MOUNT PLEASANT, Iowa _ After Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers descended on the Midwest Precast Concrete facility on the outskirts of this small, quiet town in eastern Iowa, news of the dramatic May 9 raid quickly spread to the community's schools. Some students in the high school left class without a word, hurrying to track down their family members. Some teachers quietly cried to themselves, knowing a handful of their students would be without their fathers that night. Some parents picked their kids up from school early, fearing immigration enforcement might next come for the students.
But Gabriella, a thin 12-year-old with dark brown hair and black-rimmed glasses who until recently only worried about her next clarinet performance, found out about the raid in a text from her mom on the bus ride home: "Immigration took dad away."
When government vans carrying the 32 men left town to detention centers spread across the region, it showed how unprepared the community of Mount Pleasant was for a raid by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
As the Trump administration picks up the pace of workplace raids nationwide, other communities will have the same experience that Mount Pleasant did. No one knows, however, which workplace will be hit next, which schools might have to prepare their teachers and students, which families will soon have to explain a parent's disappearance to fearful children and scramble to pay their bills after its breadwinner is taken away. Our country is vast, and immigrant communities dot every state.
A raid could happen anytime, Gabriella's parents, who came to the U.S. illegally from Guatemala, had told her. But as the school bus passed rows of cottage-style, white homes and expansive lawns that Wednesday afternoon, Gabriella thought it might have been a joke.
It wasn't until she opened the door to an empty home that reality sank in: She would have to care for her three younger siblings until her mom returned from meeting immigration attorneys in Des Moines. There would be no celebration for her youngest brother's fourth birthday that evening.
That night she cried herself to sleep and dreamed her dad would be home when she woke up. A month later, he is still detained.
Gabriella hasn't been eating; she spends most of the time in her room with the door closed, said her mother, Alba. (She asked that her family's name not be used because of their immigration status.)
Gabriella's dad had promised he was going to take her and her siblings out more on the weekends this summer. "He just likes to make us laugh and make us happy," Gabriella said, before staring at her feet. "It was wrong for them to take all of those men because they have families."
The raid caught Mount Pleasant by surprise; the people and institutions most affected were not prepared to deal with the fallout. But a few people suspected this day might come. They formed a group, Iowa Welcomes its Immigrant Neighbors. They even held an emergency response training session just weeks earlier.
The town of 8,600 residents "is like Norman Rockwell stuff," said Trey Hegar, the pastor of the First Presbyterian Church, a house of worship across the street from the green fairgrounds that host the annual Midwest Old Threshers, a celebration of antique steam-powered farming equipment.
But in a town where 8 percent of residents are Latino, many of whom lack papers to live legally in the United States, the idea that ICE would raid a local business wasn't totally farfetched to his congregation. A decade earlier, immigration officials detained nearly 400 workers at a meatpacking plant in Postville, an Iowa town of 2,000 residents to the north of Mount Pleasant.
Since President Donald Trump's inauguration, ICE has arrested more than 4,000 in Iowa and four neighboring states, with dozens of children being separated from their parents, according to the Quaker-affiliated American Friends Service Committee Iowa, which tracks the actions. Many in the religious community thought more raids could target towns like Mount Pleasant.
Officially, the town of Mount Pleasant never had a response plan. But in the past year, Hegar and the school district designated the church as a safe space for families to reunite with their children after a raid. The church has held this role for decades in the case of a natural disaster.
On the morning of May 9, the school district immediately called the First Presbyterian Church. Soon, the church was ready to receive families with snacks and bilingual volunteers. It was "providential," Hegar said, that the church would be ready for the raid, but the lack of communication from federal and local law enforcement upset the gray-bearded, energetic pastor.
"I got pissed," Hegar said, leaning back in his office chair, surrounded by walls with hundreds of books and an honorable-discharge certificate from his four years in the Marine Corps. "The next day, it really hit. ICE came in, raided our community, yanked families apart. These are not the worst of the worst. These are families that play soccer and lift up Iowa family values. These are good, good fun-loving people."
Around 90 children didn't return to school the next today, Hegar said, out of fear. When pupils did return, the emotional support they needed wasn't there, he said. John Henriksen, the superintendent for Mount Pleasant Community Schools, said the district didn't do any specific things to address the raid at schools.
"Routines are important in a time like this," he said. "We kept our school day our school day. We'll lock arms with the Presbyterian church and let them take the lead."
Estrella Macias didn't go back to her second-grade class for a couple days after ICE arrested her father, Ricardo.
"How am I going to be happy without my dad?" asked the 8-year-old, playing with Pokemon stickers on her My Little Pony T-shirt.
She's been distracted in school since, said her aunt, Julieta, whose husband was also detained that day but was released a week later on bond. "I feel so bad because my husband came back, but my niece says, 'When will my dad come back?'" said Julieta. Estrella, speaking in her last week of school, said she used to be excited about summer break. But then the raid happened.
"We were going to go on vacation, but I told my mom that I don't want to go anywhere without my dad," she said, a hole in her smile where a baby tooth recently fell out. "I want to wait until my dad comes home."
Her dad has already been deported before, and the family doesn't know when or if he'll be able to come home.
Though sympathy for the immigrants' plight _ especially the children they left behind _ is widespread in Mount Pleasant, some residents supported the raid.
Mount Pleasant native Garrett Carlston, a 21-year-old petty officer in the Navy, said that while he feels bad for the children, the families should have known this was bound to happen.
"It's no secret that Mount Pleasant had quite a bit of illegal immigrants," Carlston said. "The townspeople didn't really care. But with them coming to the country illegally, they made that choice and it was only a matter of time something was done. It's a shame, but it's their own fault."
