ICE Immigration Raids Upend Local Community Life
By Emma Rault, Community Reporter
“Fear is killing our businesses, emptying our storefronts, and choking our economy,” said Anthony Luna, board chair of the San Pedro Chamber of Commerce, at the July 11 press conference held on the Port of LA’s Terminal Island, which federal immigration enforcement agents have been using as their base of operations for the large-scale immigration raids that have been carried out across Southern California over the past month.
The conference painted a bleak picture of the devastating impact on public life.
“Let’s be clear: the immediate harms … to people is what’s primary. But we have all these secondary harms that come to our education system, our hospital system, our business communities,” said 15th District City Councilman Tim McOsker.
When Anthony Luna recently walked into The Original Las Brisas, a family-owned restaurant that has been feeding San Pedro for more than 40 years, he found the normally bustling restaurant almost empty. “Lunch is gone,” manager Hilary Mejia told him.
Last month, the Wilmington Farmers’ Market announced it would be shutting down indefinitely. “Due to increased ICE activity in Wilmington, many of our farmers are scared and have chosen not to attend,” the organizers wrote in a Facebook post.
Summer school attendance is also down significantly, as parents and students are afraid of having their lives forever upended on their school run.
The climate of extreme anxiety is caused by the current administration’s unprecedented dragnet approach to immigration enforcement. Since early June, masked men in tactical gear claiming to be agents of the federal government have swarmed parking lots, bus stops, day laborer corners, farms, car washes and other places to conduct violent arrests.
At an ICE raid targeting a farm in Camarillo, several workers were critically injured and one man—the sole breadwinner for his family—died after falling from a roof.
The raids have repeatedly ensnared U.S. citizens, like Army veteran George Retes, a security guard at an Oxnard marijuana farm who was sprayed with tear gas, pepper sprayed and dragged from his vehicle on his way to work and detained for three days without being allowed to contact an attorney.
Meanwhile, in Florida, a 15-year-old boy with no criminal convictions ended up at the new immigration prison in the Everglades. At another Florida ICE facility, according to a harrowing new report by Human Rights Watch, shackled detainees were made to kneel and eat food from Styrofoam plates with their hands behind their backs.
In addition to ensnaring documented immigrants, the raids have also targeted people without papers who are proactively trying to come into compliance with the law. In Santa Ana, for example, one resident was arrested at his ISAP check-in — a mandatory check-in with the immigration authorities that is part of ICE’s Alternatives to Detention program. Countless incidents like these have left immigrant families reeling and unsure whether their civil liberties will be respected.
Educators are seeing a devastating impact. “As a teacher, I don’t know what the future holds,” said David, a teacher with UTLA based in Torrance. “I don’t know how many students I will have in my classroom in August or how many phone calls I will have to make to find them as a result of ICE terrorizing our immigrant communities.”
LAUSD saw itself forced to roll out the option of virtual summer-school attendance, and Cal State LA likewise announced that it will allow professors to move classes online.
Many schools in the harbor area are doing the same. In March, the CSU Dominguez Hills Academic Senate passed a resolution urging faculty to do everything in their power to support students “who may be experiencing disruption in their education because of the federal executive orders relating to documentation and residency status.”
CSU Long Beach gives its faculty similar flexibility, while El Camino College has had hybrid options in place since the pandemic and continues to offer them, according to spokesperson Kerri Webb. (Harbor College could not be reached in time for comment.)
While those accommodations can be a lifeline, students continue to face uncertainty and unsafety, exacerbated by incidents like the one on the CSUDH campus earlier this month, when ICE used one of the university’s public parking lots as a staging area. (In a public statement on its Instagram page, the university stated that “ICE agents are not permitted access to non-public areas of the campus without a valid judicial warrant.”)
“Our communities are standing firm, but our kids are suffering trauma that will affect the rest of their lives,” David from UTLA told Random Lengths.
David also pointed out that many children are reliving the trauma of the pandemic — the sense of being trapped at home because nowhere else is safe.
Just weeks ago, a convoy of federal agents armed with machine guns marched into LA’s MacArthur Park while children were at a summer camp in a nearby recreation center. Torched writer Alissa Walker pointed out that scenes like these are likely to cut families off from both much-needed downtime and vital services.
“The same city rec centers also provide lunches for all kids on weekdays. Fear of ICE is going to keep families away from free summer meals,” she wrote on Bluesky.
As the Chamber’s Anthony Luna also pointed out, all this will likely have a ripple effect felt far beyond the present moment. For LA, it raises questions about the World Cup, the Olympics, and the city’s role on the international stage. For the Harbor Area, the political situation raises questions about the tourism industry (already down dramatically), the port economy, and the high hopes invested in projects like West Harbor. As Torched’s Alissa Walker put it: What if the world doesn’t come?
“This is what we’re fighting to save,” Luna summarized: “The family restaurant on the corner, the harvest ready to be picked, the dignity of safe work, the trust that keeps our economy running.”
A federal judge ordered the Trump administration to temporarily stop the LA raids, ruling in favor of a lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union and cities including LA, which alleged unconstitutional racial profiling. The federal government immdediately appealed the ruling.
In spite of the ongoing uncertainty, the community is coming together by establishing mutual-aid funds and showing up in droves to support events that have been affected.
“San Pedro has an amazing activist community that’s very in tune with social issues,” said Rick Canter, owner of VenaVer, the company that organizes the San Pedro Farmers Market.
“The community-building that’s happened [in response to the raids] is actually making the market stronger. We’re in it together. That’s how we win.”