It took weeks to confirm the workers’ status, but in the end all but one were fired. “It was horrible,” says Toni Ruiz, the human-resources manager at Sellew’s company who was forced to confront each of the suspect employees one by one with their false documents. “They cried and cried. There were families, husbands, wives, children—all worked here. Some had 10, 15 years. I was devastated.”

Each week after the agents had come, Ruiz dutifully informed the Homeland Security Department that she had let another round of employees go. The workers who weren’t fired, stung by the sudden release of their friends, struggled to keep up with demand. “It was hard for us, for a lot of us. All year long, we work on the same crew,” says Jesse Hernandez, who was a laborer at the time. “The worst day was when all the people get together and they say they have to go. A lot of people were crying.”

Was he crying? “Honestly, yes,” he says.

Hernandez, a legal immigrant from Mexico, was promoted that summer to supervisor. He now manages the potting of 12,000 plants per day and a crew of 13 workers on an assembly line. “It was better for me, but I feel bad because I feel like I take somebody’s job,” he says.

Mark Sellew’s landscaping business, Prides Corner Farms, was the unlucky target in 2011 of a government audit designed to ferret out unauthorized workers. The audits are the preferred work-site enforcement method of this administration. President Obama has shunned the Bush-era live raids that would prompt cries of La Migra! from Spanish-speaking laborers who fled their stations at the mere whiff of authorities. Employers and immigration attorneys call the paper audits “silent raids.” They’re less dramatic, but the end result is often the same.