“It’s like it was a movie“, He recalled Wednesday in dialogue with the AFP Óscar Mendía, a Guatemalan who told 25 arrested migrants in last Friday’s raid next to a home of the Home Depot chain. “People hid under the wood, in the trash, where they found a hole“
The operation was part of the antimigracy roller that the administration of Republican Donald Trump deployed that day in factories and work sites in the second largest city in the United States and that He triggered five days of protests and disturbances.
“All that started here“, Mendía said, while pointing the parking lot in which now there were just twenty people.
The Guatemalan, who He has lived 26 years without documents in the United StatesI had never been in a raid.
“It is one thing to see it on television, he said, and another livingeither”.
“You stay like Paniqueado (terrified), you scare yourself when you see a van, just like that, look“He said, when aiming at a white van.
“Terrifying”
But the need is stronger than fear, workers claim.
“It’s hard but we have to workWe have families to maintain, ”said another 40 -year -old migrant under anonymity who sends money to Honduras to take care of his six children.
Mendía considers men like him, who at the tip of remittances educated and raised his three children in Guatemala, They have less to fear in this tension climate.
But for the new generation, the situation “is terrifying,” he said. “They come with illusion, they have been dreaming of a future“
Next to him, A 21 -year -old worker numbly. The young man He saved himself from the raid because they had already collected it to go to work at a work.
On Monday he doubted, but returned: “We need“
This is what these migrants of similar stories are incessantly repeated: They fled from countries razed by economic and political crisesor for violence, in search of work to help their families.
And in the United States they find space in sectors such as construction and agriculture, where they play a crucial role Not only as labor but as taxpayers.
The undocumented US $ 90 billion in taxes in 2023 in the United Statesaccording to an analysis by the American Immigration Council of that year.