Then, on Jan. 24, her husband disappeared.

U.S. immigration officials arrested him and 20 other workers at Smithfield Foods' gigantic Bladen County slaughterhouse. They drove him to Georgia and locked him up as an illegal immigrant.

Maricruz's husband, known to his managers as Rodolfo Cordova, found himself in the middle of the nation's new get-tough immigration enforcement strategy. So did his family. The News & Observer is telling their story to offer a fuller picture of how the federal crackdown is playing out in the lives of people who immigrated illegally.

After years of standing by as millions of illegal immigrants poured over the Mexican border, federal officials are pulling immigrants from their homes and workplaces in North Carolina and around the country. Earlier this month in Massachusetts, 361 illegal immigrants were arrested at a New Bedford factory. Sixty workers were quickly released on humanitarian grounds as sole caregivers of children. Others were sent to jails or detention centers. It was one in a string of high-profile raids at factories in the past few months.

Between mid-2005 and mid-2006, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement deported more than 187,000 people, a number the agency's Web site said was a 10 percent increase over the previous year. And those numbers don't take into account the past four months of heightened enforcement.

Immigrant advocates argue that it's unfair to target workers seemingly selected at random from a pool of 12 million people who live in the United States illegally.

Those who favor the crackdown say the high-profile arrests are the government's best tool for ending illegal immigration. They say that once illegal immigrants get the message that they aren't safe in the United States, they will leave.

And those contemplating a border crossing might also think twice. Government statistics show that in the four months since enforcement increased, the number of illegal immigrants caught crossing from Mexico into the United States dropped 27 percent.

"No lawbreaker can complain when he's caught," said Mark Krikorian, director of the Washington-based Center for Immigration Studies, a think tank that supports tighter controls on immigration. "You can't say, 'Everybody else was speeding, officer, why did you stop me?' Living in a dysfunctional Third World society is not an excuse for sneaking into the United States."

New name, new home

Maricruz, 39, and her husband, whose real name is Juan, paid a smuggler to bring them over the border almost a decade ago.

A few weeks after her husband's arrest, Maricruz agreed to let a reporter visit her home. She declined, however, to give a last name other than Cordova, the name her husband paid $1,000 for when they arrived in the United States.

The $1,000 that bought the Cordova name also secured a fraudulent birth certificate and Social Security number. That enabled Juan to get hired at Smithfield, Maricruz said.

Maricruz said it was well-known in her village near Acapulco, in the Mexican state of Guerrero, that there were well-paying jobs at the Bladen County plant. Two of her brothers had already made their way to Tar Heel and were working for Smithfield.

In Mexico, they lived with her parents -- a dozen people in a two-room house. Her husband earned money picking crops. The pay at Smithfield started at about $8 an hour. To them, it was an incredible sum.

They rented an apartment in the Robeson County town of Lumberton, about 100 miles south of Raleigh. Eight years ago they had a son, Andy, a U.S. citizen who has never seen Mexico.

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