Cactus: Company Town, World's Largest ICE Raid
Texas
Cactus is a small Moore County town whose existence is almost entirely explained by one facility: a large beef-processing plant that has operated under several owners, most recently JBS USA. The plant drew successive waves of refugees and immigrants. Its workforce comes largely from immigrant communities from many countries.
On December twelfth, two thousand six, federal immigration agents launched Operation Wagon Train, hitting Swift plants in six states simultaneously. In Cactus, close to three hundred workers were taken into custody, a large fraction of a town of roughly three thousand people. It was one of the largest workplace immigration raids in United States history.
When the town manager was asked what Cactus would be without the plant, his answer was simple: it would not exist.
