Village fills with deportees as US cracks down
By TRACI CARL
The Associated Press
XICALCAL, Guatemala (AP) — For years, the only people in this valley were those too old or too young to make the trip to the United States. Now the village bustles again with deported workers.
The reason is a raid that happened nearly two years ago and 3,000 miles away. On a bitterly cold March morning in New Bedford, Mass., dozens of immigration agents swarmed the Michael Bianco Inc. textile factory on the water's edge and arrested 361 people, mostly Central American women.
The sweep was among the first of more than a dozen showcase raids as the U.S. cracks down on illegal immigration. Arrests of undocumented workers have risen tenfold since 2003, to 4,077 last year. Fines for employers have jumped from a few dozen companies paying $45,000 in 2003 to 863 facing penalties totaling $30 million.
The Michael Bianco raid signaled the government's new, no-tolerance attitude toward its undocumented population. So far only 160 former Michael Bianco employees have been sent home. But the raid's impact has had a ripple effect across the U.S., scaring employers into policing their work forces.
Thousands of workers found themselves jobless and gave up on the American Dream, returning to hometowns now struggling to feed the returning populations. One of these is Xicalcal, a collection of homes down a forgotten dirt road in Guatemala's Mayan highlands.
The area was among the hardest-hit during Guatemala's civil war in the 1980s, and many people fled as soldiers and militias killed anyone suspected of being a leftist guerrilla. A few ended up in the industrial port of New Bedford, where the fishing and textile factories rarely asked for work papers.
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