The Koch Foods chicken-processing plant dominates the small town of Morton, where even the sides of the roads are dotted with feathers.
A person wheels out boxes from the Chicken Outlet Store, as the coronavirus disease outbreak continues in Morton, Mississippi, U.S. May 9, 2020. Picture taken May 9, 2020. REUTERS/Courtland Wells NO RESALES. NO ARCHIVES
President Donald Trump recently signed an executive order aimed at reinforcing the country’s meat supply chain by keeping plants open, despite concerns about rising infections at the facilities. The United Food and Commercial Workers union said last week that at least 30 meatpacking workers across the country have died of COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, and at least 10,000 have contracted it.
With Trump’s order aimed at keeping meatpacking plants open, families like theirs across the country are facing difficult choices of how to maintain livelihoods while keeping themselves safe in the middle of a terrifying pandemic that has already killed nearly 300,000 people worldwide. “We worked together in the same area,” Pedro, 51, recalled over a series of telephone interviews – in 15-minute increments – from detention. They became a couple eight years ago; she was having problems with her husband, Pedro said, and he had split with his wife in Guatemala.
After Pedro and Zoila moved in together and had their son, Jostin, they bought a small cream-colored house in town with a front porch, roses and manicured bushes lining the lawn. Others working at the plant at the time had similar complaints. In 2018, the Illinois-based Koch Foods paid nearly $4 million to settle a lawsuit brought by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission on behalf of more than 100 workers at the Morton plant over claims the company knew – or should have known – of sexual and physical assaults against its Hispanic workers from 2004 to 2008.
It was the biggest workplace sweep in the country since December 2006 and became a symbol of the Trump administration’s efforts to crack down on immigrants living or working in the United States illegally, a central goal of his administration. Koch Foods said it has been vigilant about complying with employment eligibility laws and is cooperating with the government’s investigations.
ICE spokesman Bryan Cox confirmed the details of Pedro’s arrest and detention and said federal law allows for anyone in the country illegally to be deported solely for that reason. He said the agency did not have a record of Zoila, which he said could be an indication of her legal documentation. Pedro had been complaining of a sore throat and cough for weeks before he was moved into quarantine and tested April 14 for coronavirus, according to his medical records.While Pedro slowly recovered and was eventually moved back into the detention center’s general population, Zoila took a turn for the worse, losing her appetite and having trouble getting out of bed. One day, she felt so bad she called 911 and was taken to the hospital. But, she said, the doctors sent her home with some pills.
Kaminsky, from Koch Foods, said he couldn’t provide exact numbers of workers infected at the company’s poultry operations but said they aren’t experiencing the kind of mass outbreaks that have shut down beef and pork plants around the country. He said the company is taking every precaution to protect workers, including daily temperature checks and nightly cleaning of the facility with sanitizers and virus-killing chemicals.
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