Greeley – Yesenia Montelongo stood outside the sprawling Swift meat plant here Tuesday after everyone else had left. She stared beyond the chain-link fence at a group of federal immigration officials.
“I’m waiting for my mother,” the 18-year-old senior at North ridge High School said. “I don’t know where she is.”
Montelongo rushed to the plant Tuesday afternoon with her mother’s residency card. But she was unable to find anyone to take it to prove her mother’s legal status.
Like hundreds of other Latino Greeley residents, Montelongo didn’t get any answers outside the Swift plant.
But the residents came anyway. There was nowhere else to go.
They gathered in front of the plant as Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers escorted Swift workers onto buses and vans.
Workers who did not have their immigration papers were detained. Some were later released. Some family members said they were told it could be several days before they see their loved ones again.
Many outside the plant were family and friends of workers. Others were there to protest Tuesday’s action, which they said would split working families and possibly separate children from their parents.
The immigration action was particularly cruel, they said, because it happened on the Mexican holiday celebrating Our Lady of Guadalupe and came less than two weeks before Christmas.
Angry chants of “boycott Swift” and “racists” were repeated throughout the morning.
“We’re like family in this town; everybody knows each other. To us, this feels like a funeral,” said Greeley resident Anabell Salazar, who came to support friends and neighbors. “There are going to be a lot of people suffering.”
For Montelongo, the uncertainty about her mother, Concepcion Sanchez, weighed heavily Tuesday afternoon.
Montelongo lives with her mother and 13-year-old sister, Alejandra.
She planned to pick up her sister from school and go to her aunt’s house.
Daniel Lopez, 17, also waited for news about a relative Tuesday afternoon. His uncle, who works at Swift, is an illegal immigrant from Mexico. Lopez, whose parents are dead, lives with him.
The Greeley Central High School senior is considering going to college next year, but if his uncle doesn’t return, “I may have to start working fast food or something,” he said.
For others, the day ended with loved ones safe.
Rosa Romero was panicky Tuesday morning, wondering whether her husband, an illegal immigrant, would be deported. The mother of three was relieved to receive a call from him in the afternoon saying he was not detained.
Latino city leaders did not blame the federal government for enforcing immigration laws. But they said Swift officials should be held accountable for employing illegal immigrants for years.
“People are stealing IDs and falsifying documents; they and the company that accepts those documents should be punished,” said former Greeley Councilman Charles Archibeque. “I can sympathize with the families, but this is something we have to reckon with. It has to be legal.”
But others remained angry.
Latinos Unidos, a community group, helped organize a protest Tuesday and planned activities this week in opposition to the immigration action.
“We want people to know that we’re still here,” said group organizer Sylvia Martinez. “We won’t accept this kind of treatment.”
Staff writer Greg Griffin can be reached at 303-954-1241 or ggriffin@denverpost.com.
