In the days after ramped-up immigration raids began inLos Angeles, 50-year-old Lorena, who has been running a tamale cart in Koreatown for decades, stayed home. So did her husband, who works as a day laborer.
Worried about paying their bills, both of them after a few days went back out to work.
“My son would go around the block and watch out for us,” said Lorena, whom the Guardian is not identifying by her full name for fear of reprisal. He’d text them a warning when he suspected that immigration agents were nearby.
Eventually, though, they concluded the effort was not only risky, but futile. There was no business. “People are scared. They do not go out to buy anything,” she said.
Then Lorena was offered a grant by a local advocacy group, KTown For All, which had raised money online from supporters to “buy out” street vendors at risk of being detained.
She and her husband have been able to remain home since, and keep a low profile. She knew the group because they had organized initiatives to support vendors during the height of the coronavirus pandemic – and on occasion she had worked with them to distribute her tamales to unhoused people and others in need.
“That is why I believe that when you give love, you receive love,” she said. “I want more people to know about [how] this way they can also support more vendors, more sellers. Because there are many, many vendors who are still taking risks because they need to make money.”
KTown for All has said publicly that its supporters donated enough money to cover a month’s rent and food for at least 42 vendors and their families, and it has shared links to street vendor fundraising efforts in other Pasadena, LA’s South Bay and other neighborhoods. The group did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The LA Street Vendor Solidarity Fund, a similar effort organized by several non-profits, hasraised $80,000 so far, with the goal of raising at least $300,000.
An estimated 1 million of Los Angeles county’s more than 10 million residents are undocumented people, the largest undocumented population of any city in the US. Street vendor buyouts are just one of the ways Angelenos are responding to the Trump administration’s raids, which are continuing to spread terror across Los Angeles, with many immigrant families afraid to leave their homes for school or work.
“Community members that have not been traditionally plugged into politics or the current state of affairs are plugging in – they’re getting informed,”said Eunisses Hernandez, a 35-year-old city councilmember who represents a quarter-million people in a majority-Latino district in northern Los Angeles.
Many Angelenos who did not attend protests against the new Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (Ice) raids are doing other kinds of work, Hernandez said, like providing “know your rights” information to small businesses about interacting with law enforcement officials, or figuring out how to deliver food to immigrant families too afraid to leave home even to buy groceries.
Mutual aid networks created to help people affected by the January’s wildfires have been “reinvigorated” to respond to the Trump administration’s raids, Hernandez said.
“In this moment, while we’re seeing the worst of our federal administration, we are seeing the best here in the city of Los Angeles,” she said.
The pervasive fear of federal raids is reshaping the daily life of the city, leaving streetsemptier and quieter. One in five local residents lives with someone undocumented or are undocumented themselves. Half the total population is Latino.
“Our economy is being destroyed, our culture is being destroyed,” said Odilia Yego, the executive director of Cielo, an advocacy group focused on local Indigenous migrant communities. “The buzzing feeling of being an Angeleno is under attack.”
When Yego went out with Cielo workers earlier this month to deliver food to 200 families, she said, the streets were eerily quiet, and restaurants were half-empty, raising concerns about how small businesses already battered by Covid, Hollywood strikes and the wildfires will weather this new crisis.
It’s not only undocumented residents who fear being snatched up bymasked federal agentsin raids community members say look and feel like kidnappings, Yego said.
“Even with documents, people are afraid to go out. Even citizens are afraid to go out. People are afraid to encounter an Ice agent regardless of their status, because of the level of violence they have seen on social media or on TV,” she said.
Multiple US citizens in the Los Angeles area havereportedlybeendetainedas part of immigration raids this month.
As Cielo and similar advocacy groups help frightened immigrant families, other people are stepping up to help them. In early June, one of the city’s most popular taquerias and an immigrant-owned coffee shop in West Hollywood held fundraisers for Cielo.
“We own a business, so we can’t go protest,” one of the West Hollywood coffee shop’s owners said. The Guardian is not identifying the businesses or its owners for fear of reprisal. Helping raise funds for Cielo was “a way for us to show up to be a voice with our community”.
“In LA, we support each other during times of crisis,” Yego said. “Someone sent us $100 and said: ‘You helped me during the pandemic, and today, I’m able to give back.’”