Workers turn to grocery runs and home visits to maintain community trust
The Guardian spoke with three California gun-violence intervention workers — Violet Gallegos in South Los Angeles, Guadalupe Serrano in Oakland, and Salvador Marquez in Harbor Gateway — about how ongoing federal immigration enforcement has affected their efforts to reduce shootings in immigrant neighborhoods.
In June, hundreds of federal agents descended on Los Angeles in what The Guardian characterized as the first major immigration enforcement operation of the second Trump administration. Immigrants were swept up at Home Depots and car washes, at food stands, and at garment factories, the newspaper reported. In some Latino and immigrant communities, residents became afraid to go to work, and children stayed home from school while neighbors made grocery runs, too frightened to leave their homes themselves.
For violence interrupters — workers who go out daily hoping to prevent people from being killed by gunfire — the operation marked a turning point.
“Kids are living afraid instead of going to school,” said Gallegos, a youth services and gang intervention worker for Volunteers of America in South Los Angeles. “It’s created a system where you’re keeping people broke, poor, and leaving communities [like this one] still marginalized.”
Marquez, who works with an organization serving the Harbor Gateway area, said: “It’s created a lot of fear, a lot of anger and a lot of division.”
Gallegos said undocumented youth stopped attending school out of fear their families would be detained, and several stopped coming to the Volunteers of America workshops that aim to steer them away from street life.
“We have kids that don’t even have papers, so they weren’t going to school,” Gallegos said. “So that dream of them maybe going to college was out of the window, and they’re living in fear. It’s slowed down now, but the panic is still there.”
She added: “A community that builds in fear will always be on shaky ground, because they don’t feel secure.”
Gallegos described her street-level method for keeping youth from carrying guns through ongoing visibility in the neighborhood. “How do you stop them from picking up guns? You stay visible,” she said. “I live in the community so I get to hear everything that’s going on. I’m at a park and they constantly know that I’m nosy and I’m pulling up on them and I’m like, ‘Hey, what are you doing?’ When they know that somebody cares, they’re more careful about what they’re carrying and what they’re doing.”
Gallegos has shifted her approach in response, moving from workshop-only programming to home-based activities. She teaches journaling as an outlet for anger and has started a leadership-training workshop called “The Journey” to expand the pool of trusted adults in the neighborhood.
“The raids made us resilient, it taught us that we can’t just have kids come to our workshops,” Gallegos said. “Right now I have a workshop for journaling and we’re teaching people how to put their emotions [on the page]. So if they can’t come to the workshop, let’s teach them how to journal at home. Now we’re teaching the kids: ‘How are you gonna deal with your anger? Are you going to go and fight, or are you gonna write down your emotions in a notebook and really reflect on what you’re thinking?’”
“I also started a workshop called ‘The Journey’ where I’m training other people how to be leaders in their community,” Gallegos said. “God showed me I can’t do everything by myself, so I have to train people who can be out there too. Even though federal immigration enforcement brought fear, we’re all struggling with the same thing together. It’s no longer like, ‘What block, what neighborhood you’re from.’ They’re taking all our people. So I feel like it’s brought unity in a very weird way.”
In Oakland, Serrano, program manager for Youth Alive’s Caught in the Crossfire hospital-based intervention program at Highland Hospital, said the enforcement environment drove a reported drop in clients seeking follow-up care.
“We definitely saw a decrease in people going into the hospitals to treat their injuries or do follow-ups,” Serrano said. “We had clients who had to do surgeries to treat their wounds to avoid infections and stop treatment, which affected them later down the road. They’re doing a longer recovery with physical therapy and therapy sessions.”
Serrano said clients reported seeing U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers near the hospital and in its parking lot, and that trauma social workers at Highland had to reassure clients the facility remained a safe point of contact.
“When it came to enrolling new patients, they were very hesitant; the trust wasn’t there,” Serrano said.
Serrano also said clients asked intervention workers for legal advice. Workers tried to advise them as best they could, but clients grew frustrated or disengaged, Serrano said. “Clients would also ask for legal advice,” Serrano said. “Even though we would try to advise them the best that we could, they would get frustrated or they would stop being responsive because they were not getting the answers they wanted to hear.”
In Harbor Gateway, Marquez opened by describing his philosophy of intervention as presence. “Intervention is being able to show the community that you’re here for them,” Marquez said. “There’s a lot of times that you don’t do much but just give someone a hug or sit there and cry with them for their loss or for their joy, and you notice that means a lot to people.”
Marquez said the Summer Night Lights parks program — designed for gang members with parks open from 6 p.m. to midnight and brought to Normandale Park in 2010 — saw attendance collapse once the enforcement operations began. The city subsequently cut the program’s funding.
“When the immigration [crackdown] started, the attendance started going down, and the people that were showing up were too fearful to sign in,” Marquez said. “When a program comes in, city staff always wanna see the outcome — how many people came, got fed, and how many people got serviced. We couldn’t show that [any more].”
Marquez has continued the work informally with weekly barbecues and other activities, but said attendance never recovered. He said residents have asked him for help with basics that intervention teams did not previously perform.
“If [community members] ask if I would go to the grocery store for them, then I will,” Marquez said. “That’s the only way that I could win their trust back. I think that’s a new thing that we started doing with our intervention work, at least in my community. I think it puts people at ease knowing that someone is there for them.”
Marquez said his role has expanded into rumor control: when neighbors see an unfamiliar car and assume it is ICE, he investigates to confirm whether anyone was actually taken. He said he has had conversations with active gang members who are angry that their parents, grandparents, or older siblings are at risk of deportation.
“I know that violence has gone down,” Marquez said. “Is it due to ICE, Covid, LAPD? Is it due to our work? We’re not sure, I think it’s a little bit of everything. We had our first murder out in the Harbor [area] a few months ago. One murder is one too many.”