In May, Magali Bonilla, 21, drove with her mother, Maria, from Gainesville to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement field office in Atlanta.
Maria Bonilla had crossed the border illegally in 2001, but obtained a work permit to stay and work legally in the country, because of her clean criminal record and her four U.S.-born children. To ward off deportation, she was required to regularly check in with ICE to allow the agency to check for arrests.
Magali Bonilla or her older sister, 22-year-old Araceli, routinely accompanied their mother to those ICE visits. The elder Bonilla never learned to read or write while growing up poor in El Salvador, and the sisters felt they were needed as conduits between their mother and federal agents.
Maria Bonilla took time off from her job at a Gainesville poultry plant ahead of her May ICE check-in. That meeting was set to be her first with immigration authorities since Donald Trump returned to the White House earlier this year.
It didn’t go as she hoped.
According to Magali Bonilla, ICE took her mother into custody during what was supposed to be a routine check-in. It’s a tactic that ICE officials are deploying more often across the nation as the agency seeks to meet a quota of 3,000 arrests per day, according to immigration lawyers and advocates.
The arrest of immigrants with work authorization could herald looming challenges for the poultry industry, and others that rely heavily on immigrant workers, advocates say. Maria Bonilla had legally worked in poultry for roughly two decades.
Credit: Ben Hendren
Credit: Ben Hendren
“What they’re doing is they’re trapping people,” said Nancy Powell, an immigration attorney in metro Atlanta, who began working with the Bonilla family following Maria’s arrest at the ICE field office.
“They’re saying to come in for their ICE appointment in relation to their work permit or because they have to periodically get new [fingerprint scans]. People are reporting like they’re supposed to, and that’s when they get picked up.”
ICE did not respond to a request for comment about the Bonilla arrest or the tactic of detaining people during routine visits to the agency. Maria Bonilla was initially sent to the Stewart Detention Center in South Georgia, then was deported to El Salvador less than a month later.
Since taking the White House in January, the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown has not been limited to people without documentation. It has also targeted immigrants who had been granted work authorization after undergoing background checks, even as they lacked permanent legal status in the country.
That includes people like Bonilla who entered the country illegally years ago but had not previously been deemed a priority for deportation by immigration authorities.
Also targeted have been hundreds of thousands of recent arrivals who received temporary legal status and the right to work through Biden-era humanitarian programs — which Trump has also moved to end.
Mike Giles, president of the Georgia Poultry Federation, said in a statement that poultry companies “are closely monitoring” the winding down of Biden immigration programs to “remain in compliance with federal employment authorization laws.”
Following the ICE field office visit, Magali Bonilla drove back to Gainesville, the self-appointed “poultry capital of the world,” without her mother, whose poultry job provided for her children.
“When I got home, I almost had to go to the hospital because I think I had a panic attack,” Magali Bonilla said. “I had a mental breakdown.”
Gainesville’s billion-dollar poultry industry produces upward of 30 million pounds of chicken every day. Broiler chickens represent Georgia’s top agricultural commodity, according to a University of Georgia report. No other state in the country produces more chickens.
Credit: Alyssa Pointer / Alyssa.Pointer@
Credit: Alyssa Pointer / Alyssa.Pointer@
Gigi Pedraza is the executive director of the Atlanta-based Latino Community Fund.
She said in a statement that immigrant workers are a key engine of the state’s poultry sector, and that it is in the industry’s interest to keep those workers in the country, instead of driving them out.
“The poultry industry is known for many as a ‘3-D industry’: dangerous, dirty and demanding,” Pedraza said. “In Georgia it employs 37,000 people, many of them immigrants with various documentation situations. All of them are essential to the operation of one of the biggest and most important sectors in the state — both as workers but also as consumers and a critical part of the state economy.
“For years [industry] leaders have asked for immigration reform, and other long-term solutions to the workforce demands.”
Since her mother’s arrest, Magali Bonilla has scrapped plans to begin nursing school this fall, to avoid taking time off work as a medical assistant and to help support her younger siblings, ages 15 and 17.
“I have to step up and be a role model for them,” she said. “Not having my mom around is hard.”
Magali Bonilla created an online fundraiser to support the family, and cover the cost of what is certain to be a yearslong legal process that might allow for her mother to legally return to the U.S. from El Salvador.
Powell said the speed of Maria Bonilla’s deportation raises due process concerns.
When Maria Bonilla was detained, Powell said she lodged an appeal of her deportation order. She said the filing should have stopped Bonilla’s deportation until a judge issued a decision on the appeal. But Bonilla was removed to El Salvador before that process played out.
Powell said that’s something she is seeing more and more with clients in detention.
“Unfortunately, Maria’s case, it’s not an outlier. It’s not an exception,” she said, noting that other clients have been deported while appeals were pending. “That defeats the purpose of the appeal.”
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