[[link removed]]

ONE YEAR ON, LOS ANGELES IS STILL LIVING WITH THE FALLOUT OF THE
RAIDS  
[[link removed]]


 

Elizabeth Aguilera and Ben Poston
June 24, 2026
Capital & Main
[[link removed]]


*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

_ New analysis and firsthand accounts reveal the toll of the
crackdown on immigrant communities in L.A. County and beyond.
Thousands of people detained during the height of the raids remain in
immigration custody or have already been deported. _

Giovanni, who was picked up in October by federal agents from the car
wash where he worked, has returned to his San Fernando Valley home
after spending six months in detention., Photo: Karla Gachet for
Capital & Main.

 

WHEN IMMIGRATION AGENTS arrived at the Los Angeles car wash where he
worked, Giovanni didn’t see them until one was standing beside him.
Giovanni’s thoughts turned to his family: How would they get by
without him? Would he have to uproot his school-age children from the
only home they had ever known?

Giovanni had worked at the car wash in the San Fernando Valley for
years, vacuuming interiors and scrubbing cars. Then, on that day in
October, he was taken away by federal immigration agents along with
three other workers.

Within 24 hours his compatriots had been deported to Mexico, and
Giovanni, now 48, was on his way to the Adelanto ICE Processing Center
in San Bernardino County, where he would remain for six months. Unlike
his co-workers, Giovanni refused to sign documents that would have
allowed the federal government to deport him to his native El
Salvador.

 

At home in the San Fernando Valley, his family was distraught. Someone
sent Giovanni’s wife, Maria, a video of the raid at the car wash.
She watched as her husband, in his bright blue shirt and sun hat, was
escorted into a vehicle that then sped off. 

The couple and other immigrants who shared their experiences with
Capital & Main are being identified only by their first names for
safety reasons.

Giovanni is one of thousands of people detained in Southern California
by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Customs and Border
Protection and other federal law enforcement agencies in an
often-violent campaign against undocumented immigrants that began one
year ago.

For advocates who had prepared for expanded immigration enforcement
under a second Trump administration, the scale and speed of the raids
that began in June 2025 still came as a jolt.

“I think it has taken our breath away in the velocity, the cruelty,
the unbridled violence that we have seen,” said Lindsay Toczylowski,
co-founder, president and CEO of Immigrant Defenders Law Center.

 
Department of Homeland Security agents guard an entrance to Los
Angeles’ Metropolitan Detention Center during a protest in June
2025.  (Photo: Jeremy Lindenfeld for Capital & Main)
 

Federal immigration agencies cast a wide net during the Trump
administration’s summer 2025 surge in Southern California, shifting
resources from border enforcement to neighborhoods. Arrests increased
by a factor of seven compared to the same period the previous year and
swept up more immigrants without criminal convictions in their
communities, workplaces and homes, according to a Capital & Main
analysis of data ICE collected for the seven-county region under the
jurisdiction of its Los Angeles field office. 

A year later, the public spectacle of masked men
[[link removed]]
pulling people out of vehicles and pointing guns
[[link removed]]
at bystanders, of multiple vehicles surrounding businesses and agents
tackling workers, has largely faded from view. Massive public protests
that ended in clashes with police have subsided. The National Guard
members and Marines that President Donald Trump ordered deployed to
Los Angeles left after two months. Viral videos of arrests no longer
dominate social media feeds.

But for many immigrant families, the consequences of the crackdown
have persisted. Thousands of people detained during the height of the
raids remain in immigration custody or have already been deported.
Partners have been left to raise traumatized children alone, families
have lost primary breadwinners and face losing their housing too, and
communities that once watched arrests unfold in broad daylight are now
navigating a quieter, more entrenched threat. 

 
Giovanni shares a letter his wife, Maria, sent him while he was in
detention.  (Photo: Karla Gachet for Capital & Main)
What began in June 2025 as a highly visible show of immigration
enforcement under the Trump administration evolved over the past year
into something less public but still deeply felt. Community advocates
say enforcement tactics have shifted from large-scale visible
operations to smaller, quicker raids, even as arrests and removals
continue at an elevated rate across Los Angeles and other cities
nationwide. 

For many, especially immigrant and Latino residents who describe a
lingering sense of uncertainty, the summer 2025 raids have reshaped
how safe it feels to move through the city — especially after a
September Supreme Court decision
[[link removed]] allowed
agents to profile people based on the language they speak, their race
or ethnicity, their jobs or where they are located.  

