Omaha, Nebraska

Elizabeth Rodriguez was still a teenager when she left Mexico with her husband-to-be. They settled in Omaha, Nebraska, where she found steady work at a meatpacking plant and the couple raised four children (U.S. citizens all), eventually buying a small house. It added up to a life that their oldest son, Omar, 23, described to the New York Times as “normal” and “stable.”

Early this year, Omar convinced his mother to see a lawyer about legitimizing her immigration status. Looking over her unblemished record, the lawyer said she had a “perfect case.” To pay for the lawyer, Rodriguez put in extra hours at work, telling herself that her sore feet were a small price to pay for the reward of US citizenship.

That happy prospect evaporated a few months later. On June 10th (as the New York Times recounted in a July 27th article), federal agents raided her plant, Glenn Valley Foods, arresting Rodriguez along with dozens of co-workers. Watching online videos of the arrests, Omar saw his mom, in her factory smock and hard hat, being herded onto a bus.

Three days and many frantic inquiries later, Omar and his siblings learned where their mother had been taken. Finally permitted to make a phone call, Rodriguez reported that she was being held in a detention camp in a rural part of the state. The authorities had offered her $1,000 and a plane ticket to self-deport, but she had turned them down. She would do everything she could, she vowed, to fight the case and remain in Omaha with her family.

Since her arrest, Omar has been trying to borrow $5,000 for the bond to secure his mother’s release, while taking a nightshift job at a call center to help cover living expenses. Meanwhile, his two teenage sisters have been cooking meals, using their mother’s recipes. And all three have been doing their best to comfort their seven-year-old brother through a period of panic attacks, “waking up at night short of breath, wheezing and choking,” according to the Times’ account. It got so bad one night that Omar had to take his brother to a hospital emergency room.

Communication between the kids and their mother has consisted of a series of high-pressure phone calls, with a strict time limit of 15 minutes. Rodriguez hasn’t said much about what she’s been through. “It wasn’t in her nature to complain,” the Times observed, “not even now, about the raid, the detention center or the lawyer she could no longer seem to reach.”

In one call, witnessed by Times reporter Eli Saslow, she told her seven-year-old she would be “home soon.”

“When?” he asked.

“I don’t know yet,” Rodriguez replied. “I’m trying my best.”

After a few minutes of conversation with Omar about her legal case, an automated warning told them they had “one minute remaining.”

They used that minute for a last round of goodbyes and expressions of love.

“Everything is going to work out,” Omar assured his mother, but, as the article noted, “the line was already dead.”

Story posted on July 31, 2025