Trump says American workers are hurt by immigration. But after ICE raided this Texas town, they never showed up.

CACTUS, Tex. — The DJs at the Spanish-language radio stations gave warnings whenever Immigration and Customs Enforcement came around. “Be careful out there,” they’d say. “The relatives are in town.”

Not on the day of the Big Raid. Nothing leaked out. State police sealed off the highways in and out of town. ICE agents came with a fleet of empty buses and left with them full. 

Their target that day was the huge, steam-billowing beef plant here on the high plains of the Texas Panhandle, owned then by meatpacking giant Swift & Co. “Everyone on the production floor was shouting, ‘La Migra! La Migra!’ ” Monica Loya, a former plant worker, recalled. “There were people hiding behind machinery, in boxes, even in the carcasses.” 

Operation Wagon Train hit Swift & Co. plants in six states on Dec. 12, 2006, arresting nearly 1,300 workers. In tiny Cactus, 300 were taken into custody — about 10 percent of the town’s population. It was the largest workplace raid in U.S. history.

Cactus and surrounding Moore County have bounced back from the raid, and the plant today is once more thriving, shipping steaks to Walmart and hamburger meat to Burger King. But finding workers remains a perpetual struggle. JBS USA, a Brazilian conglomerate that now owns the plant, has raised starting wages nearly 25 percent in recent years, but like other meat processors across the country, it survived by finding a different set of foreigners to do jobs that used to be filled by illegal workers: refugees.