Some carry passports to travel to the corner store. Others do not venture out at all, too afraid of the consequences. Bus ridership has dropped. So has business at taco trucks and fruit stands.
Fear and anxiety have gripped Latinos in Los Angeles to an extraordinary degree, upending the lives of thousands of residents. Increased immigration raids and patrols by masked officers have stifled one of the largest and most established Latino communities in America, causing what residents and officials describe as a Covid-style shutdown of public events, street life and commerce.
It has affected not only undocumented immigrants and mixed-status families but also many U.S. citizens who have lived in California for decades and who say that they are fearful of being swept up in the raids. Interviews with more than two dozen Latino residents, elected officials and community leaders in the Los Angeles area revealed the cultural, financial and psychological toll the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown is having on a county where nearly half of the population traces their ancestry to Mexico and other parts of Latin America.
“People don’t feel safe,” said Mark González, a state lawmaker whose district includes part of downtown Los Angeles and the city of Montebello, a majority-Hispanic working-class suburb where a number of people have been detained by federal agents. “Normal everyday life is completely disrupted as a result of these raids.”
An immigration raid on June 6, when dozens of people were detained at a clothing wholesaler in downtown Los Angeles, set off a series of clashes among protesters, federal agents and police officers. President Trump then sent National Guard troops and Marines to Los Angeles. The clashes have largely ended, and a downtown curfew has been lifted. But federal raids have continued in the Los Angeles area.
Since June 6, agents from several federal agencies have arrested about 2,000 immigrants in the Los Angeles region, according to internal documents obtained by The New York Times. The speed and scale of the operation — with hundreds of immigrants arrested in a three-week period — has been one of the reasons so many are on edge. Another has been the operation’s visibility: Numerous encounters of agents questioning and apprehending men and women have been captured by bystanders and activists on video and posted on social media.
Federal officials have said they are prioritizing undocumented immigrants with violent criminal records. Agency officials point to immigrants they have arrested with serious criminal convictions since June 6, like attempted murder. But the viral videos of people being picked up off streets, many seemingly at random, have heightened worry among Latinos. Many residents and local officials have said they are fearful and angry because they believe federal agents are racially profiling Hispanic people, questioning their citizenship status in public places on the assumption that they are undocumented.
Tricia McLaughlin, a spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security, dismissed assertions about racial profiling. “Any claims that individuals have been ‘targeted’ by law enforcement because of their skin color are disgusting and categorically false,” she said in a statement.
To federal officials, the L.A. raids have been a success, are ridding the streets of criminal migrants and are being carried out by highly trained officers who are being demonized by Democratic politicians and activists.
To many Hispanic residents, the raids they have seen on social media appear to show agents pulling up to auto shops, carwashes and shopping-center parking lots questioning anyone who is Latino. One viral encounter in Montebello showed a Border Patrol agent asking a 29-year-old Hispanic man who’s a U.S. citizen an unusual question to prove his status: “What hospital were you born at?”
State Senator Sasha Renée Pérez was born in the United States, but she has been carrying around her passport after her parents begged her to do so. Tony Marquez, 72, a retired Verizon worker born in San Diego, used to take only his phone with him on his neighborhood walks. Lately, he has been bringing his driver’s license, too.
“Just in case,” Mr. Marquez said. “I’m a boring senior that lives in Boyle Heights that likes to go for walks, and for the first time in history, I don’t feel safe.”
Hector Mata, 22, an American citizen, has been avoiding taking the bus, worried that immigration agents may target public transportation in Los Angeles. “I’m brown,” Mr. Mata said of federal agents, “and that’s all they need.”
The Los Angeles County public transit system has seen a 10 to 15 percent decline in ridership on buses and trains since the raids began this month. Latinos make up the majority of the system’s ridership. Transit officials declined to speculate about the reasons ridership has dropped since the raids, noting that some riders may have decided to work remotely during the height of protests earlier this month.
Todd Lyons, the acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, blamed politicians for the spread of fear regarding immigration enforcement, adding that the agency had been regularly operating in the Los Angeles area well before June.
“They were doing their law enforcement mission before the incidents of June 6 even occurred, and yet it’s being spun as a way that ICE has created all this mayhem and chaos, which is farthest from the truth,” Mr. Lyons said in an interview. “It’s the elected officials out there that are spreading this rhetoric, and they’re the ones that are putting the fear in.” He added: “The men and women of ICE get tainted this way and disparaged in this way for just doing the actual law enforcement mission.”
