LA HUACANA, Mexico - Nearly 1,800 miles separate this town in the tropical mountains of central Mexico from northern Utah's Cache Valley. But spend a little time here, and the distance evaporates.
    Maybe it's the folks wearing T-shirts bearing the names of Utah brew pubs. Or the pickup truck driving through town with the University of Utah sticker on its rear window. Whatever the case, the links between the Beehive State and this area in the Mexican state of Michoacán are numerous and long-standing.
    Mexican workers from La Huacana have been making the trek to the Cache Valley for years, many of them lured by job opportunities at various companies, including the Swift meatpacking plant in Hyrum. Swift provided steady jobs and good wages, but most immigrants worked illegally under strangers' names.
    Many families in La Huacana once depended on money from Utah. Not anymore.
    On Dec. 12, 2006, U.S. immigration agents poured into the Swift plant, arresting 154 undocumented Latino workers and charging all but seven with violating federal and state identity-fraud and immigration statutes.
    In an instant, those workers, the meatpacking company and the Cache Valley were pulled into the vortex of the nation's immigration debate. A little over a year later, though, the issue is more intractable than ever. Immigration reform in Congress failed last summer. Now the topic is prime election-year fodder, ensuring a standoff at least through year's end.
    Caught in the vise are 12 million undocumented people and the Americans who hire them, creating a state of mutual dependence based on an illegal practice.
    Lawmakers in Utah and other states have tried to fill the federal vacuum with laws or proposed laws of their own, but the issue continues to scream out for a national solution. Right now, at the Utah Legislature, some 20 immigration bills are under debate. And just last week, there was another raid, this one in the Utah County town of Lindon where 57 alleged undocumented workers were arrested at a factory that produces highway signs and guardrails.
    To the loudest critics of current U.S. immigration policy, the 2006 raid - which also encompassed Swift plants in five other states with 1,300 arrests, making it the largest targeting a single company in the nation's history - was long overdue.
    In fact, the raid quickly disrupted the stream of workers from La Huacana to Hyrum. But it also abruptly separated parents from children and husbands from wives and sent a shock wave through Utah businesses. In a single day, the vulnerabilities of Swift and other companies, which had grown dependent on immigrant labor, were exposed.
    Ultimately, the Swift raid further divided a community already simmering in racial tension. While providing Cache County residents a front-row view of the immigration debate, it also emboldened some people to take strident positions that left the valley's Latino community - which makes up 9 percent of the population - feeling anxious and insecure.
   
    Back, illegally, in Utah: The raid by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) against the Swift plants marked the biggest push by the agency or its predecessor against businesses.
    "We consider the operation a resounding success," said ICE spokesman Tim Counts, who is based in Minnesota. "It removed nearly 1,300 people who had assumed the I.D. of a U.S. citizen or a legal resident, and in each of those cases had caused untold complications of that person's life."
    In 2006, the agency arrested 4,077 people - about a third of them in the Swift raids. That nationwide total represents an 869 percent leap in work force arrests in the past five years.
    In the Swift raid, however, only one company official had been arrested - a human resources employee in Iowa, charged with harboring illegal aliens. Asked why all other company officials had escaped charges, ICE spokespersons said only that the investigation is ongoing.
    Swift & Co. was bought in July by South American meatpacker JBS S.A. The company turned down several requests for interviews.
    As it turned out, only 23 percent of those arrested by ICE nationwide faced federal or state charges. But about half of those were prosecuted in Cache County. In fact, while Utah had the second lowest number of Swift arrests nationwide, it had the highest number of cases prosecuted.
    ICE spokeswoman Virginia Kice said it was up to local prosecutors to decide whether to invest substantial resources and prosecute cases. Counties in other raid states didn't pursue as many, if any, cases.
    "It was extraordinary work by Cache County," Kice said.
    Tony Baird, chief prosecuting attorney with the Cache County Attorney's Office, said prosecuting the Swift cases was "an extremely big undertaking to do for my small office," noting that three of the county's seven attorneys were assigned to the raid cases. But, Baird said, he really was left with no choice.
    "How do you say, 'No, we're not going to prosecute crime because it's too hard'?" he said.
    Of the undocumented workers arrested in Hyrum, nearly three-quarters were from Mexico. ICE declined to say how many were deported. But at least some, perhaps a dozen or more, already have returned, illegally, to Utah.
    Of the 147 people charged, about half - mostly those turned over by ICE to the state for prosecution - were tried and sentenced. Workers convicted on state charges served anywhere from 14 days to two months in Utah county jails, and most also received a $9,275 fine, which was suspended unless they illegally return to the United States. Of the 12 people convicted on federal charges, eight served a year and a day in a federal prison and three spent between 14 and 24 months.
