An 11-year-old girl cried as she begged for her dad’s release after he was detained with almost 700 workers during a massive ICE raid.
Agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement raided numerous food processing plants in Mississippi and arrested 680 workers.
One of the laborers happened to be the dad of Magdalena Gomez Gregorio.
Crying, she told a CBS reporter: “Government please show some heart, let my parent be free with everybody else please…”
“My dad didn’t do nothing. He’s not a criminal,” she added while standing next to other kids whose parents had been detained.
Heartbreaking photos showed many devastated children crying for their parents.
The raid was the biggest workplace sting in at least a decade. It happened in small towns near Jackson with a workforce made mostly of Latino workers.
The towns raided include Sebastapol, Morton, Carthage, Bay Springs, and Canton.
About 70 family members, residents, and friends waved goodbye as they shouted: “Let them go! Let them go!”
A crying 13-year-old boy whose parents are from Guatemala was forced to say farewell to his mother as he stood next to his father.
Some workers tried to run away on foot but they were caught in the parking area.
“It was a sad situation inside,” said Domingo Candelaria, a legal resident and Koch worker.
A spokesperson for ICE, Bryan Cox, said search warrants were executed at numerous locations across Mississippi.
“I’ve never done anything like this,” said Chris Heck, a resident agent in charge of Ice’s Homeland Security Investigations unit in Jackson. “This is a very large worksite operation.”
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