called the Klucks, frantic and worried that immigration agents would come after the rest of the family. Debbie Kluck told the girl to bring her family over.

Then, she called Sheriff Tucker for help reaching Juanita, who had been taken to a detention center an hour south, in Texarkana. Dr. Kluck e-mailed the governor, a college classmate, who later sent a member of his staff to investigate.

Of the 119 detained workers, only Hernandez and six others were not deported. They were released without bail to await hearings before an immigration judge. The judge could grant Hernandez legal residency if she shows that, among other things, she has no criminal record, has children who are U.S. citizens and that they would suffer "extremely unusual hardship" if she were deported.


Lack of sympathy
Martha Dixon does not understand why people would do so much to help illegal immigrants.

Dixon belongs to a Democratic women's club that donated $1,000 to the Petit Jean workers. And yet Dixon herself has only limited sympathy for the Petit Jean workers because she believes they lower wages for American workers.

People who help undocumented workers are undermining the law, she says.

"You can't straddle the fence, and I think that's what we're trying to do," Dixon said.