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Maricruz got a part-time job cleaning rooms at a hotel. Juan enrolled in English classes. They joined a Catholic church. They spent weekends with their extended family, all of whom lived within a 20-mile radius.

They regularly sent money to their families in Mexico, paying for their daughter to enroll in a university there. They started paying on a piece of land in Mexico, so they could one day return.

Maricruz said she never worried about their immigration status. She seemed only vaguely aware that their residency in North Carolina was illegal and said she didn't realize, until her husband's arrest, that they could be deported.

And then, on that Wednesday in January, Juan didn't arrive to pick her up from work. Smithfield officials told her only that her husband no longer worked there, she said.

Eight days after his disappearance, Juan called from Georgia's Stewart Detention Center.

"He told me not to cry," Maricruz said, "that he was OK."

But they do cry

A few weeks after the arrests, a group of families gathered in a Catholic church in Red Springs to tell their stories. Children played in the corners. Teenagers talked of their fears that their mothers would also be taken. Wives cried at the thought of returning to Mexico. Parents pleaded for the return of their grown children.

All said they had no idea why their family members had been chosen for arrest from the plant's more than 5,000 workers, about half of whom are Hispanic. All, including Maricruz, said their relatives were longtime Smithfield employees who had never been convicted of a crime.

Jamie Zuieback, a spokeswoman for Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Washington, would say only that the government had "special concerns" about the men who were arrested. She said some had criminal histories, although Juan did not. All will be deported.

Organizers with the United Food and Commercial Workers Union, which is campaigning to unionize the Smithfield plant, say the company took advantage of lax immigration enforcement. Now, they say the company, not its workers, should be punished.

"Smithfield has used this workforce for the last 15 years, has profited from this workforce," said union organizer Eduardo Pena. "Who benefitted from this relationship the most?"

Plant officials say that immigration officials have pressured them to turn over their employment records and that they are cooperating to avoid a larger raid. In the past few months, immigration raids at other meatpacking plants have imprisoned hundreds.

At Smithfield, by contrast, several hundred workers whose Social Security numbers immigration officials flagged were forced to quit, but they have not been arrested.

Plant spokesman Dennis Pittman said the company does all it can to catch falsified documents, but it's difficult to know when people use the names and Social Security numbers of citizens.

Life in hiding

In the weeks after Juan's arrest, Maricruz spent her days sequestered at home, waiting for his occasional calls.

Afraid that she, too, would be arrested, she quit her job. She can't drive -- she depended on her husband for transportation -- and had never managed the family finances. She feared that the money they paid toward the land in Mexico was lost.

At her husband's urging, she and her son moved out of the apartment where they lived for nine years, leaving everything but clothes and a few toys. They moved into her brother's trailer in rural Robeson County, where they shared a bedroom with her niece.

They lived with their clothes piled in garbage bags in the corner. Maricruz's toiletries sat atop an old entertainment center at the foot of the bed, where the children played video games on a big-screen TV. A Bible and a picture of the Virgin Mary rested on the nightstand.

On March 10, immigration officials say, her husband was sent back to Mexico. Maricruz has declined interviews since then.

Adrift in the weeks after his arrest, she awaited word from him about what to do next. In the decision to cross the border, as in most of life's major decisions, she followed her husband's lead.

She said that if it were her choice, she would stay.

Even life as a lawbreaker in the United States, she said, is better than the one she left in Mexico.

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