After Hurricane Francine damaged Althea Vallotton’s house in suburban New Orleans last year, puddles formed on her floors whenever it rained. But she saved up money and lived in a mobile home on her front lawn for months, until she finally obtained a loan to pay for a stronger, metallic covering.
The cost? About $49,000.
On Wednesday, several workers — hired by a “legitimate contractor,” she said — arrived around 7 a.m. and got to work on the roof. She, in turn, drove to her job at a nearby school, relieved that her home repair odyssey was ending. It was a one-day job, after all.
Then her phone buzzed. Friends and relatives were asking if she had seen the videos online of federal immigration agents in Kenner, La., ordering the roof repairers to get down. Some sent screenshots of a masked agent pointing a weapon at the workers.
They were at her house.
Ms. Vallotton was stunned. She found the principal. “I got to go now — ICE is at my house,” she told her.
By the time Ms. Vallotton got home, the action was over, but she pieced together what had happened: The largely Hispanic construction crew on her roof had become the latest target of a federal immigration crackdown that had arrived in New Orleans that morning.
Episodes like this one are now playing out all over the country, revealing the ways that the Trump administration’s deportation agenda is reverberating far beyond the immigrants whose lives are being upended.
According to videos taken by neighbors, the agents, including several from the Border Patrol, had shown up and tried to detain the men, but they refused to get down from the roof. An hourslong standoff ensued. At one point, video shows, agents climbed onto the garage roof, and one of the workers appeared to point a rodlike item at them. A man is heard telling the worker in Spanish, “You can’t do that, and I’m going to shoot.” Several agents aimed weapons at the worker, who eventually dropped the item and shuffled toward the edge of the roof.
Agents detained at least one worker who was not on the roof, neighbors said. After the agents left, the other workers climbed down, hopped into a vehicle and drove away.
Ms. Vallotton was bewildered by it all, especially after an immigration lawyer at the scene told her that many of the workers had work visas.
“Why the agents didn’t let them stay and finish the freaking job, I don’t know,” Ms. Vallotton said in an interview, complaining about “the mess they’ve left on my property” and adding that she had no insurance.
She looked at the leftover construction supplies, including a blue tarp and a ladder propped up against her garage. “Now you’re hurting the economy,” she said. “Now these people are afraid to come back even though they’re here on a work visa.”
The Department of Homeland Security did not immediately respond to questions about the episode on the roof.
As Ms. Vallotton spoke with people on the phone, pacing the sidewalk with a hand over her head, her neighbors looked on with surprise. For some, the episode highlighted the recklessness with which the Trump administration was trying to clamp down on illegal immigration. For others, it was a front-row seat to a crackdown that they fully endorsed, even if it was surprising to see it right across their lawns.
“If they’re illegal, they got to get out,” said Mac Dunn, 87, who has lived in the neighborhood, called University City, for more than six decades and supports President Trump’s immigration enforcement in the city.
“You got to do it right,” he said, referring to immigration. “You got here illegally, well, that’s a crime.”
Nearby, the Morales family, who are Honduran American, were startled.
“This is too close to home,” said Lastenia Morales, the matriarch of the family and a nurse who was returning home from a shift on Wednesday. She cried as she pulled up to her driveway and discreetly snapped photos of the agents, and said she was stunned by the tepid reaction from some of her neighbors.
“I don’t know which neighbor to trust or not,” she said. “It was really hard for me to talk to them when they came outside to watch. This lady over here said, ‘Oh, they have to be illegals.’ I thought, ‘Maybe she’s on their side.’ So I just watch what I say around them.”
Ms. Vallotton’s white house sits on a corner lot on Marquette Drive, in a racially diverse neighborhood that is home to a mix of longtime white residents, new Honduran homeowners and young families. It is reflective of just how much the suburb of Kenner, home to 66,000 people, has been transformed by immigrants in the decades since Hurricane Katrina, when many Hispanic people moved to the area and helped it rebuild.
But while New Orleans is led by Democrats, the city is surrounded by conservative strongholds, and the Republican governor has welcomed the assistance from federal law enforcement agencies. That has made this Border Patrol operation feel different from the ones that have come to Los Angeles, Chicago and Charlotte, N.C., all led by Gregory Bovino, a senior agency official.
As Mr. Bovino and his agents strolled the streets of downtown New Orleans on Wednesday, the friendlier atmosphere was noticeable. In the French Quarter, the city’s boozy artery, several people thanked them for their work, though there was still an occasional insult.
Ms. Vallotton didn’t quite the see the issue through a political lens. She does not identify with either major political party, she said, and she did not vote in last year’s presidential election.
But she does see the operation, which the Department of Homeland Security has nicknamed Catahoula Crunch, as unfocused and potentially causing more harm than good.
“If you’ve got illegals in the country, then yes, they should be deported back to their country because we don’t need more crime,” said Ms. Vallotton, who lives with her husband and teenage son. “But you’ve got people who have been here for decades. These guys are working for a living. They weren’t out doing crime. They’re spending money in our economy. They’re buying groceries.”
“Why are we actively looking for people who are not actively committing crimes at the moment?” she asked.
The Border Patrol has said that it is targeting immigrants with criminal histories, but data from past operations shows that most of the people arrested do not have serious criminal records.
Ms. Vallotton did not want to share her exact job title at the school where she works, nor the name of the construction company she hired. But she said the presence of Border Patrol agents had already prompted many students to skip school this week.
On Wednesday afternoon, she was still scrambling to find someone who could cover the roof. Inside the mobile home on her lawn, she could hear her cat, Humphrey, yowling. Then she looked up at a darkening sky.
The forecast for Thursday showed a high chance of rain.
Shannon Sims contributed reporting.
Eduardo Medina is a Times reporter covering the South. An Alabama native, he is now based in Durham, N.C.
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