The Trump administration is encouraging immigrants to leave, and its raids in Los Angeles are making life miserable for many who stay.
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Some businesses in the MacArthur Park neighborhood of Los Angeles began reopening after shutting down in response to recent ICE raids in the city.in June and the smaller number of street-level stops in the following weeks have not brought the city to a standstill.The absences are seen and felt in areas where Latinos are the majority or plurality, and where people are less likely to be insulated by their own wealth.UCLA and USC, are continuing to operate on schedule, but Cal State Los Angeles, which caters to a far higher proportion of low-income students, has given its students and faculty The school’s provost blamed “heavily armed immigration agents” that left students and faculty in fear. Another empty space: The spot on immigration court documents where the names of Immigration and Customs Enforcement attorneys should be. Judges have permitted them to operate. The top half of his index finger was destroyed by what he describes as a grenade, fired by the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department during an anti-ICE protest. In some of the quiet spaces, a small but coordinated resistance sprung up. Most of what they do is photograph immigration agents as they detain people. Sometimes, volunteers with immigration advocacy groups try to stop the detentions, and sometimes they are detained themselves.would not admit to in court. In California, according to the state Justice Department, about 3,000 people are in ICE custody as of July.One of them is Mario Romero, the father of Yurien Contreras, a 20-year-old whose whole neighborhood is waiting for what comes next.Contreras’ father was detained in the opening stanza of immigration enforcement action, a June 6 raid on a garment warehouse in the Fashion District. He was the only one in the family with a full-time job. Contreras has confined herself to the house she shares with six people since the day he was taken — she rarely ventures beyond the gate bounding their South Central duplex. Yurien Contreras, a young mother of two, has taken on a larger role supporting her family as the eldest daughter after her father was detained by ICE agents. Her family has been sheltering in place in their two-bedroom apartment out of fear.Yurien Contreras’ mother washes baby bottles at their home in Los Angeles, on July 25, 2025. Contreras’s father was detained by ICE agents during a factory raid, leaving the family distraught.When her two infant daughters are napping, when her brothers are out of the house, Contreras confronts the quiet in her home and in her neighborhood. Strangers are given a wary eye now – something Contreras said wasn’t true before the raids. Contreras said most of the people on her block fear a knock on the door from immigration agents. Contreras was born in this country, but her mother was not. One of her brothers, age 4, has developmental delays and appears to be regressing into old behaviors without his father home, pointing and shouting at objects on a kitchen counter but not making clear what he wants. When Contreras looked for work after her father’s detention, she saw openings for warehouse workers but was afraid to leave the house — afraid for her own safety and afraid of what might happen if her mother had to venture off the property while she was gone. “There's like, no like happy things,” she said. “And when there's happy things like a birthday that just passed, we get even more sad because my dad's not here.” Family friends have kept them afloat by buying them diapers and groceries. In mid-July, Contreras made her first trip to the grocery store since the June 6 raid. It had to be done with precision. Her undocumented family members waited at home. She brought her cousin with her – if something happens to her, she wants her family to know when and where she was detained. Her legal status gives her no real comfort — she’s“You could tell something was going on,” Contreras said. “Back then , everybody was going out, families were together, kids were laughing. Now the markets are empty.” She hustled inside the store, armed with a short list. She knew the shelves well enough to get where she needed to quickly. She left as soon as she could. She didn’t really take a deep breath until she was back home, behind the gate. Contreras wanted to go to school for a certificate as a certified nurse assistant or ultrasound technician this fall, plans that are now on hold. The family also wanted to send one of her other brothers, 16, to a four-year college when he graduates high school, but now wonders whether that’s realistic. Yurien Contreras holds her newborn inside their home in Los Angeles on July 25, 2025. Her family has been sheltering since her father was detained by ICE agents at his workplace.“I had already gone from, like, a year and a half without having … anxiety attacks, no panic attacks,” she said, “but when they took away my dad, it triggered it. So my anxiety attacks have been coming back.” They kick in every week or two, and at the most inconvenient times, like when she’s already crying or when she’s arguing with her brothers. It feels like her heart is trying to jump out of her throat. Her breathing races. Sometimes she forgets her compensation strategy, which is taking deep breaths, and her friends have to remind her. Her father was good at calming her down. “So I don't really show it to, you know, to my mom either, because I want to be strong for her, for the kids,” she said. “So, it's like, I can't talk to anybody. I feel like I can't talk even though I know I can talk to people about it, it feels like I can't.”“I'd rather sometimes not talk about it. So when I keep it to myself, it's, you know, it’s even worse.”Depending on your point of view, MacArthur Park is either a symbol of Los Angeles’ ascent to a truly global city or a. Labeled as part of the city’s “Mayan Corridor” that welcomed immigrants from Mexico and Central America, its nickname is “the Ellis Island of the West.” It’s also a place of intense poverty and the violence and crime that accompanies it, conditions that led the owner of longtime city institution Langer’s Deli to Men play soccer at MacArthur Park in Los Angeles, on July 26, 2025. The area is beginning to slowly go back to normal after ICE agents raided the area.in green Humvees and on horseback, a massive show of force to a mostly empty park – word of the immigration agents’ impending arrival got around in the preceding days. Very few people stuck around to watch the show. Now, the 35-acre park is smaller somehow. There are fewer people manning its grills or playing music — though the church services held in front of little clusters of folding chairs still draw a crowd. Watching from the fringes was a man named Francisco Romero, dressed in an olive green T-shirt, blue jeans, gray running shoes and, on his neck, a red bandana. He wore a large straw hat, visible “so people know where to run to” in case of a raid or street stop.