LAUREL (AP) — The work has always been stupefying and hard. Hour after hour standing on the line, soldering or welding or drilling in screws until tears join streaming sweat and hands cramp in pain.

Even in today’s nightmare economy, most people wouldn’t want this daily grind that steals the soul in 12-hour shifts paying as little as $280 a week, before taxes.

But such labor prospers here in mostly rural Jones County, home to Laurel, where the area’s biggest employer, Howard Industries, maintains a sprawling factory that builds electrical transformers and other big equipment behind a chain-link fence topped with barbed wire.

Assembly lines like these offer tenuous lifelines to those desperate enough to toil on them. And sometimes, competition for these jobs pits have-nots against have-nots.

For a long time, Howard workers were blacks and whites in this town of 18,000.

But in the past few years, immigrants poured across the Mexican border, eagerly applying for work on the Howard line and not complaining about long hours or menial labor. Family members followed, until the racial palette of Laurel shifted from black and white to abundant shades of brown.

Many blacks and whites claimed Hispanics were taking over their city and taking away jobs by not complaining about safety issues in a factory that faced $193,000 in fines last year from federal inspectors citing dangerous working conditions.

A disgruntled union member allegedly tipped the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, whose agents swept in last summer and staged the largest single workplace raid.

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Workplace raids reached an all-time high in 2008 with 6,287 arrests — a tenfold rise since 2003. After the 9-11 attacks, in the name of national security, the Bush administration announced it wanted to detain, and then deport, every illegal immigrant in America. Such a drastic change in immigration policy was necessary to safeguard the country against terrorists, said the newly formed Department of Homeland Security.

Sweeping immigration reform bills — which included eased access to citizenship, along with tightening border controls — failed in Congress. Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff escalated the raids.

But swooping down on low-paying jobs has yet to produce terrorism suspects. Asked if any of the raids had produced terror-related arrests, ICE spokeswoman Barbara Gonzalez replied, “Not to my knowledge.”

Across the country, such raids have netted sweatshop workers in Massachusetts, kosher slaughterhouse employees in Iowa and federal courthouse janitors in Rhode Island.

In some places, the aftermath has been devastating. The northeast Iowa city of Postville reeled after 389 workers at the Agriprocessors plant were arrested. The kosher slaughterhouse is now closed and bankrupt. Its owners face federal charges for allegedly helping employees obtain fake citizenship documents.

But the biggest roundup — 592 people arrested, mostly for the crime of illegally entering this country — was here in Laurel.

Since then, 414 Hispanics have been deported; 23 have left voluntarily and 27 were released on bond pending immigration hearings. One remains incarcerated at a federal detention center in Jena, La. Nine were charged with identity theft for using false identification.

More than 100, mostly women with children, were released pending the outcome of their cases. They wade through a long, confusing current of immigration hearings that will determine their futures. Many fear venturing out, lest they receive withering glances in the Wal-Mart aimed at the electronic monitoring devices on their ankles.

Immigrant groups, religious leaders, and various Democrats have expressed hope that the raids will be curtailed under President Barack Obama. The immigrants in Laurel know this, and they hope Obama’s promise of change applies to them.

“We do the jobs no one else wants to do,” says Ismael Cabrera, a 37-year-old father of two. “We just want to work.”

He paid a smuggler $2,000 to walk him across the desert into Arizona. He paid $1,000 more to get a ride to Laurel, where he first worked in a poultry plant, wielding a small knife to slash the wings off dead chickens as they blurred past. His all-time high: 39 birds per minute.

“It’s not that we took the jobs from other people,” he says in Spanish. “It’s that they don’t want to work them.”

He joined Howard as a welder three years ago, when hiring soared after Hurricane Katrina pulverized the Southeast and rebuilding began. When ICE agents descended in August, with handguns strapped to their thighs, people screamed. Some ran for the exits. Cabrera knew he was caught. “I just waited for what would happen,” he says.

What followed was a month of incarceration at the Louisiana detention center while bail money was scraped together. “It was terrible,” he said. “The guards called us bad words,” which Cabrera refused to repeat in front of his son.

He waits on deportation hearings that he doesn’t understand. He weeps at the prospect of going back to his hometown near Mexico City, where he made little money. His son, Cesar, has few memories of that place. He left when he was 6.

Now a sweet-faced boy of 13, Cesar respectfully interprets for his father in perfect English delivered with a Mississippi drawl.

Cesar is asked how he feels about going back to Mexico.

