‘You don’t know if you’ll return home’: Immigration raids shake Los Angeles | Migration News

Los Angeles, California — On a warm Tuesday afternoon in East Hollywood, Payo grilled up heaping plates of chicken, carne asada, potatoes and ribs at the food stall where he works.

He moved here three years ago from the state of Oaxaca in southern Mexico. He has a one-year-old daughter in the United States.

But in the country that he now calls “home”, even doing his job now feels dangerous.

For millions of undocumented migrants in the US, fear and uncertainty about the future are fixtures of life. Yet with the administration of US President Donald Trump launching a series of aggressive immigration raids and calling in the National Guard and more than 700 US Marines to crack down on protests that have followed, the last several days have felt different to Payo and residents of neighbourhoods in Los Angeles with large immigrant communities.

“I feel tense. It’s a bit of a risk even being out here on the street,” says Payo, who requested that only his first name be used.

Still, he feels he has little choice but to continue his work, to support his daughter, as well as family back in Mexico.

“I’ve never felt like this before during my time here,” he says. “When you leave your house, you don’t know if you’ll return home.”

 

Chilling effect

East Hollywood is located several miles from downtown Los Angeles, which has been the site of large demonstrations and protests, some of which have turned violent and included clashes with law enforcement, since last Friday. Local officials have accused Trump of seeking to escalate the situation rather than helping restore calm.

Residents of the neighbourhood say that the streets have been quiet, with fewer people venturing outside amid heightened fears over immigration raids and arrests.

“People aren’t going out as much. They’re not going to work because they’re afraid,” said Jose Medina, who works as a cleaner at a hospital and first came to Los Angeles from El Salvador about 45 years ago.

He says the city’s status as a metropolis with a large Latino community is part of what drew him there. According to a 2023 census survey, Spanish is spoken in nearly 40 percent of Los Angeles households, and the city’s ties to Latin America are as old as the United States itself.

“It’s a beautiful city, a city of working people,” says Medina, noting that immigrant workers often take on demanding jobs such as construction, landscaping and cleaning services.

Immigration raids across Los Angeles and the state over the last several days have frequently targeted workplaces, adding to the feeling of anxiety in immigrant communities. So, too, has the aggressive nature of the Trump administration’s approach to enforcement.

“What you see in the news and in the statements is that they’re going after the most violent criminals, but we know that’s a lie and that’s not what’s happening. We’re seeing agents coming into a Home Depot and picking up everyone, not even investigating,” said Jose Madera, director of the Pasadena Community Job Center, which offers support for day labourers.

“With day labour, if you miss one day of work, that’s the rent, or that’s food on the table for your children and your family,” he added, of the economic cost of staying home from work due to fear over immigration raids. “That’s the decision that every day labourer and every migrant person has to make.”

He also said that the due process rights of those detained and deported also seem to have been ignored.

The parents of a 23-year-old man deported to Mexico after being arrested on Friday told The Washington Post newspaper that he signed what he believed was a form consenting to a COVID-19 test, but may have been a document agreeing to his deportation.

Sensitive locations that have traditionally been exempted from immigration enforcement activities, such as courthouses, have also been subjected to raids. Los Angeles school district officials said on Monday that school security will set up safety perimeters around schools so that families can feel secure as they attend student graduations.

Marlene Marin, the owner of a hair salon in East Hollywood who has lived in the city for 35 years and is originally from the Peruvian capital of Lima, said that the last several days have reminded her of the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, when people stayed in and the streets were largely empty.

“People have a lot of anxiety. We don’t have many clients coming in,” she said. “There is an economic impact when people don’t want to go out to the stores and the shops.”

History of dissent

On Tuesday evening, Mayor Karen Bass declared a curfew in the downtown area of Los Angeles in what she said was an effort to halt vandalism and looting.

“There are some bad people burning police cars,” said Marin. “But I don’t think the people doing that are immigrants.”

In a speech on Tuesday, Trump leaned into incendiary rhetoric, promising to “liberate” the city from “animals” and “a foreign enemy”. US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the federal agency largely tasked with immigration raids, shared a picture on social media showing immigration agents flanked by heavily armed soldiers detaining a man.

But contrary to Trump’s narrative, studies have repeatedly shown that migrants are less likely to commit crimes than those who are born in the US. “People are here looking for something better, to support their families,” says Payo, standing under a tent that shields him from the afternoon sun as smoke pours off the grill in East Hollywood.

Throughout Los Angeles’s history, a tradition of robust dissent and immigrant activism has frequently brought local figures and movements into confrontation with federal authorities.

During the 1980s, the city became a key part of the country’s sanctuary movement, which offered support for refugees fleeing violence in countries like El Salvador and Guatemala, where military governments, with the backing of the United States, were carrying out campaigns of brutal violence.

When a Roman Catholic priest named Father Luis Olivares offered refugees and undocumented workers physical sanctuary inside the La Placita church near the city’s historic centre, immigration officials threatened to raid the church if Olivares continued to defy the federal government. Eventually, the government didn’t follow through on the threat.

But Mario Garcia, a professor of Chicano studies at the University of California at Santa Barbara who wrote a biography on the life of Olivares, says that the Trump administration has pushed an aggressive interpretation of executive power with few comparisons in modern US history.

“[Ronald] Reagan’s policies in the 1980s on immigration did not include the militarisation of INS [the Immigration and Naturalization Service], the predecessor of ICE. It did not include using the National Guard and the Marines to put down protests in support of the undocumented and Central American refugees,” he said in an email to Al Jazeera.

Garcia believes that Trump isn’t done yet and that his recent moves may be laying the groundwork for something even more dramatic: the declaration of martial law.

“Los Angeles has a long history of protesting against unconstitutional efforts to repress free speech and mass peaceful protests,” he said. “As a city of immigrants, Angelenos recognise and support the work and contributions of immigrants, whether documented or undocumented.”