Document
Residential Services for Persons with Developmental Disabilities: Status and Trends Through 2008
EL XAB, Guatemala – It took Surama Morales five years of plucking feathers, pulling bones from chicken carcasses and washing the birds’ breasts to pay off the $4,200 she borrowed to pay a smuggler to help her cross into the United States.
And the very week after she paid off the loan, she was arrested in a federal immigration raid at the Chattanooga Pilgrim’s Pride chicken processing plant and sent back to Guatemala.
“I cried bitter tears because I had nothing,” she said three years after the April 16, 2008, raid while sitting on her front porch in the village of el Xab, near Guatemala’s western coast. “But my parents would say, ‘At least you are coming back alive and not dead.'”