The boy looks to his father for guidance, who sits across from him on a hard wooden pew at the small Pentecostal church they attend. Cesar’s gaze drops to his feet. His eyes brim with tears. He wipes his nose with the back of his wrist. “Bad,” he manages to get out. “It would feel bad.”

He shuffles out of the sanctuary, staring at the carpet. Cabrera watches his son go, then wipes his own face with the sleeve of his shirt.

“Sometimes I ask myself if it was worth it to come here,” he says in a voice just above a whisper. “To gain insults and to be humiliated.”

He has a 6-year-old daughter born in this country. “I’m not here because I want a lot of money. I want to work. I want a good education for my kids.”

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Pastor Robert Velez, who leads a largely immigrant congregation of about 60 souls at his Pentecostal church, thinks he knows what was behind the immigration raid, and what continues to drive discord in this industrial city.

“It’s politics,” says Velez, an American citizen born in Puerto Rico. “It’s to make them look like they’re doing something about the border. And to satisfy politicians.

“But these are poor people. They just want to work. Now they can’t.”

More than 20 percent of Mississippi residents live in poverty — the highest rate in the country, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

Added to those rolls since the raid: Cabrera, his son Cesar and many others.

One is a woman named Mary, who didn’t want her last name used because she said she has cut a deal with federal prosecutors investigating whether Howard Industries knowingly hired illegal immigrants using false identification. “The investigation is ongoing,” said ICE’s Gonzalez.

A spokeswoman for the company, which has not been formally accused of wrongdoing, declined comment. Previously, Howard officials have said they used every means available to check the immigration status of job applicants, and never knowingly hired an undocumented worker.

Mary was a solderer on the line for $11 an hour. The burning light and noxious fumes seared her eyes until she wept. She can no longer read up close and she can’t afford glasses. She hopes her help to federal investigators will gain her a work visa to replace the fake ID she bought here.

Cabrera scrapes by doing odd jobs like cutting grass. His wife sells bread. He, too, purchased forged ID cards.

Sometimes the Social Security numbers are real and belong to real people, including people in trouble with the law. One worker in Laurel, whose purchased Social Security number belonged to a deadbeat dad, paid the man’s child support to keep from being discovered.

But Laurel’s factory raid targeted only illegal immigrants, not the people who sell them bogus documents costing anywhere from $60 to $200 a piece.

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Cabrera doesn’t know what will happen to him, or what he will do if deportation is ruled his fate.

Angelica Olmedo, a 32-year-old single mother, has already decided what to do. She will volunteer for deportation to Vera Cruz, where her parents grow sugar cane. She hopes that decision will ease the way for her to someday legally return to this country.

Immigration officials have held out that hope to those willing to go quietly, she said.

Her 13-year-old son, who was 5 when she paid for him to be smuggled to Mississippi, will return with her. After she was swept up in the Howard raid, where she repaired forklifts for $10.25 an hour, she said immigration officials released her on “humanitarian” grounds because she was a single mom.

She was outfitted with an electronic ankle bracelet and told not to leave the state. “I feel like a dog,” she said, sitting in the doublewide trailer she shares with her sister, her brother-in-law, their two daughters and her son. “They told me I have charge it every two hours, and I said, ‘What am I? A cell phone?”’

It took about two months for Olmedo to realize that apparently no one was monitoring the devices. In time, the clumsy plastic device slipped off her foot. No one from ICE has said a word to her since.

“It’s to shame me,” she said. “That’s all it was, to shame me. To make me look like a criminal. But I am not a criminal, I was only working.”

Another woman wore her anklet to Jena to visit her jailed husband. “She crossed a state line and walked right through the metal detector,” said pastor Velez. “It’s a joke. It’s just to make them scared.”

Another worker, a gay man who was released on humanitarian grounds because he feared his sexuality would get him assaulted in jail, keeps his bracelet on a living room table, next to a bowl housing his pet crawfish.

Olmedo regrets she can no longer work and contribute to her sister’s household. She baby-sits her two small nieces during the day as partial payment for rent and food. “I don’t even like to go out,” she says. “I feel like everyone is watching me and knows I was in the raid.

“People stared and pointed at us when we were wearing the ankle bracelets,” she said. “They talked to each other like we wouldn’t understand.” But Olmedo knows enough English to piece their words together.

“They were saying it was good what happened. They said I was illegal and that we should all be sent back to our own country.”

Yet Olmedo has met kindness from some former co-workers. “I had friends. African-American and white. They come and ask if I need money for food. I don’t take it. They brought shoes.”