The Trump administration has made New Orleans the latest target in its crackdown on illegal immigration, with federal agents fanning out across the metropolitan area this week, raising fears in the city’s migrant community.
The immigrant community in New Orleans, though, is distinct from others that have been swept up in the president’s deportation blitz, both in its unique history and its comparatively small size. It has been shaped by decades-old ties to countries like Vietnam and Honduras, as well as the monumental rebuilding effort that followed the city’s devastation from Hurricane Katrina 20 years ago.
Here are a few things to know about immigrants in New Orleans:
The city’s immigrant population is relatively small but significant.
New Orleans is home to more than 93,000 foreign-born residents, which is roughly 9 percent of its overall population, according to a March 2025 fact sheet published by the nonprofit research organization Vera Institute of Justice, citing U.S. census data. In the United States, foreign-born residents make up about 14 percent of the population.
New Orleans’s number falls well short of the foreign-born populations of other cities that have been targeted in the Trump administration’s deportation sweeps, like Los Angeles (33 percent) and Chicago (18 percent).
Still, immigrants in New Orleans are part of a key component of the local economy and labor force. They support the construction industry and, as service workers, fuel the city’s booming tourism sector. Many live in immigrant-heavy neighborhoods in the city and the surrounding metro areas like Kenner, Metairie and Terrytown.
Hondurans represent a large share of the city’s Hispanic community.
Immigrants from Honduras have an outsized presence in New Orleans and comprise the city’s single largest immigrant group.
The ties between New Orleans and the Central American nation stretch back to the 1900s, when the city served as a crucial port in the fruit trade with Honduras.
In more recent decades, migrants from countries like Guatemala, Nicaragua and Mexico have swelled the city’s Hispanic population. Many in those communities arrived in the city in the wake of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, drawn by the promise of work rebuilding after the storm.
Vietnamese immigrants face a shifting deportation policy.
The New Orleans area is also home to around 14,000 Vietnamese immigrants, who began arriving in the city as refugees when U.S. forces withdrew from their home country at the end of the Vietnam War. Catholic charity groups helped resettle the heavily refugee Vietnamese population in the region, and thousands arrived over the following decades.
Many Vietnamese immigrants in New Orleans have legal status or U.S. citizenship. But local media reports indicate that hasn’t eased the community’s anxiety over the president’s immigration approach.
Recent shifts in U.S. policy toward Vietnamese refugees have increased those fears. Historically, Vietnamese immigrants who arrived before 1995 were excluded from deportation. But both the first and second Trump administrations have pressured Vietnam to change its stance.
In 2020, Vietnam relented somewhat, signing an agreement with the United States that established a process for deporting some who arrived before 1995. And this year, Immigration and Customs Enforcement announced that it had dropped a policy to not detain pre-1995 Vietnamese immigrants slated for deportation for longer than 90 days.
Chris Hippensteel is a reporter covering breaking news and a member of the 2025-26 Times Fellowship class, a program for journalists early in their careers.
The post What to Know About New Orleans’s Immigrant Community appeared first on New York Times.
