BI
This article was reported in partnership with The Trace and Type Investigations.
Nemesia Martinez was working at one of Mississippi's dozens of poultry plants on July 20, 2016, when she missed a call from her neighbor. It was 9 p.m., and her shift defeathering and extracting the livers from chickens, at a facility about an hour outside Jackson, wouldn't end until 10:30. But Martinez had a feeling something was off. When she went to the bathroom to call back, her neighbor told her: "There's police at your home. I don't know what happened."
Martinez, now 47, shared the modest ranch-style house with her partner, Gabino Ramos Hernandez, 48, and a few housemates. She and Ramos had landed in Laurel more than a decade earlier, attracted by the plentiful if grueling poultry work, and had built a stable life for themselves. But they were both unauthorized immigrants, and the threat of arrest by immigration officials was a part of life.