What LA Immigration Raids Left Behind: Empty Spaces and a City on Edge

This story was originally published by CalMatters. Sign up for their newsletters.

There’s a certain beauty in the notes not played. An entire symphony, if you’re listening.

The cars not backfiring. The sirens not wailing. The fireworks not erupting in sonic booms that bounce off hills and peal across valleys.

This is the consequence of the largest planned deportation in American history. The Trump administration’s goal is to make life as unnavigable, unstable and uncomfortable as possible for people in the country illegally. The administration’s hope is they leave on their own, or with their kids in tow.

“Self-deportation is a dignified way to leave the U.S.,” the Department of Homeland Security said in May as part of a pitch encouraging people to leave the country on their own.

What remains are places that used to be: a shuttered restaurant, empty benches on weekends at MacArthur Park and even an abandoned taco stand, meat still on the grill hours later. The silence is the point.

Beneath that silence, behind locked doors, is a population in hiding. They were dishwashers and garment factory stitchers. They sold fruit on the street. This is the echo of the city they left behind.

Los Angeles has always been the author of its own story, from Chandler’s Marlowe to Angelyne’s bright pink Corvette. Now immigration enforcement agents wearing masks, driving cars with license plates from other states, are rewriting the narrative.

LA’s long, nervous summer entered its third month in August, but the immigration worksite raids in June and the smaller number of street-level stops in the following weeks have not brought the city to a standstill.

But it is a city diminished.

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.

That means car traffic is nearly unchanged from a year ago, going by the frequency of crashes, but bus ridership was down 1.5 million rides in June, compared to the same month in 2024.

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 option to take classes online. 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 anonymously, according to a report from The Intercept. Asylum seekers and their attorneys must use their full names.

There’s also the missing space on Sergio Espejo’s left hand. 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.

The administration’s goal was for deportation squads to arrest 3,000 people each day — a number that administration attorneys 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.

A family retreats

It’ll really pile up on you, if you let it.

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.

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 read the stories about ICE detaining U.S. citizens.

The grocery store was out of tomatillos, something she’s never seen before.

“You could tell something was going on,” Contreras said. “Back then (before the first immigration raid), 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.

And her anxiety attacks are back.

“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.”

She pauses.

“I’d rather sometimes not talk about it. So when I keep it to myself, it’s, you know, it’s even worse.”

It’ll really pile up on you, if you let it.

Searching for ICE in LA

Depending on your point of view, MacArthur Park is either a symbol of Los Angeles’ ascent to a truly global city or a symbol of its fall. 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 threaten to abandon the area.

One morning this summer, immigration agents arrived at the park 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.

On a weekend morning in July, Romero’s phone rang. He listened for a few seconds.

“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.

“We’re just trying to be careful, with ICE out here,” Romero said.

“I’m not ICE,” said the man inside.

Romero made his apologies and waved.

Once out of the man’s earshot, he said “that was totally an ICE agent.”

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.”

Romero moved on to a nearby Home Depot.

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.

“We’re here because we have to make money,” she said in Spanish when asked about the risk of appearing in public.

She pointed to a young man seated next to her. “Our kids.”

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.”

Three weeks later, immigration enforcement agents would detain two men who were standing outside the same MacArthur Park Home Depot. Two days after that, agents in masks detained at least two women from behind the same tables in the same spot at the same Home Depot where Yesenia stood.

CalMatters could not confirm the identities of the people who were taken.

Where life feels unchanged

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.

This, according to the Los Angeles Times, 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 Romans banished their 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.