How Trump instilled fear in a tiny town in Nebraska

The Flores family invited almost everybody they knew to baby Elian’s first birthday party, but Leydi Flores wasn’t sure whether anyone would show up.

Her family’s Mexican restaurant in O’Neill, Nebraska, has had a ghostly feel in recent days, as many Latino families in this rural farming town lay low, scared that they might become targets of US President Donald Trump’s sweeping immigration crackdown. Across the country, raids have ensnared thousands and crowded immigration detention centres.

“I’m worried,” Flores said, cuddling her grandson in a banquet room at the restaurant as her daughter put together an enormous cardboard Winnie-the-Pooh for the celebration.

A sunset turns the sky over O’Neill a vivid pink. Credit: Sarah L. Voisin/The Washington Post

“We invited all these people. Will they come? Do they have visas or not? Will the police be outside watching?”

The close-knit community in O’Neill is still recovering from a 2018 raid by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents at several agricultural facilities, which gutted the midwest town, forced some businesses to close and left many residents reeling.

“I feel like we’ve bounced back to a certain extent, but I feel like there’s a heaviness you can’t truly recover from,” part-time English teacher Kasey Hoffman said. She helped care for children at the local elementary school after their parents were detained seven years ago. “Even now, it just feels so heavy.”

The town took a big hit to its workforce in the aftermath of the raid. At least 100 families moved away. The impact still gives people pause, even in an overwhelmingly white county of ranches and cornfields that went for Trump by a huge margin in November. A flag flying in one yard these days urges “Take America Back”.

Elian Flores celebrates his first birthday with family and friends.Credit: Sarah L. Voisin/The Washington Post

“Whatever you believe about immigration,” Bill Price, who was mayor at the time, said, “the realities are, they fulfil a lot of jobs no one else will do.”

Awash with fear

In Hoffman’s family literacy class, she counted only nine of 25 adult students on a Thursday night last month. Their anxiety was palpable.

All had seen the images on social media of immigrants, their hands and ankles shackled, being led onto United States military planes bound for Guatemala. That week, the nearby meatpacking town of Schuyler was so awash with fear over false media reports of a large-scale ICE raid that the police chief put out a statement debunking it.

The students peppered Hoffman with questions: Could ICE come and question their children at school? Could they be stopped while driving?

“I heard on the news that they are going to be targeting people with visas next, and it’s not just happening here, but all over the country,” Armando Pantoja, sitting in the front row with his wife, said.

Kasey Hoffman, centre, hugs her eight-year-old son after teaching a family literacy class at the elementary school in O’Neill. Credit: Sarah L. Voisin/The Washington Post

He and the other students relaxed a bit when they split up into teams to play a Family Feud-style vocabulary game.

“How do you say donkey?” Denice Frausto, a volunteer serving as quizmaster, asked.

“Burro!” the class responded.

“How do you say carpet?” Frausto asked.

And then, “How do you say wound?”

Growing population

Tiny O’Neill – population 3500 – sits among corn and soybean farms and cattle ranches in a remote part of north-eastern Nebraska not far from the South Dakota border.

It’s a quiet town founded by Irish settlers, with shamrocks dotting its landscape and blooming on footpaths, skip bins and a large green and white mural on the south side of town. Another, even bigger shamrock decorates the middle of the main intersection that is a frequent meeting spot.

O’Neill is just over three hours north-west of Omaha. Credit: Sarah L. Voisin/The Washington Post

The surrounding county’s Latino population increased to 5 per cent between 2012 and 2022, with both documented and undocumented migrants arriving to pick tomatoes, plant potatoes and feed hogs.

The newcomers had been “a small but consistent part of growth in a state that doesn’t have a lot of growth”, Josie Schafer, director of the University of Nebraska’s Centre for Public Affairs Research, said.

More than half the state’s foreign-born residents are from Latin American countries. About 13,000 settled in Nebraska last year.

For more than a decade, those who came to the town after illegally crossing the US-Mexico border knew whom they had to see for a job – Juan Pablo Sanchez Delgado, who was undocumented himself but owned a Mexican restaurant and ethnic grocery store in town. He scammed these new arrivals for years, federal prosecutors charged, amassing a fortune and luxury homes in Las Vegas by cashing the workers’ pay cheques and skimming money that should have gone to taxes.

‘It was scary’

On a hot day in August 2018, ICE and Department of Homeland Security forces swarmed O’Neill to arrest Sanchez Delgado and his associates, snagging more than 100 undocumented workers in the process.

