Biohazard Cleanup Near North Cactus Cactus, TX

Cactus began as a World War II company town in northern Moore County, thirteen miles north of Dumas on U.S. Highway 287, built around the Cactus Ordnance Works that the Chemical Construction Company established in May 1942 to produce ammunition.

The Cactus post office opened in 1948, by which time the wartime boom had faded and the population had fallen to about 2,000.

Cactus is one of only three incorporated cities in Moore County, alongside Dumas and Sunray.

The town's modern life revolves around the huge beef plant now run by JBS USA — a roughly 125-acre operation employing about 3,000 people, one of the largest meat-processing plants in the nation.

On December 12, 2006, the federal immigration raid known as Operation Wagon Train arrested about 300 workers at the Cactus plant — roughly a tenth of the town's population — in what was then the largest workplace raid in U.S. history.

After the raid, the plant rebuilt its workforce with legal refugees, and Burmese, Somali and Sudanese families remade Cactus — the town gained a mosque and a halal meat market, and Moore County at one point had the fifth-highest per capita Muslim population in the United States.

Cactus counted 3,057 residents in the 2020 census, after growing from 1,529 in 1990 and 2,538 in 2000 to 3,179 in 2010.

The 2010 census counted just 801 households in Cactus, and recent Census Bureau survey estimates put it at roughly 935 households averaging about three people each.

Cactus belongs to the Dumas Independent School District, and enrollment at Cactus Elementary has surged as immigrant families — most recently many from Guatemala — arrive for plant jobs.