On Friday, June 6, Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers raided a Downtown Los Angeles warehouse and a Home Depot parking lot. As news of the raids spread, protesters tried to block the arrests, clashing with police officers in the streets.
Within a few days, rage bubbled into all-out demonstrations. The National Guard was called in miles from my home, and soon my news feeds were filled with images of protesters and law enforcement personnel squaring off on the 101 Freeway.
But only a few miles away, the neighborhoods where many undocumented Angelenos live were experiencing these raids differently.
In Boyle Heights, a predominantly Latino neighborhood in East Los Angeles, the streets were unusually quiet. In the early afternoon, a time when the neighborhood is typically bustling with activity, the sidewalks and stores were empty.
I met Ceasar Sanchez, standing at the entrance of a barbershop on Cesar Chavez Avenue, one of the area’s main thoroughfares. Inside, every chair sat empty.
Mr. Sanchez, who works at the shop, hasn’t had a single client this week. “They’re just afraid to go anywhere — shopping, stores, even work,” he explained.
Nearby, a restaurant sat empty at lunchtime. The owner, who, like so many I spoke to since the raids, was fearful to tell me his name, said that the sudden drop in customers seems worse than the early months of the Covid pandemic.
At a community center in South-Central, an undocumented street vendor — who asked to remain anonymous out of fear of facing deportation — spoke of how she’s become too afraid to go to work since the raids. She typically sells clothing and jewelry on the street nearby: income to support her two young children, ages 13 and 10, in the United States and another who is still in Mexico.
In the daytime, she has been finding refuge in this community center, where she is accompanied by her 13-year-old son. “I’m scared for my parents,” he told me. “I’ve been helping my mom out and I talk to my sister about how we should take care of my parents.”
In the flower market district in Downtown L.A., just blocks away from the ICE raid at the Ambiance Apparel warehouse, the morning streets had more foot traffic than the barren sidewalks of Boyle Heights. But Omar Perez, who was working at a local flower shop, told me that many surrounding stores have closed early every day since the raid.
And yet, despite the proximity of the raids, people continue to show up to work. One undocumented worker from Mexico explained to me that with rent and a family, forgoing a paycheck isn’t an option. “I hope this doesn’t last long,” he said of the unrest throughout the city. “But I need to keep on working.”
I met Gabriela Aguilar, a documented flower vendor from Honduras, the day after ICE was spotted in the flower market. She shut down her business to keep her workers safe. Later that day, she came back with another worker to finish an order for an event. “The people we have an event with, they have no idea what’s going on,” she told me. “If I tell them we shut down, they’re going to look for another florist.”
The raids across the city came just as thousands of students in largely Latino neighborhoods across Los Angeles were preparing for graduation. Outside the gates of one school, undocumented street vendors sold balloons and festive decorations to families of students, some of whom are undocumented themselves — flashes of normalcy in a an otherwise uneasy city. At another school, the principal told me the first priority was simply to get students and families behind the school gates as quickly as possible. At least there, he felt, they could be safe if immigration officers attempted to take anyone.
But despite their heightened anxiety, the parents and students I spoke to still showed up — for graduation, and for one another. That courage felt like its own kind of quiet resistance.
In the line to enter the graduation at Van Nuys High School, I met Dipu Ahmed, a Bangladeshi immigrant attending his son’s graduation. This fear felt familiar to him.
“During the time after 9/11, my daughter said ‘I don’t want to go to school anymore,’” Mr. Ahmed told me. “But what is happening now is very hard. This is a pain for millions of immigrants.”
Still, Mr. Ahmed posed proudly with his family members holding an American flag. “This is a beautiful country,” he said. “This country leads you to education. Education is clearness from the darkness.”
I’ve spent my career telling stories about undocumented people in America, particularly within the Latino communities that have been caught in the shifting tides of political change. I’ve interviewed and filmed undocumented families, immigration activists, ICE agents, and immigration attorneys — all cogs in a broken immigration system that puts the people caught up in it in increasingly precarious standing here. Each experience has deepened my understanding of just how fragile the promise of the American dream really is.
For undocumented people in America, the fear of deportation and all the ways that it can tear a family apart or turn a life upside down isn’t just relegated to moments when immigration is a hot-button issue in the news. It’s a daily undercurrent in the lives of the people I’ve met: an anxious calculation behind every school drop-off, every commute to work, every knock on the door.
As the announcer in Van Nuys declared the official end of the school year, students tossed their caps into the air and the campus erupted in celebration. Miles from the football field where they were graduating, the National Guard was beginning a crackdown on protesters.
But here, there was fear, yes, but also a deep resolve that life — and the joy of living it — must continue.
Isabel Castro is a Mexican American filmmaker based in Los Angeles. She has covered immigration for 15 years. Her latest, film Selena y Los Dinos, premiered at Sundance and will be released by Netflix later this year.
Additional reporting by Alana Hauser.
The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: [email protected].
Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Bluesky, WhatsApp and Threads.
The post Fear and Quiet Resistance Amid a Los Angeles in Turmoil appeared first on New York Times.
