CHARLESTON, Missouri (Reuters) – The effort to protect river towns in Illinois and Kentucky from rising floodwaters by blowing open a levee and inundating more than 100,000 acres of Missouri farmland appeared to be slowly working on Tuesday.

The controversy surrounding the extraordinary demolition continued, with farmers affected by it filing suit.

Dick Durbin, a Democratic Senator from Illinois, also cautioned that the endangered river towns, including Cairo at the southern-most tip of Illinois, were "not out of the woods yet."

The National Weather Service said the river gauge at Cairo, Illinois, where the Mississippi and Ohio rivers meet, showed water levels had dropped more than a foot-and-a-half since 10 p.m. last night, when the U.S. Army Corp of Engineers blasted a hole in a protective embankment downriver from the historic town.

"The plan performed as expected," Jim Pogue, a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers spokesman, said in a telephone interview.

By 4 p.m. local time on Tuesday, the gauge at Cairo had dropped to 60.08 feet and was expected to continue dropping through the weekend.

The Cairo gauge topped out at 61.72 feet, its highest level since 1937, on Monday night before the Corps detonated the levee to allow the Mississippi River to cope with the rising waters of the Ohio River.

Both rivers have been rising as a result of days of rain and the melt and runoff of heavy winter snowstorms.

Carlin Bennett, a commissioner in the rural Missouri county that is bearing the brunt of the flooding, said it was a little early to make the call, but was afraid the operation would not drop the river the three to four feet the government wants.

"It's looking like all of our worst fears here," said Bennett, who has 80 acres himself that are being flooded. "Our land got flooded and they are not getting the flooding relief they expected."

NO CHOICE

Missouri farmers who returned Tuesday to survey the land they work found it beneath 8 to 10 feet of brown water.

Many, like Kevin Nally, 40, who farms 250 acres here, seemed resigned to the necessity of the extraordinary move, which continues to generate lawsuits against the Corp.

"They didn't have a choice," he said. "It was coming over the levee anyway."

Nally had already planted 80 acres of wheat, which was washed away when the waters poured in last night.

His losses will be covered by insurance. But he said he was worried about the long-term damage that might result if too much sand is left behind.

Legal efforts by the state of Missouri to stop the Corps from blasting the levee at Birds Point-New Madrid failed.

But on Tuesday attorneys filed a new private class-action complaint in the U.S. Court of Federal Claims on behalf of farmers whose land was flooded.

"In the process of breaching the levee, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers also destroyed or is in the process of destroying 90 households and more than 100,000 acres of the country's richest farmland," said J. Michael Ponder, the attorney from Cape Girardeau, Missouri, who filed the suit.

"What these property owners and farmers are seeking is just compensation for the land and livelihood they have lost -- possibly forever or for decades."

The government blew a two mile hole in a 56-mile levee that holds back the Mississippi to relieve pressure and expects later on Tuesday to blow two smaller holes in the same levee downstream to allow the water to flow back into the river.

The effort was designed to save a number of towns along the Ohio River, first among them Cairo.

Located at the southern tip of Illinois between two states, Missouri and Kentucky, that still permitted slavery prior to abolition in the 19th century, Cairo was an important destination for runaway slaves during the Civil War.

Its population of around 3,000 is more than 60 percent African-American and a third of its residents have incomes below the poverty level.

Durbin said that while the levee breach had lowered water levels, the Corps was continuing to monitor "dangerous sand boils and weakened levees."

(Writing by James B. Kelleher; editing by Jerry Norton and Peter Bohan)

COTTONDALE, Ala (Reuters) – Mourners gathered at a church on Tuesday to say goodbye to a victim of last week's storms, another sad scene being repeated hundreds of times across the Southern states ravaged by deadly twisters.

Judy Sherrill, 62, lived in Tuscaloosa County, Alabama, the state's hardest-hit area where officials said at least 39 people died in severe weather on April 27.

At her funeral at Fleetwood Baptist Church in Cottondale, mourners learned that relatives searching through the debris at her home found note cards with to-do lists written on the front and scripture on the back.

"She was a pearl as a church member," said Pastor Rick Davis, who in his sermon told the mourners that God was in control and had not made a mistake.

"My friends, this didn't take God by surprise at all," he said. "I want you to understand the same God who has given has taken away."

As state officials continue to count the dead, the recovery effort for friends and relatives must include the painful task of burying them. Nearly 350 people died in seven states last week, the second-highest recorded death toll from tornadoes in U.S. history.

Some people have insurance to cover funeral costs, while others have turned to the Federal Emergency Management Agency for help, said Paul Rollins, Jr., a funeral director at Rollins Mortuary in Tuscaloosa.

The mortuary is directing four funerals this week, all for residents who died during the tornado.

"Even though I am a funeral director and grew up in the business, I don't think anyone is prepared," Rollins said. "We will keep each other in prayer and help each other. That's all we can do."

In Rainsville, a town of 5,000 in northeast Alabama, two small funeral homes struggled without power to accommodate the 14 tornado victims in their town.

"We used an inverter hooked to a car and left it running," said Tom Wilson of W.T. Wilson Funeral Chapel, where the last of the victims will be remembered on Friday.

