A year after armed federal immigration agents descended on Los Angeles in a massive enforcement operation, the city has been left with what advocates and residents describe as lasting wounds, economic dislocation, and a climate of persistent fear.
The raids that began in early June 2025 brought a large influx of ICE and Border Patrol agents, along with an unprecedented incursion of National Guard troops, into Los Angeles, which is home to the largest undocumented population of any U.S. city. The enforcement actions targeted workplaces including car washes, garment warehouses, and Home Depot stores. Angelenos took to the streets in protest. Several immigrants died while being chased down, according to The Guardian. Lawyers scrambled to locate and help detained people before ICE swiftly transferred them out of state or removed them from the country. Mutual aid networks sprang up across the region to help immigrants too afraid to leave their homes.
The raids marked a turning point in the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement, according to The Guardian. Caravans of agents who swept through Los Angeles eventually moved on to Chicago, Portland, Washington D.C., and Minneapolis, escalating their tactics at each stop, the outlet reported.
On June 12, 2025, Brian Gavidia, a U.S. citizen born and raised in East Los Angeles, was at work in his used-car lot when immigration agents rushed in, pinned him against a gate and asked him to name the hospital where he was born. His story became part of a class-action lawsuit challenging ICE’s racial profiling of Angelenos. After that day, business declined and it felt unsafe to work. He closed his used-car refurbishing business and dealership. “For the first time in seven years, I had to look for a job, and work for somebody else,” Gavidia told The Guardian.
He said he saw neighbors and childhood friends targeted by roving patrols, and he had to tell his nine-year-old daughter — who lives with her mother in Portland — that she could not spend the summer with him as she usually did. “It was painful,” he said. “But it wasn’t safe for her.”
Gavidia experienced a brief period of relief in July 2025, when a federal court ordered federal agents to halt their indiscriminate raids and racial profiling. Then, in September, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the ruling. “I was devastated,” Gavidia said. The American Civil Liberties Union, alongside a coalition of immigrant rights groups, has submitted an amended legal complaint challenging that result. Gavidia said he feels a responsibility to keep sharing his story until the racial profiling stops. “I want us all to feel safe again,” he said.
In the fashion district, home to hundreds of fabric shops, ateliers, tailors, and clothing factories run by and employing immigrants, the shadow of the raids lingers. On June 6, 2025, in a single sweep, agents arrested dozens of workers — many from the Indigenous Zapotec community — at Ambiance Apparel, a large manufacturer and retailer. Fourteen members of Citlali Fermin’s family were arrested that day. In the months afterward, 11 were released after a public campaign called Lucha Zapoteca. Fermin, who is also an organizer with Trabajadores Unidos Workers United, told The Guardian that one relative was deported after being coerced into signing documents, another decided to exit due to inhumane conditions in detention, and the last relative exited after six months.
Antonio, 52, who co-owns a fabric shop with his wife, Alma, said the raid happened as he was finalizing a large order for 20 rolls of fabric, each costing $200-$300. News spread that federal agents had arrived, and his client canceled the order. Since then, sales have gone down about 85%, he said. “It’s a drastic change.”
At a Home Depot in the MacArthur Park neighborhood, day laborers remain on edge. On June 6, 2025, masked federal agents came to the store in a fleet of white vans, ambushed workers, and arrested nearly two dozen people. In August, despite the federal court order, Border Patrol agents returned to the same Home Depot in a yellow rental truck; the driver told workers he had jobs to offer, and then masked agents jumped out of the back and started making arrests. Frederico, 62, a laborer and security guard who came to the U.S. from Guatemala in 1998, said fewer and fewer workers have been coming and there are fewer jobs. “Until the mandate of the president ends, we are going to be in danger,” he told The Guardian. “It hasn’t been safe since then, and it’s not safe now.”
Though it is now uncommon to see roving caravans of agents patrolling Los Angeles, people are still being detained, according to Melissa Shepard, director of legal services at the legal aid non-profit ImmDef. Often, arrests happen at immigration check-in appointments. But Shepard and other attorneys and advocates said people are still being arrested in targeted raids, or as bystanders at raids. Jorge Nicolás, a senior organizer at the Central American Resource Center (Carecen), said he recently witnessed agents chasing a laborer into a Home Depot and taking him away bloodied and in handcuffs. “The arrests never really stopped,” Nicolás told The Guardian.
The number of people in immigration detention in the Los Angeles area has doubled since the raids began. Before the raids, fewer than 1,000 people were detained in ICE’s Los Angeles area of responsibility on any given day, Shepard said; since then, the number has doubled. At the Adelanto detention center east of Los Angeles, detainees began a hunger strike in May to protest murky drinking water, moldy food, and a lack of medical care. Many of those participating in the strike alleged that they were zip-tied and threatened with teargas and transfers to other ICE facilities, according to ImmDef, which represents some of the detainees. DHS has denied there is a hunger strike.
“The state of dysfunction of the detention centers is alarming,” Shepard told The Guardian. “They are being used as a deterrent and also as a punishment for immigrants.”
Judges are increasingly requiring bonds that are 10 times higher than the $1,500 minimum, Shepard said, with bonds of $15,000 or $20,000 now common. Jennifer Gutierrez, executive director of Clergy and Laity United for Economic Justice (CLUE), a southern California-based non-profit, said her organization spent at least $1.5 million to help 150 immigrants pay their bonds, but the court system is severely backlogged and only three of those bonds have been returned.
Gutierrez, Shepard, Gavidia, and others testified at the People’s Hearing on Immigration Enforcement, a public forum led by Rochelle Garza, chair of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. “What we are seeing is a terrorizing of our communities,” Garza said. Garza has held similar hearings in Minneapolis in March and Chicago in May.
Since the raids, MSI has reported on ICE enforcement actions in Minneapolis, Chicago, and elsewhere, including cases of U.S. citizens detained and a nationwide strike against the administration’s immigration crackdown. The Los Angeles experience that began last June has been echoed in those cities, with advocates pointing to similar patterns of sweeping arrests, economic disruption, and legal challenges.
Gavidia, however, is preparing to restart his used-car business. “I’m excited,” he said. “We have to keep building.”