Dozens of LA Car Washes Have Been Raided by ICE. Workers are Taking the Fall
This article was first published by the nonprofit newsroom LAist on August 6, 2025 and is republished here with permission.
Immigration agents first showed up at Touch and Glow Car Wash, a mom-and-pop operation in a heavily Latino, working class area of Whittier, in early June. Hector Contreras, the assistant manager, found himself abruptly boxed in, with four to five agents coming from each direction, he recalled recently.
“ They don't ask nothing — they go straight with the Latino people,” he said.
Contreras told the agents he was a legal permanent resident and showed them his driver’s license. Still, they held him, hands tied, for around 10 minutes, he said. Ultimately, agents let Contreras go, but three of his colleagues were detained. Several others haven’t come back to work since.
It was all over in less time than it takes to hand-wash a car.
Agents went back to the car wash three times within the span of a few weeks, managers told LAist.
“It’s not right what they’re doing,” said Contreras, who said he has lived in the U.S. for over three decades. “Everybody here just come to work.”
Recent raids have had a chilling effect in Southern California, with immigrants and even native-born Angelenos afraid to go to work or leave their homes at all. As agents seek to fulfill the Trump administration’s deportation goals, Los Angeles and Orange County car washes have been a frequent target.
But the focus of the sweeps so far has been on the workers — not owners or operators.
LAist compiled news and social media reports of immigration actions at workplaces across Southern California since March 27, and cross-referenced that with arrest warrants and court documents.
We found that car washes — an iconic and beloved industry in L.A. — made up nearly 50% of the businesses where publicized immigration actions took place.
The CLEAN Carwash Worker Center, which works to improve conditions for car wash employees, has documented more than 100 people detained in sweeps at car washes in L.A. and Orange counties since June, mostly workers, but also several customers.
Such raids have died down significantly in recent weeks, since courts temporarily blocked immigration actions from using race, ethnicity, language or place of employment as a basis for suspected violation of immigration laws. But sweeps haven't stopped completely, according to local news reports.
A hearing is set for Sept. 24 where both sides will argue for and against a more permanent ban.
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. In that case, the general manager at a painting company in San Diego, which had done contract work for the federal government, pleaded guilty to knowingly hiring unauthorized workers. He was sentenced to one year probation and 50 hours of community service.
The Department of Homeland Security, which oversees border security and immigration enforcement, didn’t respond to LAist’s request for data about enforcement actions against employers suspected of hiring unauthorized workers. But Tricia McLaughlin, assistant secretary at the Department of Homeland Security, wrote in an email to LAist, saying: “There will be no safe spaces for industries who harbor violent criminals or purposely try to undermine ICE’s efforts.”
Ciaran McEvoy, a spokesperson for the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Central District of California, which includes L.A., said, “I’m not aware of us charging a company with hiring illegal immigrants.”
However, McEvoy added, “Under the Biden presidency, there were very few immigration-related criminal cases of any kind being brought.”
Migration and labor experts agree that the ease of finding work in the U.S. is the biggest draw for people willing to risk crossing the border illegally or overstaying their visa — and ending that draw, or making it easier for would-be migrants to work legally here, is crucial to stopping it.
“People are making rational decisions when they come to the United States illegally. Most often it's economic, that there is the opportunity for a job here in the United States,” said Ira Mehlman, media director with the group Federation for American Immigration Reform or FAIR, which advocates for reduced immigration and greater enforcement of immigration laws. “If you can convince people that no, that's not gonna happen, you'll see fewer people come.”
Raúl Hinojosa, a labor and Chicano studies professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, said he believes the Trump administration’s selective immigration enforcement tactics are geared toward “political performance.”
“We're seeing the entire focus being on the most cruel demonstrations,” Hinojosa said. “They’re using muscles, not brains.”
What does immigration law say?
The most recent large-scale change to U.S. immigration law, the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA), established fines and jail time for employers for knowingly hiring unauthorized workers — up to $10,000 per illegal employee and up to six months in prison for repeat offenders.
But over the years, under both Republican and Democratic presidents, few employers have faced penalties despite estimates that undocumented immigrants make up 5% of the country’s workforce.
Why? For one thing, business leaders have political power.
“You have to recognize that the business lobby is quite powerful, that they look at illegal immigrants as a source of cheap labor,” said Mehlman from FAIR.
Hinojosa said employers and consumers depend on that labor to keep the cost of doing business and prices low.
“This is the base of the contradiction that we've always had in this country,” he said, “and they certainly don't want to pay the price of actually following the law.”
Plus, prosecutors have to prove that a business knowingly hired unauthorized workers in order to build a case against them, which can be tricky.
