A year before, in Smith’s home state of Texas, the INS had launched a raid around Labor Day called Operation Last Call, which targeted immigrants with past felony convictions for driving while intoxicated. They arrested five hundred people. When the Mexican consulate in El Paso managed to interview ninety-one of them, who were in local detention, officials found that the average time they’d lived in the US was more than twenty-one years. Ninety-one percent of them held jobs, and 81 percent had children who were US citizens.
