Juan Ibarra is held outside its release of fruits and vegetables on the vast market of fresh products from Los Angeles, the place in the city center where Hispanic restaurateurs, street vendors and tacos truck operators buy supplies every day.
On June 16, the usually animated market was widely empty. Since immigration and customs officials began to perform immigration raids more than a week ago, especially in a textile factory with two houses, Mr. Ibarra said that business has practically dried.
Its customers of street vendors are at home to hide, while restaurant workers are too afraid to go to the market to recover supplies. Most of the 300 market workers in the United States illegally stopped presenting themselves.
Mr. Ibarra, who pays $ 8,500 per month in rent for his point of sale, which sells grapes, pineapple, melons, peaches, tomatoes and corn, generally takes around $ 2,000 per normal day. Now it’s $ 300, if he’s lucky. Shortly before speaking to Reuters, he had, for the first time since the start of the ice raids, he was forced to throw rotten fruit. He has to pay a waste company $ 70 per palette to do this.
“It’s about a ghost city,” said Mr. Ibarra. “It’s almost comfortable. People are afraid. We can only last so long like that – perhaps a few months.”
Mr. Ibarra, who was born in the United States to Mexican parents and is an American citizen, is not the only one to see the repression of President Donald Trump against immigrants in the country illegally devastating his small business.
This occurs in Los Angeles and California, according to other business owners and experts, and threatens to harm the local economy considerably.
A third of California workers are immigrants and 40% of its entrepreneurs were born abroad, according to the American Immigration Council.
The Trump administration, concerned about the economic impacts of its mass deportation policy, has moved its goal in recent days, telling Ice to take a break from raids on farms, restaurants and hotels.
The ice raids triggered demonstrations in Los Angeles. Those who prompted Trump to send troops from the National Guard and the American Marines to the City, against the wishes of the Democratic Governor of California, Gavin Newsom.
Abigail Jackson, a White House spokesperson, said violent demonstrators in Los Angeles had created a dangerous environment for local businesses. “It is the democratic riots – and not the application of the federal immigration law – which harms small businesses,” Jackson told Reuters.
Restaurant crisis
The recent change in focus by Mr. Trump and Ice was not a help for Pedro Jimenez, who directed and owned a Mexican restaurant in a largely workers’ working class, a Hispanic district in Los Angeles for 24 years.
Many in his community are so afraid of the ice that they stay at home and have stopped attending his restaurant. Jimenez, who was the subject of the United States illegally but received citizenship in 1987 after former Republican president Ronald Reagan signed a legislation granting numerous immigrants without legal status, said that he earned $ 7,000 per week less than two weeks ago.
On June 13 and 14, he closed at 5 p.m., rather than 9 p.m., because his restaurant was empty.
“It really hurts everyone’s business,” he said. “It’s terrible. It’s worse than cocovid. “
Andrew Selee, president of the Non-Partisan Migration Policy Institute, said that the Trump administration had started its repression of immigration by focusing on people with criminal convictions. But that has moved to workplace raids in the past two weeks, he said.
“They are targeting the most integrated hard immigrants in American society,” said Selee.
“The more the application of the Immigration Act is blind and broader, rather than targeted, the more it disrupts the American economy in a very real way.”
Through Los Angeles, immigrants have described to shake, some even jumping out of work, to avoid the application of immigration.
Luis, a Guatemalteque hot dog seller who asked to be identified only by his first name for fear of ice, said he presented himself this weekend at Santa Fe Springs Swap Meet-a flea market and a musical event. Others told him that ice officers had just been there.
He and other sellers without status of legal immigration quickly left, he said.
“All of this was psychologically exhausting,” he said. “I have to work to survive, but the rest of the time I stay inside.”
This story was reported by Reuters.
