Trump says American workers are hurt by immigration. But after ICE raided this Texas town, they never showed up.

CACTUS, Tex. - The DJs at the Spanish-language radio stations gave warnings whenever Immigration and Customs Enforcement came around. "Be careful out there," they'd say. "The relatives are in town."

Not on the day of the Big Raid. Nothing leaked out. State police sealed off the highways in and out of town. ICE agents came with a fleet of empty buses and left with them full.

Their target that day was the huge, steam-billowing beef plant here on the high plains of the Texas Panhandle, owned then by meatpacking giant Swift & Co. "Everyone on the production floor was shouting, 'La Migra! La Migra!' " Monica Loya, a former plant worker, recalled. "There were people hiding behind machinery, in boxes, even in the carcasses."

Operation Wagon Train hit Swift & Co. plants in six states on Dec. 12, 2006, arresting nearly 1,300 workers. In tiny Cactus, 300 were taken into custody - about 10 percent of the town's population. It was the largest workplace raid in U.S. history.

There are Burmese meat cutters a few years removed from refugee camps in Thailand and Malaysia. "Chuckers" from Sudan, tall and strong, who specialize in separating the spinal cord from a side of beef swinging on a moving chain. Somalis who showed up in such numbers that Moore County at one point had the fifth-highest per capita Muslim population in the United States, according to religion survey data, though many of those workers have moved to join a larger community of their compatriots in Minnesota.

A decade after Operation Wagon Train, the Trump administration says it is preparing to crack down on employers who hire illegal workers and may revive enforcement tactics such as big roundups, which fell out of favor under President Barack Obama. But President Trump's plans to intervene in the U.S. labor market are more ambitious than that.

Related: [Trump takes 'shackles' off ICE, which is slapping them on immigrants who thought they were safe]

Under Trump, the U.S. government is for the first time in decades seeking to sharply restrict legal immigration, particularly the entry of people with few job skills, saying they compete with American-born workers and drive down wages. By limiting immigration and tightening the labor pool, the administration argues, competition will increase among employers, forcing them to raise the wages of blue-collar American workers left behind in the dust of galloping global capitalism.

In deep-red Moore County, where Trump won 75 percent of the vote, the president's rhetoric on immigration has emboldened some of his supporters to freely vent their frustrations at the meatpacking plant they blame for bringing crime, drugs and civic decline. Their corner of northern Texas has been culturally and economically transformed, and they had never had an American president say the transformation was a bad thing.

And yet, no one seemed to believe the Cactus plant would be filled anytime soon with American workers. People here were not even sure they were American jobs in the first place. At least not since the Vietnamese and Laotians showed up in the late 1970s, a few years after the plant opened.

"Cactus wouldn't exist without the plant," said the city manager, Aldo Gallegos, who grew up in the town after his parents moved from Arizona in 1992 to work for Swift. He estimates that about half of all floor workers are refugees and that half are Latino, mostly immigrants.

"The plant didn't skip a beat," Gallegos said. "Everyone's got to eat steak."

Workers who hang on at the unionized plant earn wages that average more than $17 an hour, in addition to health benefits and free language classes, making it one of the best-paying jobs in the United States for someone who speaks little or no English.

Cactus is not always a melting pot of meatpacking harmony. Workers of different ethnicity and languages struggle to communicate, and sometimes they clash. Turnover among new hires is high. The town's streets are a jumble of windblown garbage and battered trailers, each one appendages with dusty vehicles parked at odd angles, like fingers from a hand.