Gary Chandler, owner of the Rainsville Funeral Home, typically runs 15 funerals a month. With seven tornado victims and three natural deaths, he had nearly a month's work in three days.

Volunteers helped answer the phones as the funeral home extended its operating hours.

"Some of the victims were good friends," Chandler said. "One of the worst was a family of three, a husband, wife and his mother."

In the tightknit town of Smithville, Mississippi, where 14 people died, employees at the Smithville Cemetery and E.E. Pickle Funeral Home also said they were busy with multiple funerals this week.

Helping families cope amid the devastation was their main focus, said funeral home spokeswoman Margaret Toss.

"It has been hard enough on them," she said. "We are just trying to get through all of this."

(Additional reporting by Verna Gates and Leigh Coleman; Writing by Colleen Jenkins; Editing by Jerry Norton)

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – U.S. immigration agents descended on Chipotle Mexican Grill restaurants on Tuesday, interviewing employees in about two dozen outlets in Los Angeles, Atlanta and other cities.

Roughly 500 undocumented workers have been fired as a result of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) audits of the popular burrito chain's hiring paperwork in Minnesota, Virginia and Washington, D.C.

Tuesday's ICE interviews were part of a related criminal investigation and could suggest that government interest is intensifying.

In addition to the cities mentioned above, ICE agents also interviewed workers in Minnesota and Washington, D.C., said Robert Luskin, Chipotle's outside counsel and a partner at Patton Boggs in Washington.

Luskin said ICE gave Chipotle enough advance notice of the interviews by plain-clothed agents that the company had the opportunity to send a note to employees telling them it wanted them to cooperate.

"We've got nothing to hide," Luskin said. "We're absolutely convinced that nobody did anything wrong."

Chipotle's co-chief executive, Monty Moran, said on April 20 that the criminal division of the U.S. Attorney's Office in Washington, D.C. was overseeing the investigation and had asked for documents related to the ICE audits.

That request came hours after a Reuters story quoting fired immigrant workers who said that Chipotle, one of the highest-profile employers to fall under the scrutiny of immigrations authorities, ignored signs that pointed to the illegal status of some of its workers.

Luskin said the company has not received any subpoenas related to the criminal probe and that it is cooperating with federal prosecutors.

Tuesday's action "doesn't signal a broader or more serious or more substantial investigation," said Luskin, who added that he had no reason to expect that the investigation would be confined to audit areas.

ICE spokeswoman Cori Bassett said the agency "does not comment on ongoing investigations."

ENFORCEMENT SHIFT

U.S. immigration enforcement has shifted considerably in recent years. Notably, the Obama administration is cracking down on employers rather than illegal workers.

Carl Shusterman, a former prosecutor for ICE's predecessor agency, the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, said interviews like the ones ICE conducted at Chipotle on Tuesday show how the administration is ratcheting up pressure.

He also acknowledged that advance notification of upcoming ICE interviews might scare off any undocumented workers.

"I would imagine what happens is that the people who are illegal will never come to work again," said Shusterman, who now is in private practice in Los Angeles.

Denver-based Chipotle has won plaudits from Wall Street for its seemingly uncanny ability to hold down labor costs. That ability has been a major factor behind its six-fold increase in share price since late 2008. Chipotle shares fell 2.4 percent Tuesday to $260.40.

The immigration probe may inflate costs in the long run if it leads to more mass firings. That could be bad news for Chipotle, which like other restaurants, is grappling with rising prices for everything from beef to produce.

It is also a blow to the reputation of a restaurant chain that prides itself on serving "Food with Integrity."

Should the investigations uncover widespread disregard of immigration laws, co-chief executives Steve Ells and Monty Moran could face criticism for allowing the practice to spread through the 1,100-unit U.S. operation.

Unlike many rivals that sell franchises, Chipotle owns and operates its restaurants and is ultimately responsible for hiring.

The U.S. fast-food industry historically has offered relatively low pay and paltry benefits to legal workers and, as a result, has struggled with high employee turnover.

Experts say restaurant owners are attracted to illegal laborers because they work hard, are loyal and will go the extra mile to hold down a job.

It is hard to know the extent of hiring of illegal immigrants in U.S. restaurants. But immigrants, both legal and illegal, account for about a quarter of workers in the restaurant and food services industry and their numbers have climbed in recent years.

Their share fell from 24.5 percent in March 2006 to 21.4 percent in March 2008 -- before and during the recession -- but then recovered to 23.6 percent in March 2009 and March 2010, according to an analysis of the government's Current Population Survey (CPS) data conducted for Reuters by the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank.

The overall number of immigrants employed in the sector climbed from just over 1.7 million in 2008 to 1.8 million in 2010, according to this data, even as native employment fell from 6.4 million to 5.9 million.

The Pew Hispanic Center, whose demographic and labor market work is highly regarded, estimated in a 2009 report that 12 percent of the workforce in food preparation and serving in 2008 was undocumented.

(Graphic of immigrant workers and Chipotle share performance: http://r.reuters.com/nuh87r)

(Editing by Steve Orlofsky and Matt Driskill)