Custodian Angelica Riz, who was detained during the 2018 ICE raid, sweeps the floors of O’Neill Elementary School. Credit: Sarah L. Voisin/The Washington Post

Angelica Riz was spraying down trucks at Christensen Farms, one of the country’s biggest pork producers, when federal agents burst through the door of the garage and trained “big guns” on her and other workers.

“They yelled, ‘Stay where you are. Put your hands up!’” she said. “It was scary.”

She had a legal work permit, but her papers were at home, so she was herded onto a bus with the others, including two pregnant women, for a harrowing, two-hour drive to a detainment facility in Grand Island, Nebraska. The detainees were given little water or food, according to an American Civil Liberties Union report.

In a recent statement, an ICE spokesperson said the agency acted to protect the men and women who were being exploited. Sanchez Delgado was eventually sentenced to 120 months in prison, with the judge calling it “one of the most egregious financial crimes” he had seen.

The workers of O’Neill were the collateral damage.

Divisions emerge

Once in Grand Island, Riz saw nearly all of O’Neill’s Latino residents in a tented holding facility. Her husband was among them, still in his dirty ranch clothes, which meant their two young daughters were still with a babysitter back home. Authorities had confiscated mobile phones, so she had no way to check on them.

Yet unbeknownst to her, the babysitter had fled herself after dropping the children at O’Neill Elementary School – which opened to take in about a dozen students who had been separated from their parents. Employees cared for Riz’s seven-year-old and four-month-old until she was released several hours later.

Like many Hispanic residents in O’Neill, Nebraska, Leydi Flores worries about how her community is being affected by federal immigration raids. Credit: Sarah L. Voisin/The Washington Post

Many residents supported the workers after the raid, helping stock a food pantry and volunteering to give them rides to their hearing dates. On social media, however, others backed the federal operation. Such divisions strained fence-post conversations between neighbours.

“For months and months, there was a lot of worry in our community,” former schools superintendent Amy Shane recounted.

“You didn’t know when you were visiting people in the community how they felt about what had happened.”

‘A war wound that won’t heal’

Riz is now a custodian at the elementary school, along with Mayra Felix, another Guatemalan immigrant who was caught up in the raid at a tomato plant.

The women said the trauma of that summer had never left them. Despite both having legal documentation to work, they’ve basically been sheltering in place since Trump’s inauguration. Their husbands are still undocumented.

“For the time being, it’s better to spend the majority of time in the house,” said Riz, who is 39. She keeps her green card and driver’s licence in her sparkly pink phone case, though she no longer will drive the hour and a half to Walmart.

The town’s trauma remains, too. The 24-acre hydroponic tomato farm – which had been one of O’Neill’s biggest employers, with about 80 people – struggled to find replacement workers and finally shut for good in 2020. The potato-processing plant also scaled back operations. Even today, Holt County has more than 150 open jobs, according to its economic development department.

William Lopez, a professor of public health at the University of Michigan, is writing a book about the first Trump administration’s immigration raids.

Such enforcement actions can damage communities for years, he said, fracturing social networks, worsening food insecurity and endangering physical and mental health.

After a 2008 raid on a meatpacking plant in Postville, Iowa, Lopez noted, researchers found the following year that Latino babies had lower birth weights than white babies.

“There’s no clear end to the impact. The potential removal just lingers on for years like a war wound that won’t heal,” he said.

Painful memories

In the years since the raid in O’Neill, Flores has built two thriving businesses that started with making tortillas in her garage. She and her current husband now run a grocery store and a restaurant, La Costeñita. At 48, she is at last a legal resident.

Her sunny daughter, 20-year-old Anais Flores, is an American citizen who works three jobs – as a paraprofessional at the elementary school, a waitress at the restaurant and a party planner. She founded that business herself, teaching herself to arrange flowers by watching TikTok videos.

The latest Trump immigration crackdown has brought back painful memories for Anais. She was seven when her father left the country with little fanfare to avoid deportation.

Anais Flores at La Costeñita, her family’s Mexican restaurant in O’Neill. Credit: Sarah L. Voisin/The Washington Post

“I’ve blurred a lot of it out, but I remember thinking, ‘What did we do? Why?’” she recalled. “It was really hard on me.”

She resolved to put the current tension out of her mind for her son Elian’s birthday party. As it turned out, people whom they hadn’t seen in weeks showed up. The restaurant was packed. The kids attacked a piñata. The adults danced into the evening as red, green and yellow disco lights flickered overhead.

It was good to put worry at bay for a night, but it was only one night.

“It’s always something. We can’t lift ourself up,” Leydi Flores said. “First it was COVID, now the immigration system. We are still waiting for the good times to arrive.”

Razzan Nakhlawi contributed to this report.

The Washington Post

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