ICE Comes to a Small Town in Tennessee
The Political Scene | The New Yorker
The New Yorker
4.3 • 3.9K Ratings
🗓️ 30 April 2018
⏱️ 12 minutes
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Summary
Earlier this month, Immigration and Customs Enforcement conducted its largest workplace raid in a decade, in the tiny town of Bean Station, Tennessee. The owner of a meat-packing plant was being investigated by the I.R.S., and was suspected of employing undocumented workers. Ninety-seven people, mostly from Mexico and Guatemala, were arrested. Most lived in Morristown, in Hamblen County, which voted seventy-seven per cent for Donald Trump in the 2016 election. This suggests that Hamblen is an inhospitable place for undocumented Latinos, but the reality that the staff writer Jonathan Blitzer found while covering the raid is more complicated; U.S.-born residents were quick to tell him that the community had quickly raised sixty thousand dollars for the families of detainees. Blitzer talked with David Williams, the pastor of Hillcrest Baptist Church, in Morristown, who said that the raid has inspired conservative residents to reconsider what immigration enforcement should look like.
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| 1:11.9 | I'm Dorothy Wickend. On today's Politics and More podcast, the New Yorker's Jonathan |
| 1:17.6 | Blitzer talks to David Williams, the pastor of Hillcrest Baptist Church in Hamblin County, Tennessee. |
| 1:24.7 | The county went for Trump in 2016, but after a recent ICE raid on a local |
| 1:29.9 | meatpacking plant, many in the community have begun to question the administration's |
| 1:34.9 | immigration policies. Now, I don't know if you saw the story that ICE, immigration and |
| 1:42.9 | customs enforcement, recently conducted what's believed to be the largest workplace raid in 10 years. |
| 1:49.0 | Agents arrested almost 100 workers at a meatpacking plant in eastern Tennessee, and we sent Jonathan Blitzer, who covers immigration for the New Yorker, to report on how the raid is affecting immigrant families, business, |
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