In the U.S., where 82% of Latino adults are native-born citizens,
naturalized citizens, or otherwise lawfully present, Latinos are
increasingly worried about being asked about their citizenship or
legal status, according to the Pew Research Center
[[link removed]].
In the same survey, conducted in October, Pew reported that about 11%
of Latinos said they had begun carrying passports or other identifying
documents with them for safety.

Data now offers a clear picture of the scale of the crackdown in the
L.A. ICE field office’s “area of responsibility,” which spans
Los Angeles, Orange, San Bernardino, Riverside, Ventura, Santa Barbara
and San Luis Obispo counties. During the six-week summer surge from
early June to mid-July last year, arrests in the region increased
nearly sevenfold compared to the same period in 2024, rising from
roughly 500 to more than 3,500, according to data provided by ICE in
response to a Freedom of Information Act request from the Deportation
Data Project and analyzed by Capital & Main. 

Arrests remained two to four times higher in the months that followed
compared to the same period a year prior, the analysis found. The
latest Deportation Data Project records release covers ICE activity
through early March. The figures cover only interior enforcement
operations — people arrested by ICE in Southern California. They do
not include border apprehensions. 

 

When Donald Trump returned to office in 2025, his administration
placed immigration enforcement at the center of its political agenda,
promising to target people accused or convicted of violent crimes.

However, data from the counties policed by the L.A. ICE field office
shows the raids increasingly swept up people without criminal
convictions.

In 2024, about a third of those arrested in the region had no criminal
conviction or pending criminal charge. By 2025 the share had grown to
more than half. During the six-week peak summer period, 69% of those
arrested had no prior convictions, including Giovanni.

 

 

A DHS spokesperson, who declined to provide a name for this story,
said in an email that the information gathered by the Deportation Data
Project had been “cherry picked” to “peddle a false
narrative.”

“DHS nor ICE have verified the accuracy, methodology or the analysis
of the project and its results,” the spokesperson wrote. “The
bottom line is that the Deportation Data Project is not accurate.”

A Capital & Main reporter asked the agency to provide correct data,
but DHS did not respond.

In response to a separate query, a DHS spokesperson, who also declined
to provide a name for this story, defended its enforcement methods,
saying that the agency is focused on enforcing laws and that officers
are trained to “use the minimum amount of force necessary to resolve
dangerous situations.” 

The agency spokesperson also disputed Capital & Main’s finding that
most people arrested by ICE did not have a criminal conviction,
writing in an email “that nearly 70% of ICE arrests are of people
charged or convicted of a crime.” DHS did not respond to a request
to provide data to support this claim.

The scale and violence of the raids reflect Trump’s lack of
restraint in his second term, said Louis DeSipio, professor of
political science and Chicano/Latino studies at the University of
California, Irvine. 

Trump has been emboldened by a compliant Congress that approved
historic levels of funding
[[link removed]]
for ICE and Border Patrol and has enlisted other federal agencies to
assist with immigration enforcement and deportations.  

“What was threatened is that enforcement would become indiscriminate
and it did,” said DeSipio.

Critics say the raids also reflected years of increasingly xenophobic
rhetoric, particularly toward immigrants from Latin America as well as
Black immigrants from Haiti and African nations, that had become a
defining feature of Trump’s political rise. Trump is attempting to
end birthright citizenship through an executive order
[[link removed]]
now before the Supreme Court, which heard arguments
[[link removed]]
in April. Legal immigrants are also feeling squeezed by the
administration, which has restricted their access
[[link removed]]
to jobs, ended benefits for some permanent residents and others with
legal status, and moved to strip some naturalized
[[link removed]]
immigrants of their citizenship. 

 
Federal agents wield crowd-control weapons during a protest in
Paramount, California, in June 2025.  (Photo: Jeremy Lindenfeld for
Capital & Main)
 

In addition, a U.S. Senate report
[[link removed]],
released in December, documented that nearly two dozen American
citizens were detained by ICE across the country between June and
November 2025, including a pregnant woman and an Army veteran. A
separate Capital & Main analysis
[[link removed]]
published in August found that at least nine citizens in Southern
California were detained by the agency last year, including a
20-year-old man arrested
[[link removed]]while
on break from his job at Walmart in Pico Rivera. He was held for three
days.

“If you look different, if you don’t speak English, if you sound
different, you are a target,” said Vanessa Cárdenas, executive
director of America’s Voice, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit that
advocates for immigration reform.

 
LOS ANGELES AS A TESTING GROUND

The surge, which began in politically blue Los Angeles, followed
renewed national emphasis on interior immigration enforcement promised
by Trump during his reelection campaign. Within weeks of the raids in
Los Angeles, similar reports of raids and agents pulling people off
the street and out of cars soon surfaced in Chicago, New York and
Minneapolis, where two citizens were
[[link removed]]
shot and killed by federal agents.

