What does the United States gain from a massive immigration raid? The eradication of a town or city’s immigrant—or undocumented—community? Lower unemployment rates for American citizens? A stronger economy?

No, none of that. The result is three-fold. It destroys families, hurts companies and weakens local economies. Case in point: Postville, a small rural town in northeast Iowa, surrounded by farms and corn fields and home to just over 2,500 people.

On May 12, 2008, Postville was the site of the largest workplace immigration raid in United States history. It took place at the Agriprocessors kosher meat packing plant, the area’s largest employer. Federal authorities arrested 389 people, most of them undocumented Central American workers.

Overnight, a quarter of Postville’s residents were detained. Two-hundred-eighty-seven people—almost all from small towns in Guatemala—were deported. Many who weren’t at the plant the morning of the raid fled with their families anyway, leaving behind their belongings and abandoned houses. In a matter of weeks, nearly 1,000 immigrants left Postville.

Nine days after the arrests, Postville council members met to discuss the situation. Mayor Robert Penrod attacked the media for "false reports" that Postville was a ghost town. A representative of the local Chamber of Commerce declared that business was unaffected. Several councilmembers even expressed their support for the raid. Among them, Jeff Reinhard thanked ICE agents for enforcing the law, as recorded during the day’s session.

But the town's economy soon felt the impact. Within a year, Allamakee County, where Postville is located, lost 7% of its workforce. In 2009, the city collected fewer taxes and saw decreased revenue, as revealed by financial statements reviewed by Univision News. Dozens of houses were auctioned off by banks, several businesses closed and some owners of rental apartments left town.

In a March 4, 2010, report, Iowa State Auditor David Vaudt wrote: “The City was not prepared for the financial crisis which developed with the closing of AgriProcessors. The delinquent property taxes and unpaid utilities to the City caused reduction in services and projects originally planned. The number of foreclosed homes became a concern with the City taking an aggressive look for grant opportunities for housing rehabilitation.”

Postville was founded by German immigrants in 1849, and remained a predominantly white community for generations. After Abraham Aaron Rubashkin, a Jewish businessman from New York, founded Agriprocessors in 1987, many Orthodox Jewish families also began to settle in town.

When Agriprocessors began operating, Postville had about 1,400 residents. But more labor was needed, and it wasn’t long before immigrants from Guatemala and Mexico—who were mostly undocumented—arrived looking for work.

Between 2000 and 2010, Postville's white population decreased 5%, while the number of Hispanics increased 52%.

Agriprocessors went bankrupt after the raid, and Canadian businessman Hershey Friedman purchased the business in 2009 and renamed it Agri Star.

Rubashkin’s son, Sholom, a former plant manager, was sentenced to prison for fraud and money laundering. President Donald pardoned him in 2017. Abraham Aaron Rubashkin died April 2 from the novel coronavirus.

In Postville, the 2008 raid did not affect demographic trends. On the contrary, the community is now more diverse than ever. Shortly after the raid, the company hired immigrants from the Pacific island of Palau, who are legally entitled to work in the United States. Somali refugees from Minnesota also arrived to work at the plant. A number of Guatemalan women arrested by ICE received humanitarian visas to stay with their children. Over time, more Guatemalan and Mexican immigrants have settled in town.

Despite President Trump’s nationalist, anti-immigrant rhetoric, Postville’s demographic shifts reflect the inevitable future of the United States: in 2050, an estimated one in five U.S. residents will be immigrants and the number of Latinos will triple to represent 29% of the population.

Between 2010 and 2018, the white population in Postville decreased 28%. In that same time frame, Hispanics grew to make up a third of all residents and the black population to 12%, according to Census Bureau data. While older residents are now predominantly white, young people are diverse. In 2018, more than half of the children between the ages of 5 and 9 in the town were Hispanic.

In Allamakee, the percentage of people born in another country grew from 4.36% in 2015 to 5.3% in 2018. An annual festival celebrates that diversity: each year, the community gathers in the high school gym to see Somali teenagers in colorful dresses, Guatemalan children in traditional costumes, American and Mexican cowboys (the latter known as charros) and quinceañeras in long dresses. The school website features information in three languages: English, Spanish and Somali. Thirty out of every 100 students in the Postville School District are Hispanic, and seven of 100 are black, mostly from Somalia.

