People snatched off the streets. Residents in hiding. This is the past week in Los Angeles.
Hermanita Conchita was tending to her stand on Monday afternoon, selling pupusas and fruit outside her home in the South Central neighborhood of Los Angeles, when she saw two suspicious cars pull up.
“I said, ‘That’s immigration!’ and everyone started running,” said Conchita, who hustled everyone she saw into her home, locked the door, and stood guard outside.
It was an ICE raid.
“My granddaughters kept telling me, ‘Grandma, please move away from there! They can hurt you!’ And I’ve seen how on the TV or on the phones you can see how they hurt even seniors, too,” she said an hour after the raid. “I was ready to say, ‘Only my family is here, and we all have papers, me included.’ I was ready to show them my documents that I carry in my pocket.”
Conchita was lucky: The officers went across the street to a doughnut shop instead. The raid was just one of many in the neighborhood that afternoon and one of dozens carried out between ICE and Border Patrol agents across the Los Angeles area over the past week.
The protests against these raids, which prompted President Donald Trump to deploy the National Guard, may have died down, but the campaign to round up immigrants has only accelerated. The nationwide crackdown that began days after Trump took office has been focused in Los Angeles as a shock-and-awe campaign terrorizing residents. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said federal forces had come to “liberate the city,” and she has appeared at least once during the raids. Groups of officers dressed in military-style fatigues and bulletproof vests, often with their faces covered, driving marked and unmarked vehicles — sometimes even armored vehicles resembling tanks — have flooded into largely Latino neighborhoods. They have targeted everything from taquerias to bus stops, sometimes detaining dozens of people at a time, including U.S. citizens. The scenes play out on social media nearly in real time: a man selling fruit at a stand being wrestled to the ground, another being chased out of his car on the side of the freeway, and a Walmart worker being handcuffed and dragged to an ICE vehicle. On Sunday, federal agents tried unsuccessfully to reach Dodger Stadium.
Latino residents we spoke to described a pervasive fear of federal agents appearing out of nowhere to snatch friends, family, and even themselves off the streets. A loitering car can easily fuel rumors of another raid. In some neighborhoods, it seems as though the pandemic has returned, with people fearful of going outside and being vulnerable to arrest. Parks, tiendas, and immigrant-dependent businesses such as car washes are virtually empty. Many have been indefinitely shuttered. “We knew it was going to be bad, but we didn’t know it was going to be this bad,” said Primitiva Hernandez, executive director of the 805 UndocuFund’s Rapid Response Network.
The group began as a way to help undocumented residents obtain federal funds after natural disasters such as wildfires. Since Trump’s return to office, it has pivoted largely to helping residents avoid ICE and Border Patrol. It receives calls and texts from people who spot potential agents, sends alerts to residents to watch out, and dispatches trained personnel to the scene to verify and document the operation. It also posts photos of people believed to have been taken by ICE, in hopes they can be connected with families who are looking for them. In a single day last week, UndocuFund received 620 calls and 4,333 texts.
Over a two-day period, Hernandez said, ICE had been spotted taking farmworkers from strawberry and flower fields in Ventura County near the coast and from businesses and plazas further inland. In Simi Valley, Hernandez heard that Border Patrol rolled through one community in a convoy of marked trucks. “This administration is definitely targeting California. The Central Coast has been significantly targeted as well as regions like L.A. and other areas where they have seen more than the usual attacks by ICE or even Border Patrol,” she said. “This week alone, we estimate 100 people were arrested.”
CLEAN, an organization that represents car-wash workers in Los Angeles and Orange counties, said that in the past two weeks, 22 car washes had been hit by ICE — some locations more than once — and that more than 20 workers and customers had been taken, including two who have already been deported to Mexico.
It’s unclear how many people have been arrested by ICE and the Border Patrol across the region in the past several days, and a spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security did not respond to a request for comment. On the first day of major raids, June 6, a DHS official said 44 people had been detained.
For months, Unión del Barrio, a political organization focused on Chicano workers’ rights, has been training people on how to spot ICE in their neighborhoods. “We’ve gotten calls where people say, ‘Hey, my wife was just taken. What can I do?’ When people call us and ICE is in front of their house, you can hear that they’re shaking; you can hear that they are super-scared and nervous. There’s that tremendous fear,” said Ron Gochez, the lead organizer.
Such groups have come under attack themselves. Missouri Republican senator Josh Hawley sent a letter to Unión del Barrio and others, accusing them of “abetting criminal conduct” — Gochez called it intimidation.
In Los Angeles, the spring’s foggy marine layer from the Pacific is finally starting to cede to penetratingly bright summer days with parks and beaches typically packed with children, families, and tourists. But on a cloudless Sunday, Griffith Park was relatively empty. No families cooking on charcoal grills. No bounce houses for birthday parties or celebrations. Social media was teeming with alerts that ICE vehicles had been spotted in the nearby Los Angeles Zoo parking lot. It turned out to be a false alarm: While there were more than a dozen police cars and county vehicles, they had been parked there for some time.
The agents’ prevalence across the city has kept some Latinos at home and out of sight. Downtown, along a corridor known as the Piñata District given its prevalence of stores selling speakers, candy, fireworks, and colorful seven-pointed-star piñatas, only a handful of storefronts was open. Inside, the shops were mostly empty. “Ever since this all started, we’ve had other employees call in and say, ‘Excuse me, but I cannot make it in, they might take me, we don’t know what can happen,’” said MacJenny, an employee of Betancourt’s Cash & Carry who declined to give their last name out of fear of retaliation by the government.
The prior week, ICE had raided a nearby clothing store called Ambience, sparking the protests in Downtown.
Lino Hernandez, the owner of the party store Carrusel, said he hasn’t seen customer numbers this low since the early days of COVID. “The government said it was going to be a whole month, so we’re counting the days. We want to think there’s just two weeks left of this, but in reality, the consequences are here. It could get to the point that we cannot survive and we have to close our business,” he said.
Over in Boyle Heights, Mariachi Plaza was eerily quiet. A few people trickled in and out of the Metro stop coming back from the “No Kings” protest downtown., but no one was hanging around the grand gazebo where men typically wait to find work. “For the last couple of weeks, there have not been any vendors, no eloteros, no paleteros, nothing,” said Julie Regalado, who had been protesting ICE and Trump at the plaza.
A banner strung over the porch of a nearby home signaled the end of the school year: “Congratulations 2025 Graduates.” “We had to kind of pivot a little bit of what our celebration was gonna look like,” said Ron Collins, director of Brothers, Sons, Selves, a coalition focused on ending the criminalization of young boys of color. “All of our youth are Black and brown folks, and we are in Boyle Heights, which, from where I’m sitting, is ground zero for what has been happening in these ICE raids all week.” Inside, about a dozen young men celebrated graduating from high school behind blacked-out windows.