    Arrest warrants have been issued for others. Baird said local law enforcement officials are not actively searching for those undocumented Swift workers who have warrants, but if they're picked up on another violation, they will be tried on the raid charges.
    Cheetos and Cokes: Most Utahns have never heard of La Huacana, but the city and surrounding area is a hub for many Mexicans who live and work in the Beehive State.
    La Huacana has a population of around 10,000 and is about 250 miles west of Mexico City. The only paved road is the two-lane highway. Trucks and cars sport license plates from Utah, California, Oregon, Texas and even Ohio. There are few street signs and no streetÂlights.
    Every few blocks, there's a family making and selling sweet bread or another running a corner store stocked with Cheetos and Cokes. A handful of family-run restaurants are open during the day, but for dinner, people sell enchiladas and tacos from their homes. Men push carts selling corn on the cob with powdered cheese and chile. Most homes, which stand like row houses, don't have front yards, and their heavy, metal front doors meet the cracked sidewalks.
    The village of El Naranjo de Jorullo, about 10 miles from La Huacana, is even more rustic.
    Chickens, dogs and pigs roam about and cattle amble along dirt roads. There are only about six phone lines among the 200 or so houses. No one has a computer. Most homes, some made of dirt and palm leaves, have outhouses and big cement cisterns for storing water.
    Yet, this is also drug cartel country. Federal and local agents, dressed in black and armed with machine guns, drive and walk around La Huacana's central plaza all day as a way to counter the cartels and the violence they bring.
    Former Swift worker Lorena Velazquez Solis, 40, who grew up in Naranjo, now lives here with her three children and earns about $160 a month selling enchiladas from her home.
    "Here, we suffer, but at least we're together," she said.
    Some of the deportees left behind their $13-an-hour Swift jobs and returned to La Huacana to work as maids, landscapers and servers for about $1.35 an hour. (A medical doctor with about five years' experience in La Huacana makes roughly $8 an hour.)
    Elma Alcantar Sandoval, 45, used to depend on about $300 a month that her son sent from Utah to support her two daughters. But when he was deported after the raid, she had to get a job working as a maid six days a week.
    "Without him, I don't have any help," she said.
    'Human tragedy': There's still work for undocumented workers in Utah, but more than a year later, the Swift raid has left in its wake an atmosphere of anxiety, uncertainty and frustration not only among undocumented workers and their families, but also in the industries statewide that employ them.
    Salvador Jimenez, the former Mexican consul who was based in Salt Lake City, called the raid a "human tragedy," saying that Mexicans in Utah now live in fear. "Our people are more afraid now because of that action," he said.
    In Logan, customers line the counter at La Huacana, a store named after the Mexican town. But they aren't buying cowboy boots or Mexican music CDs. They're lining up to send money back home.
    Owner Jaime Mendoza said that a year after the raid, his business has been reduced to mostly sending money back to Mexico. Skittish workers aren't investing their wages in homes and are buying old beater cars instead of newer vehicles.
    "What's happening in Logan is the money is leaving," Mendoza said.
    That uncertainty about the future is shared by many within industries that employ tens of thousands of immigrants in Utah, which is home to an estimated 100,000 undocumented people.
    The immigrant work force is vital to areas of the state economy, such as manufacturing, construction and hospitality services, according to industry leaders and experts. And immigrants have long been a mainstay in Utah's fields and orchards.
    Business owners say they're caught in a Catch-22. It's illegal to knowingly employ an immigrant not authorized to work in this country, yet they need the workers.
    "This system is a train wreck," said Clark Ivory, chief executive officer of Ivory Homes, the state's largest home builder.
    Utahns such as Robert Wren, chairman of UFIRE, a Utah-based group demanding enforcement of the nation's immigration laws, opposed the immigration-reform bill that failed to pass the U.S. Senate in June because it would have provided a path to citizenship for the millions of undocumented immigrants. The group feels betrayed by the federal government for not enforcing immigration laws after passage of the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 - which created an amnesty for undocumented immigrants who had been in the country continuously at least five years.
    "We're already doing enough of that with the benefits we are providing them and allowing them to get away with identity theft that they do all the time in order to get even a semi-legitimate job," Wren said.
    For former Swift worker Artemio Diaz Hernandez, 32, the chances to legally return to Utah are all but nonexistent. He doesn't know of anyone who has ever applied and received a work permit. He doesn't even know where he would begin the process. It would require him to chance hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars on an application process, which takes years. The application fee alone would cost him two weeks' salary. But, he'd love to figure out a way to work in Utah legally.
    "If I knew how to do it, I'd already have it," he said.