It’s also religiously diverse. Twenty years ago, Postville had three churches: Catholic, Lutheran and Presbyterian. Now, there are 10 prayer centers in town, including synagogues, the Islamic society—mostly attended by Somalis—and several Hispanic Pentecostal churches.

In Postville, more than half of the population speaks a language other than English at home. On N. Lawler St., on one side is Club 51, there is a typical American bar, while some 80 meters away sits Juba Grocery & Halal, the store where Somalis shop. Nearby are Tonita’s store, La Canasta Supermarket and the El Pariente taco shop, all popular with locals.

The 2008 raid did not eradicate Postville’s immigrant community, but it did separate families. The morning of the operation, ICE agents arrested parents while their children were at school. Those left behind took refuge in the Catholic church. A few kilometers away, family members were processed in a makeshift immigration court at a fairground.

Many children born in the United States had to leave the country to reunite with their parents in Guatemala. At a city council meeting days after the raid, someone reported that "a majority of the children that are U.S. citizens are getting ready to go home," suggesting that the country where they were born wasn’t actually their home.

After Jorge Castillo was arrested by ICE in May 2008, his wife, Maribel, returned to Guatemala with their daughters. The family reunited six months later when Jorge was deported. In 2014, they sent their eldest daughter Jeidy—a U.S. citizen—back to Postville so she could study. She wouldn’t have the same opportunities in Guatemala, they reasoned.

Jeidy, 12, lives with a school teacher and has not seen her family since 2014. "I tell [her sisters] that one day, their sister will have the little that’s necessary and she will give it to them wholeheartedly," Maribel told Univision News in 2018.

In the United States, Jeidy said she constantly misses her parents. “They don't give me hugs here. Everyone here has parents, I'm the only one who doesn't have them,” she told Univision News.

Politicians often justify raids and deportations by saying that immigrants take American jobs. In fact, that’s one of President Trump's favorite lines.

But life in Allamakee tells a different story. As the immigrant population increased, so did the number of people with jobs. And that follows national trends. In 2010, the county’s unemployment rate was more than 9%. But the figure has continued to fall, and was 2.1% in September 2019.

The crisis caused by the coronavirus pandemic this year—since March, more than 42 million people have filed for unemployment nationwide—altered positive trends. In April, Allamakee reported 10.3% unemployment, the highest rate in the last decade.

The Postville raid was part of the George W. Bush administration’s Endgame strategic plan, launched in 2003 to deport all undocumented immigrants over a 10-year period. The goals of the mass raid were to increase public safety, reduce crime and "improve the well-being" of American society.

Trump now uses the same discourse, attacking undocumented immigrants for being criminals and bringing drugs into the country. "The crackdown on illegal criminals is merely the keeping of my campaign promise," he tweeted in February 2017.

But crime in Postville is hardly what Trump describes. The local police department is made up of three officers and, unlike most departments in the country, doesn't even report crime statistics to the FBI.

The Allamakee Sheriff's Office reports the crimes. In the past 10 years, the office reported 10 violent crimes, mostly aggravated assaults. Of the 11 criminals identified for these crimes, 10 were white.

And the sheriff reported a total of 136 crimes against property between 2008 and 2018, though numbers are declining: from 54 offenses in 2016, to six in 2017 and zero in 2018, the last year for which there is a report. In 2016, the year Allamakee reported the most property crimes, 35 such offenses were committed in the state of Iowa for every 1,000 residents. That’s barely 3.9 crimes per 1,000 people.

And a large part of the economy actually depends largely on undocumented labor. Before the COVID pandemic, there was a real shortage of "low-skilled" workers in sectors like agriculture, construction and food processing—jobs that immigrants often fill. But the government refuses to give out work visas.

Almost 12 years after the raids in Postville, the town is more diverse than ever. A sign at the town’s entrance reads: "Hometown to the World.” The plant now has a different name and new foreign owners. Some families are still separated and a handful of undocumented youth who came to the country as children depend on the DACA program to stay in the country. The town is safe and until recently there was work for almost everyone.

So how did the raid benefit the country? No one knows, but figures indicate it didn’t.