In a two-room apartment in Lower Price Hill on Wednesday, a pregnant Salvadoran woman choked back tears.
"It is tough trying to accept this," Sonya Salazar, 29, said through an interpreter. "I felt so good about being in this country. There are so many things I had planned for my children."
Mrs. Salazar's husband, Antonio Salazar, 36, was among 117 arrested Wednesday in a government raid on two Butler County companies accused of employing illegal aliens.
For the past year, the Salazars and their three children have lived in two rooms - a kitchen and a living room - in a three-story building on State Street that is home to many immigrants.
The Salazar children, Violeta, 9; Belen, 3; and Dalia, 1ï, clung to their mother, unaware of their father's arrest and their possible deportation.
"I don't know much about this neighborhood because I don't go outside very much," Mrs. Salazar said.
She hugged and cried with her interpreter, Margaret Singer, director of WESTCO, a low-rent housing company in Lower Price Hill. Mrs. Singer said that as far as she knows, the family is here legally.
Mrs. Salazar had worked with her husband at the Chesapeake Display & Packaging Co. in Butler County, where the raid took place Wednesday, until about a month ago. She stopped working because her baby is due Sept. 1.
Lower Price Hill has become a magnet for immigrants because of inexpensive housing, Mrs. Singer said, a point that isn't entirely agreeable to neighborhood residents.
Eugene Grady, president of the Lower Price Hill Community Council, said immigrants "have created a major problem, and we are going to be on City Hall to do something."
Eileen Gallagher, treasurer of the community council, said, "I believe what we have in this neighborhood is a local franchise of a national illegal operation."
Mrs. Singer said many of the immigrants come to Lower Price Hill because of low rent. Tenants pay $280 for three-bedroom and $250 for two-bedroom apartments.