The same 1986 law that set penalties for employers set rules for verifying an employee’s ability to work. Generally, employers have to document a worker’s passport or green card, or a combination of a state ID, like a driver’s license, and a Social Security card or birth certificate. (Here’s the full list of requirements.)
The government established a system called E-Verify to try to prevent the use of fake or borrowed documents to establish employment authorization. But employers in most states, including California, aren’t required to use it. To date, nearly 1.4 million businesses use E-Verify across the country — a tiny fraction of the total number. California alone has more than 4.2 million businesses.
Tia Koonse, a lawyer at the UCLA Labor Center, said many businesses are inherently disincentivized to check their employees’ work authorization.
“Their bottom line relies on immigrant labor,” she said.
Before and during the raids
LAist spoke to owners and managers at four car wash businesses targeted by the recent immigration raids. All of them said they took steps to verify their employee’s eligibility to work when they were hired.
“My job ends at collecting the socials,” said Omar Mawazini, owner of the Anaheim Car Wash. “I’m not law enforcement, I don’t need to be going any further than that.”
Mawazini and several other car wash owners who spoke with LAist said some of their employees had worked there for decades.
"Our workers, they have papers, they have authorization to work here … They gotta show the simple documents — their Social Security, their ID, their place of residence, where do they live, their work permit — basically, everything you and me need to work, they need to show that as well,” said Austin Clark, the operations lead at Westchester Hand Wash.
Car wash owners and managers who spoke with LAist also said they had received no prior notice from immigration authorities of any suspected hiring violations.
Andrea Gonzalez, deputy director of CLEAN, said representatives from the organization spoke with owners or managers at more than 50 car washes where raids have taken place. They told her agents never presented warrants before detaining employees.
Mawazini from the Anaheim Car Wash said he asked agents whether they had a warrant, and asked them to show identification, but was ignored.
He said agents also ignored “private property” signs.
“I asked for a warrant as soon as their tire touched my property, they didn’t provide that,” he said. “We did everything to make it labeled that you are not welcome unless you’re invited. They didn’t care about any of that … they did whatever they wanted to do.”
When agents hit Westchester Hand Wash twice on consecutive days in early June, they gave no warnings of their arrival to the owners or managers, and did not interact with them during the raids, Clark told LAist.
“I didn’t expect them to talk to management, honestly,” Clark said. “They don’t really care, to be honest. I was expecting them to show up and take our people, that’s the one thing I expect.”
The raids have also been notoriously quick, many lasting mere minutes. Touch and Glow’s managers told LAist it seemed like the agents were in a hurry. Operations Supervisor Emmanuel Karim said the raid at Bubble Bath Bath Car Wash was over in a mere 180 seconds.
He said agents “terrorized and scared” his workers while deliberately ignoring "private area" signs and requests for a warrant.
“They just conducted [the raid] in a very inhumane way,” Karim said. “It’s not even an American way.”
The fallout for car washes and their workers
There are more car washes in California than any other state in the country, according to U.S. Census data. Koonse said the widespread, visible nature of the car wash industry could be one of the reasons it has quickly become a target.
“It's a beloved industry in L.A., it's an iconic industry in L.A.,” she said. “I wonder if that isn't one of the reasons why it's, you know, low-hanging fruit for ICE and DHS right now, just from a cruelty perspective.”
Gonzalez from CLEAN said over half of the center’s more than 1,000 members have stopped working in the car wash industry.
“There are some who have decided to move back home on their own accounts, or some who are just sheltering in place for the time being,” Gonzalez said. “There are hundreds of workers who are deciding to stay home to remain safe.”
Cities across L.A. and Orange counties have set up funds for undocumented residents who are foregoing work and hiding out in their homes.
Many undocumented workers could face an additional burden — they’re unlikely to be able to collect past wages owed to them by their employers, Koonse said. When employers have evidence that their employee is unauthorized, workers can no longer claim outstanding wages, she said.
Ultimately, Koonse said the lack of enforcement of employers “put[s] the entire onus of immigration enforcement on the backs of really, really, really vulnerable people who are just trying to send remittances home.”
Business goes on
After four raids, Touch and Glow Car Wash has put up signs marking private spaces in an effort to keep immigration agents out. They also hosted a training on employer and employee rights in case of another raid. Co-owner Rosio Sarabia said they’ve had to rely on the community to keep their business going.
“We had a lot of families step in to help us just on the weekends and stuff,” Sarabia said. “Some of them volunteer, some of them get paid. There's been a lot of support from community and family members, friends as well."
Sarabia said the Trump administration’s approach to immigration enforcement is “not working for our state at all.”
“This is a state of immigrants,” she said, “we can't live without them.”
