As President Trump ordered at least 2,000 National Guard members to Los Angeles County on Saturday, some of the most active protests against immigration raids in the area were taking place near a Home Depot in Paramount, a small city some 25 miles southeast of the Hollywood sign. Law enforcement officers used flash-bang grenades and fired rubber bullets at demonstrators.
The mood had been tense in the city ever since Mr. Trump took office for the second time with promises to deport thousands of undocumented immigrants.
“Since January, people have lived in fear,” said Jose Luis Solache, a state lawmaker who represents the area. “We saw a decline in our schools’ attendance, we saw a decline in people going to work.”
Los Angeles County includes wealthy enclaves like Malibu and Beverly Hills, but also many communities like Paramount that have for decades attracted Latino immigrants who clean hotel rooms in tourist districts, manufacture clothes or work at the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach.
Paramount is one of about two dozen cities ringing Los Angeles’s southeastern border, collectively known as “the Gateway Cities.” Some 82 percent of Paramount’s more than 51,000 residents are Hispanic and about 36 percent are foreign-born, according to census data. Its median household income is $70,900; across Los Angeles County, that number is roughly $87,800.
“All these cities — Bell Gardens, Bellflower, Paramount — they are full of working-class Latinos that were able to have a piece of the middle class,” said Hugo Soto-Martinez, a Los Angeles City Council member who previously worked as a labor organizer in the area. “They’re like Latino suburbs.”
Trump administration officials have said that the federal government’s immigration crackdown will increasingly focus on workplaces.
Angelica Salas, the executive director of CHIRLA, an immigrant rights group in Los Angeles, said that the Paramount area’s dense concentration of immigrants, including undocumented ones, most likely made it a ripe target for immigration enforcement raids.
“They don’t care to go to a workplace or have warrants,” Ms. Salas said of federal immigration enforcement authorities. “They just care that brown people are there.”
Paramount and other Gateway Cities weren’t always destinations for working families. In the early 20th century, they were agricultural areas.
The two villages that would later combine to form Paramount were known as “the Milk Shed of Los Angeles,” according to a city history on its website. In 1948, the city, which wouldn’t be officially incorporated until 1957, was named Paramount for a main street running through town.
The area was developed in the decades that followed. Factories and warehouses spread, alongside homes. According to the city history, in the early 1980s, a think tank called Paramount an “urban disaster area.”
But in recent years, Paramount has been revitalized as the children of immigrants have sought out more affordable homes and opened businesses. Now, young people catch up over elaborate horchata and coffee concoctions at Horchateria Rio Luna and belt their favorite songs during karaoke nights at Casa Adelita.
Jill Cowan is a Times reporter based in Los Angeles, covering the forces shaping life in Southern California and throughout the state.
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