“Put spotters on the 710 and the 110,” he said. Romero oversees a complicated operation for the volunteer group Union del Barrio, people who have organized and trained since the first Trump administration to resist immigration enforcement by tracking agents’ vehicles and interrupting their arrests, which the volunteers call kidnappings. The freeways of Los Angeles are the only practical way for convoys of immigration vehicles to get from their home bases on Terminal Island or the city of Los Alamitos to their next raid, so volunteers with Union del Barrio wait and watch on freeway overpasses, two teams per overpass, observing both directions of traffic. At MacArthur Park, Romero was looking for signs that immigration enforcement agents were already on the scene, lying in wait. The first check was all the cars parked along the park’s border looking for what he calls “grab cars,” “drop cars” or “kidnapper ghost rides.” “These kidnapper ghost rides, we know which ones they are, and we’re always ID’ing new ones,” Romero said. “You run their plates and there’s no records found, their VIN numbers don’t match. That’s how you know.” “Drop cars” are the unmarked vehicles parked in an area where immigration enforcement will later show up in large numbers, meant to serve as an advance force blending in with the rest of the cars on the block until they spring their trap and an agent or agents come spilling out, pulling people into the car for transport to a federal holding area. “Mire esta placa,” he said, telling an observer to check out the license plate of a red sedan parked behind a black Sprinter van. The van had paper plates. The red sedan had an Idaho license plate. The combination of paper plates and an out-of-state vehicle was what he was looking for. Romero pulled out his phone and took a picture of both vehicles. From inside the sedan, a man called out, asking why Romero was taking pictures.Romero made his apologies and waved.The goal, Romero said, was to be vigilant, not paranoid. He acknowledged the balance is delicate. Romero said immigration enforcement agents have tried to detain him at least twice after he and other Union del Barrio volunteers raced to the scene of an ICE raid in a store parking lot. Escape is constantly on his mind. His day job is evaluating nonprofits for grant-worthiness. But under the nom de guerre of Chavo, he delivers orders over the phone, sending people who have chosen names like Froggy, War Machine or Porridge to scope out Home Depots or track a potential drop car. “This is a war strategy, so we’re using the language of war,” Romero said. “We’ve been preparing for this.”In the store’s parking lot, a woman named Yesenia was selling Gatorades and mini-donuts. She declined to give her last name but said she is undocumented. A paletero hangs around MacArthur Park in Los Angeles on July 26, 2025. The neighborhood is slowly returning to normal after ICE agents raided the area.“We’re here because we have to make money,” she said in Spanish when asked about the risk of appearing in public.A group of day laborers stood nearby, one of them shyly agreeing to speak to a reporter. They were scared, the man said, but they had no choice but to show up to the same places they went before the raids in Los Angeles began. That’s where the work is. “There is no option,” he said in Spanish, declining to give his real name. “It makes you have fear but there is no option.”The entrance to Élephante is nestled on a leafy, unassuming block in downtown Santa Monica, 10 minutes from the Gwyneth Paltrow-owned Goop store and a half-mile from where Stephen Miller, architect of Trump’s deportation plan, went to high school.Down a darkened hallway, up three floors in an elevator, insulated by the street, Élephante opens into a modest dining room fronted by a large wooden desk from which three restaurant employees ask guests to kindly step out of the way of the elevator. It is just before noon on a Sunday in August. About 40 people fill out three-fourths of the room. The walls, eggshell white, do a good job keeping them hushed to a low murmur., is a minor evolution in Los Angeles dining. Or at least it was in 2019. Celebrities, sure, but also thoughtful curation of a menu that could have relied instead on the restaurant’s prime beachside location. The decor, the owner told the newspaper, was inspired by a trip to the Pantelleria, an island off the Italian coast most famous as the place where Romanstheir unwanted royalty. Longtime Times critic Bill Addison called it “a place to observe plenty of examples of humanity at peak physical perfection” and “the full Los Angeles stereotype.” Which Los Angeles goes unmentioned, but this Los Angeles is far from the raids. The closest one was 11 miles away, in Hawthorne, two months ago. A bachelorette party of seven commands a corner of the room. A gift is handed to the bride-to-be. She opens it. It’s a red bra. She holds it up to laughter and coos of approval. In the next gift box is a nurse’s outfit. A group at a nearby table is on their third order of espresso martinis. A restaurant employee dressed in black with a thin, looping plastic wire attached to his right ear stands among the diners, silent. Outside, beyond the dining room, is a patio and beyond that the beach and then miles and miles of ocean.The loss of federal funding for public media means audience support is more important than ever. Make a powerful statement to safeguard the future of LAist. Become a monthly sustaining member or increase your current support to keep independent local journalism strong.Where is Andrew Do? Convicted ex-Supervisor is a no show at OC taxpayer restitution hearing for corruption scheme Federal prosecutors have dubbed the former Orange County leader a"Robin Hood in reverse" for his misdeeds. So how much will he have to pay back?Climate and EnvironmentFederal agents detain people at a Westlake Home Depot after jumping out of rented Penske moving van The action, which a Border Patrol official called “Operation Trojan Horse,” comes after a federal appeals court upheld a restraining order halting indiscriminate sweeps in Southern California.Dozens of SoCal car washes have been raided by ICE. Why aren't employers the focus? Notably absent from those facing penalties during this era of stepped-up immigration enforcement are the employers themselves: LAist found just one instance since January in which an employer was penalized for hiring unauthorized workers.LA’s legal cannabis owners say multi-million dollar program to give them a hand up, instead left ‘complete debt and devastation’How to navigate LAUSD’s magnet point system
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