DeSipio said Los Angeles County — home to 950,000 unauthorized
immigrants, according to the California Immigrant Data Portal, and the
most foreign-born residents
[[link removed]]
of any county in the nation — became the center of the bullseye
because of the region’s politics and demographics.  

“It’s a way of undermining and seeking to undermine California
Gov. Gavin Newsom, who is perceived as a political threat,” said
DeSipio. 

California, the state with the nation’s largest number
[[link removed]]
of undocumented immigrants, has long pushed back against federal
crackdowns, from the border militarization of Operation Gatekeeper in
the ’90s to programs like Secure Communities, which increased
cooperation between local law enforcement and federal agencies
beginning in 2009. The state has also offered health care and other
benefits to those without legal status and is the birthplace of
sanctuary cities, which limit local police force cooperation with
federal immigration officials. Los Angeles, a sanctuary city, boasts
the most active immigrant rights movement in the country and is sought
after for training and guidance by activists from other cities. 

“I believe that is why they came to Los Angeles first,” said
Angelica Salas, Executive Director of the Coalition for Humane
Immigrant Rights, known as CHIRLA, one of the oldest immigrant rights
organizations in Los Angeles and a leader in the movement. “They
wanted to test us and test all of the protections we had in place and
try to break those protections.” 

 
Community members gather in Altadena, California, on June 13 to
protest the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement actions
and show support for immigrant workers.  (Photo: Karla Gachet for
Capital & Main)
 

At the beginning of Trump’s second term, CHIRLA reactivated its
Rapid Response Network, which includes thousands of volunteers who
support immigrants facing arrest and detention. Last summer, the
network also published a map
[[link removed]] highlighting hotspots of
enforcement activity.

Almost immediately after the first raid, the hotline lit up with calls
about ICE activity throughout the region. Volunteers rush to the scene
to record arrests and to try to identify those detained so family
members can be notified. So far, the hotline has received more than
20,000 calls, Salas said.

“ICE thinks it’s all about them, and it is about documenting their
abuses, but first and foremost it’s about rapid response aid to the
people who are being impacted,” Salas said.

Since Trump’s election in 2024, advocacy groups spent hours teaching
people about their constitutional rights. As a result, more people
knew what to do when federal agents arrived on their doorstep, Salas
said. 

During an interview with CNN
[[link removed]] months before the raids,
Tom Homan, Trump’s border czar, said such know-your-rights
campaigns, along with the restrictions on cooperating with ICE imposed
by sanctuary cities, were forcing increased neighborhood
enforcement. 

“If we got to play that cat-and-mouse game, that’s what we are
going to do until every one of them is gone,” he said.

The street patrols and raids began five months later.

 
VISIBLE WORKERS BECOME EASY TARGETS 

During the summer surge, agents increasingly conducted at-large
arrests — done mostly in public places, according to the ICE data
analyzed by Capital & Main. These included masked men detaining
workers outside a donut shop at dawn in Pasadena; nabbing street food
vendors and leaving their carts behind; and a sweep in MacArthur Park
where Mayor Karen Bass confronted agents and called the tactic
“fear, chaos and politics.”
[[link removed]]  

 

 
Federal immigration agents have conducted raids targeting day
laborers at Home Depot locations across Southern California, including
at this Hollywood store.  (Photo: Karla Gachet for Capital & Main)
These types of arrests nearly quadrupled to roughly 9,600 last year.
During the summer surge, they increased tenfold compared to the same
period in 2024. They also made up a larger share of arrests in the
region last year than the prior year, accounting for 68% of all
Southern California arrests in 2025, up from 54% the year before.  

The hardest-hit groups were day laborers and car wash workers, because
they are visible and accessible, said Flor Melendrez, executive
director of the CLEAN Car Wash Worker Center. Men bore the brunt of
the raids, making up 87% of those arrested by ICE last year, the
analysis shows. By far, those arrested hailed mostly from Mexico
followed by Guatemala and El Salvador. Data shows there was an uptick
in arrests of people from China and Iran.

 
FAMILIES LIVING IN THE AFTERMATH

Many families lost their main breadwinner. That’s true for Blanca,
whose husband, a day laborer, was detained two days after the raids
began last June. After he was detained, Blanca navigated the birth of
her third daughter and the critical beginning of her baby’s life
alone. She fell into depression.

“The only person who worked was my husband and he paid all the
bills,” she said. “He was the pillar of the house and that’s why
it affected us so much, financially and emotionally.”

