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.

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.