Immigration raids in Los Angeles hit small business owners: 'It's worse than COVID By Tim Reid and Kristina Cooke

 

LOS ANGELES, June 17 (Reuters) - Juan Ibarra stands outside his fruit and vegetable outlet in Los Angeles' vast fresh produce market, the place in the city center where Hispanic restaurateurs, street vendors and taco truck operators buy supplies every day.

On Monday morning, the usually bustling market was largely empty. Since Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials began conducting immigration raids more than a week ago, including at a textile factory two blocks away, Ibarra said business has virtually dried up.

 

His street vendor customers are at home in hiding, while restaurant workers are too scared to travel to the market to pick up supplies. Most of the market's 300 workers who are in the U.S. illegally have stopped showing up.

Ibarra, who pays $8,500 a month in rent for his outlet, which sells grapes, pineapples, melons, peaches, tomatoes and corn, usually takes in about $2,000 on a normal day. Now it's $300, if he's lucky. Shortly before he spoke to Reuters he had, for the first time since the ICE raids began, been forced to throw out rotten fruit. He has to pay a garbage company $70 a pallet to do that.

 

"It's pretty much a ghost town," Ibarra said. "It's almost COVID-like. People are scared. We can only last so long like this - a couple of months maybe."

Ibarra, 32, who was born in the U.S. to Mexican parents and is a U.S. citizen, is not alone in seeing President Donald Trump's crackdown on immigrants in the country illegally devastate his small business.

It's happening across Los Angeles and California, other business owners and experts say, and threatens to significantly damage the local economy.

A third of California's workers are immigrants and 40% of its entrepreneurs are foreign-born, according to the American Immigration Council.

The Trump administration, concerned about the economic impacts of his mass deportation policy, shifted its focus in recent days, telling ICE to pause raids on farms, restaurants and hotels.

 

The ICE raids triggered protests in Los Angeles. Those prompted Trump to send National Guard troops and U.S. Marines into the city, against the wishes of California's Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom.

Abigail Jackson, a White House spokeswoman, said violent protesters in Los Angeles had created an unsafe environment for local businesses. "It’s the Democrat riots - not enforcement of federal immigration law - that is hurting small businesses," Jackson told Reuters.

RESTAURANT SLUMP

The recent shift in focus by Trump and ICE has been no help for Pedro Jimenez, 62, who has run and owned a Mexican restaurant in a largely working class, Hispanic neighborhood in Los Angeles for 24 years.

Many in his community are so scared of ICE they are staying home and have stopped frequenting his restaurant. Jimenez, who crossed into the U.S. illegally but received citizenship in 1987 after former Republican President Ronald Reagan signed legislation granting amnesty to many immigrants without legal status, said he's taking in $7,000 a week less than he was two weeks ago.

 

Last Friday and Saturday he closed at 5 p.m., rather than 9 p.m., because his restaurant was empty.

"This is really hurting everybody's business," he said. "It's terrible. It's worse than COVID."

Andrew Selee, president of the non-partisan Migration Policy Institute, said the Trump administration began its immigration crackdown by focusing on people with criminal convictions. But that has shifted to workplace raids in the past two weeks, he said.

"They are targeting the hard working immigrants who are most integrated in American society," Selee said.

"The more immigration enforcement is indiscriminate and broad, rather than targeted, the more it disrupts the American economy in very real ways."

Across Los Angeles, immigrants described hunkering down, some even skipping work, to avoid immigration enforcement.

Luis, 45, a Guatemalan hot dog vendor who asked to be identified only by his first name for fear of being targeted by ICE, said he showed up this weekend at the Santa Fe Springs swap meet - a flea market and music event. He was told by others that ICE officers had just been there.

He and other vendors without legal immigration status quickly left, he said.

"This has all been psychologically exhausting," he said. "I have to work to survive, but the rest of the time I stay inside."