A single mother called a neighbor on the morning of Aug. 7, as federal immigration agents stormed the rural Mississippi chicken plant where she worked: “Manuel,” he remembered her saying, “I can’t get out. I have faith, and I trust you to take care of my kids.” That afternoon, Manuel Ramirez watched TV with the boys, who are 12, 10, and 5, making excuses for their mother’s absence until the oldest child saw on Facebook that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement had come to her plant. The child started to cry. “You’re a bad friend,” Ramirez recalled him saying. In the four days that followed, as the children’s mother sat in a Louisiana detention center, Ramirez tried to cheer the brothers with pizza and burritos, but he was struggling with the burden—and nervous. Like the boys’ mother, he is in the United States illegally. He might be rounded up too. And then what? He had already been ticketed for driving without a license earlier this year. “What am I going to do?” he asked. “I can’t fly.”
As Ramirez, 38, recounted this story last Sunday afternoon in the annex of St. Michael’s Catholic Church here in Forest, he used the sleeves of his polo shirt to dry his tears. (Like several other undocumented immigrants in this story, I have changed his name because of his fears of deportation.) He wanted to know if I could help him get working papers. The other night he dreamed he was dressed all in white. “I asked Father Roberto, ‘What does it mean to be wearing all white clothes?’ And he said, ‘It means you are an angel, because they are not your children and you are watching after them.’ “...