The family lost their apartment and moved in with relatives for the
eight months Blanca’s partner was in detention. Her little girls,
both under 5, asked constantly where their father was. 

 
The now-shuttered Crenshaw Imperial Car Wash in Inglewood was one of
the first raided by federal immigration agents in 2025. Photo: Karla
Gachet for Capital & Main.
 

Since her husband returned home, Blanca said she is afraid every time
he leaves the house, and she rarely goes out with her daughters.

The full fallout from the raids has not yet been measured, DeSipio
said.

Schools in Los Angeles saw attendance decline
[[link removed]]
as some parents remained fearful about leaving home and some children
were afraid to go to class. Giovanni and Maria’s children stayed
home for two months after his arrest.

“Right now, we are seeing the shock of what happened,” said
Melendrez of the CLEAN Car Wash Worker Center. “But for years to
come we’ll see the children who, instead of going to college, will
have to go into the workforce. We haven’t seen the final effects of
this.”

 
DETENTION BECAME ALMOST INEVITABLE

Almost all those arrested last year ended up in detention. In 2024,
about three-quarters of people arrested by ICE in the seven-county
region were taken into federal custody. By 2025, that figure had
climbed to 96%. The number of people detained nearly quadrupled, from
roughly 3,500 to more than 13,400. Detainees have reported inhumane
conditions
[[link removed]]
— from inadequate medical care to excessive use of force by
guards.  

 
Maria and Giovanni share a quiet moment at their apartment following
his release.  (Photo: Karla Gachet for Capital & Main)
 

Giovanni spent six months in detention, where he developed a serious
skin rash, hoping for a reunion with his family. Even now, after his
release, he has to catch his breath and wipe his eyes when he talks
about being taken away. He’s a wiry man with salt-and-pepper hair
who is eager to provide for his family but is unable to do so.

At home their apartment became a hub of activity as Maria, a mother
whose determination is in her voice, focused on her husband’s
release. She found an immigration lawyer, rallied friends and family
for help and reached out to CLEAN Car Wash Worker Center for guidance.
And she prayed, constantly.

“I begged God that he could be here when our daughter graduates,”
Maria said. 

Their girl walked across the stage in early June. Giovanni was proud
to be there. 

So, when a judge issued a $55,000 bond, an amount Melendrez said was
the highest she had seen so far, Maria raised some of the money and
borrowed the rest with the help of friends. Giovanni was released in
April with an ankle monitor and a court date.

Maria is paying $700 a month on that loan, and she said she’ll just
keep figuring out how to pay it if it means keeping her family
together in Los Angeles, for now.

_[ELIZABETH AGUILERA is an award-winning multimedia journalist who
covers health and social services for CalMatters. She joined
CalMatters in 2016 from Southern California Public Radio/KPCC 89.3
where she produced stories about community health. Her reporting there
revealed lead-tainted soil on school campuses near a former lead
battery recycling plant that spurred district action. Previously
Aguilera was a staff writer at the San Diego Union-Tribune where she
covered immigration and demographics. The L.A. native is a graduate of
Pepperdine University and the University of Southern California. She
lives in Los Angeles._

_BEN POSTON is a former investigative reporter at the Los Angeles
Times. A three-time Livingston Award finalist, Poston has won several
national awards, including a George Polk Award, a Gerald Loeb Award
and Sigma Delta Chi’s award for 1st Amendment reporting. He worked
on “Behind the Badge,” a series that detailed the flawed hiring
practices by the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s
Department.]__Copyright __Capital & Main_
[[link removed]]_ 2026.  It is republished here with
permission._

* deportations
[[link removed]]
* mass deportation
[[link removed]]
* detention
[[link removed]]
* ICE detention
[[link removed]]
* Child detention
[[link removed]]
* Immigration
[[link removed]]
* Immigrants
[[link removed]]
* Immigration and Customs Enforcement
[[link removed]]
* ICE
[[link removed]]
* BCP
[[link removed]]
* Los Angeles
[[link removed]]
* Pam Bondi
[[link removed]]
* Donald Trump
[[link removed]]
* Racism
[[link removed]]
* families
[[link removed]]
* immigrant families
[[link removed]]
* children
[[link removed]]
* immigrant children
[[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

 

 

 

INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT

 

 

Submit via web
[[link removed]]

Submit via email
Frequently asked questions
[[link removed]]
Manage subscription
[[link removed]]
Visit xxxxxx.org
[[link removed]]

Bluesky [[link removed]]

Facebook [[link removed]]

 




[link removed]

To unsubscribe, click the following link:
[link removed]