The day they came for Sandra Lopez, she was working the line inside Moreno Farms' packing house.
Cool air blasted through the cavernous building in a remote field outside Felda, a tiny hamlet nine miles from Immokalee. Lopez and 70 other workers, mostly Mexican and Central American women, stood in rows packing vegetables picked from Southwest Florida's acres of verdant farms.
Lopez, a short, soft-spoken woman with fine black hair pulled back tightly above sparkling almond-shaped eyes, had always wanted a job like this. She had been two months pregnant when she fled her native Chiapas, Mexico, and had braved a harrowing four-day trek through the Sonoran Desert in search of a better life for her unborn child. In Florida, she had spent eight years following the crops, toiling in strawberry and tomato fields beneath blazing skies.