Gregory Bovino, the head of Border Patrol’s El Centro region, has defended his agency’s work in Los Angeles. “Many millions of illegal aliens have passed across that border over the past several years,” he told reporters at a news conference on June 12. “It’s our job to get them out, and that’s what we are going to do, and that’s what we’re doing right now.”
Days later, Mr. Bovino assumed control of the federal immigration-enforcement operation in the Los Angeles area. A memo obtained by The Times from Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, announced that she was putting him in charge as the operation’s tactical commander. The presence of Border Patrol agents, who had rarely conducted high-profile raid operations in the Los Angeles area in the past, has added to the alarm for many Hispanic residents, and as a result they are limiting the time they spend in public or going to extremes to change their daily routines.
Catholic leaders said people are staying home from Mass on Sundays. One worker at a cemetery in a Latino neighborhood said fewer people have been visiting the graves of loved ones because of the heat and the raids. Officials in Pasadena canceled swim lessons at a park after reports of federal agents in the area. Bell Gardens, a city southeast of downtown Los Angeles that is 96 percent Latino, canceled its Fourth of July celebration over concerns about federal raids.
In downtown Los Angeles, one historic landmark and tourist site — a Mexican marketplace on Olvera Street — has been quiet. Normally, it would be easy to find an antojito, Spanish for small snack, on Olvera. But on a recent afternoon, many of the shops were shuttered and only a few people were walking around.
For landscapers, nannies, housekeepers and day laborers who are undocumented, the chilling effect of the raids has been paralyzing. Some have stopped showing up to work. Others travel only to and from their employers’ homes.
One undocumented woman who has been in the United States for more than 20 years and who works as a nanny said her anxiety about getting stopped by federal agents kept her from attending her daughter’s high school graduation. The woman asked to be identified only by her first name, Ana; she feared retaliation because of her immigration status. She agonized for days about whether to attend the ceremony but finally told her daughter: “I prefer to be home when you come back.”
Ana moved to the United States when she was 17, in part to flee a volatile home life in Oaxaca, Mexico, and was in the process of applying for a green card, for which she was eligible through her U.S.-born children. She said the life she built in America has never felt more precarious. “Everything has changed,” she said.
She and her daughter have spent days mostly holed up at home, rarely leaving other than to go to work. They have skipped sushi dates at their favorite Japanese restaurant. They love hiking together on popular trails, but they have instead stayed inside, scrolling on their phones or watching Netflix. She said they have felt stuck, the nation’s second-largest city suddenly only as big as their apartment.
“Trapped,” she said.
Another undocumented woman whose husband was one of those detained at the June 6 raid on the clothing wholesaler stopped going to her job as a taco-stand worker the day after the incident.
The woman, who asked to be identified by her first name, Susana, because of her immigration status and her husband’s case, has four children, all born in the United States, and she fears that federal agents will show up at her workplace and take her away from them. One of the few times she left home was to take her 9-month-old boy to the hospital because he had a high fever.
“The morning they took my husband, I wanted to go see him at his work — I couldn’t go,” she said, adding, “I was afraid they would take me. And who would take care of my children? Now, I’ve had to accept what happened, but I am terrified of what could happen to me.”
Tito Rodriguez, the executive leader of the Local Hearts Foundation, typically helps organize back-to-school events and Thanksgiving canned-food drives in and around Long Beach and South Central Los Angeles. He pivoted to helping deliver food to undocumented families who are too afraid to leave their homes and go grocery shopping.
In recent weeks, he said he has received text messages from families across Southern California, from Long Beach near southern Los Angeles to the San Fernando Valley farther north. “There’s so many, I can’t keep up,” Mr. Rodriguez said. “They’re afraid. They’re scared to come outside.”
On Friday alone, Local Hearts distributed groceries for more than 270 families who have been afraid to go shopping, Mr. Rodriguez said.
Christian Medina, 27, a grocery delivery driver who lives in Whittier, said that even as an American citizen, he has held back on unnecessary trips outside. “Many people are afraid of getting taken,” he said, “for simply walking outside their house.”
Jesus Jiménez is a Times reporter covering Southern California.
Jill Cowan is a Times reporter based in Los Angeles, covering the forces shaping life in Southern California and throughout the state.
Hamed Aleaziz covers the Department of Homeland Security and immigration policy for The Times.
Gabriela Bhaskar is a Times photographer correspondent based in Los Angeles.
The post ‘Completely Disrupted’: Fear Upends Life for Latinos in L.A. appeared first on New York Times.
