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[url=http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17060481/]Immigration raid leaves Texas town a skeleton
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CACTUS, Tex. - The streets of this small, isolated city in the Texas Panhandle are virtually empty nowadays, and "For Rent" signs decorate dilapidated trailers and shabby 1940s-era military barracks that just weeks ago were full of tenants.
Sales of tortillas and other staples are down. Money wire transactions to Central America have mostly dried up. The "Guatemalas," as local residents call them, are almost all gone, and so are a significant number of Mexican nationals. An estimated 12 to 18 children are now living with only one parent since the other was arrested in a massive immigration raid at the biggest employer in town.
On Dec. 12, hundreds of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents clad in riot gear and armed with assault rifles descended on the Swift & Co. meatpacking plant in a coordinated raid of six of the company's facilities nationwide. The operation was the government's largest single work-site enforcement operation ever. The plant in little Cactus -- a town better known in the state of Chihuahua, Mexico, and in the department of Quiché, Guatemala, where workers came from, than in Texas -- was the largest one raided. Almost a quarter of the 1,282 suspected illegal immigrants arrested in the raids were removed from the Cactus plant.
READ MORE AT THE LINK TO DISCOVER WHO IS THE CONTROLLING FORCE IN THIS SMALL TOWN.
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"Behind every great fortune lies a great crime." Honore de Balzac
"Democrats work to help people who need help. That other party, they work for people who don't need help. That's all there is to it." ~Harry S. Truman
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