When immigration agents\u00a0arrived at the Los Angeles car wash where he worked, Giovanni didn\u2019t see them until one was standing beside him. Giovanni\u2019s 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?<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Related | How ICE is still terrorizing Los Angeles<\/a><\/p>\n At home in the San Fernando Valley, his family was distraught. Someone sent Giovanni\u2019s 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n The couple and other immigrants who shared their experiences with Capital & Main are being identified only by their first names for safety reasons.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n \u201cI think it has taken our breath away in the velocity, the cruelty, the unbridled violence that we have seen,\u201d said Lindsay Toczylowski, co-founder, president and CEO of Immigrant Defenders Law Center.<\/p>\n Federal immigration agencies cast a wide net during the Trump administration\u2019s 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n A year later, the public spectacle of\u00a0masked men<\/a>\u00a0pulling people out of vehicles and\u00a0pointing guns<\/a>\u00a0at 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n 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 \u2014 especially after a September Supreme Court\u00a0decision<\/a>\u00a0allowed agents to profile people based on the language they speak, their race or ethnicity, their jobs or where they are located.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n 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\u00a0Pew Research Center<\/a>. 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.<\/p>\n Data now offers a clear picture of the scale of the crackdown in the L.A. ICE field office\u2019s \u201carea of responsibility,\u201d 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n 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 \u2014 people arrested by ICE in Southern California. They do not include border apprehensions.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n However, data from the counties policed by the L.A. ICE field office shows the raids increasingly swept up people without criminal convictions.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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 \u201ccherry picked\u201d to \u201cpeddle a false narrative.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cDHS nor ICE have verified the accuracy, methodology or the analysis of the project and its results,\u201d the spokesperson wrote. \u201cThe bottom line is that the Deportation Data Project is not accurate.\u201d<\/p>\n A Capital & Main reporter asked the agency to provide correct data, but DHS did not respond.<\/p>\n 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 \u201cuse the minimum amount of force necessary to resolve dangerous situations.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n The agency spokesperson also disputed Capital & Main\u2019s finding that most people arrested by ICE did not have a criminal conviction, writing in an email \u201cthat nearly 70% of ICE arrests are of people charged or convicted of a crime.\u201d DHS did not respond to a request to provide data to support this claim.<\/p>\n The scale and violence of the raids reflect Trump\u2019s lack of restraint in his second term, said Louis DeSipio, professor of political science and Chicano\/Latino studies at the University of California, Irvine.\u00a0<\/p>\n Trump has been emboldened by a compliant Congress that approved\u00a0historic levels of funding<\/a>\u00a0for ICE and Border Patrol and has enlisted other federal agencies to assist with immigration enforcement and deportations.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cWhat was threatened is that enforcement would become indiscriminate and it did,\u201d said DeSipio.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s political rise. Trump is attempting to end birthright citizenship through an\u00a0executive order<\/a>\u00a0now before the Supreme Court, which heard\u00a0arguments<\/a>\u00a0in April. Legal immigrants are also feeling squeezed by the administration, which has\u00a0restricted their access<\/a>\u00a0to jobs, ended benefits for some permanent residents and others with legal status, and moved to strip some\u00a0naturalized<\/a>\u00a0immigrants of their citizenship.<\/p>\n In addition, a\u00a0U.S. Senate report<\/a>, 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\u00a0Capital & Main analysis<\/a>\u00a0published in August found that at least nine citizens in Southern California were detained by the agency last year, including a\u00a020-year-old man arrested\u00a0<\/a>while on break from his job at Walmart in Pico Rivera. He was held for three days.<\/p>\n \u201cIf you look different, if you don\u2019t speak English, if you sound different, you are a target,\u201d said Vanessa C\u00e1rdenas, executive director of America\u2019s Voice, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit that advocates for immigration reform.<\/p>\n Los Angeles as a Testing Ground<\/p>\n 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\u00a0were<\/a>\u00a0shot and killed by federal agents.<\/p>\n DeSipio said Los Angeles County \u2014 home to 950,000 unauthorized immigrants, according to the California Immigrant Data Portal, and\u00a0the most foreign-born residents<\/a>\u00a0of any county in the nation \u2014 became the center of the bullseye because of the region\u2019s politics and demographics.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s a way of undermining and seeking to undermine California Gov. Gavin Newsom, who is perceived as a political threat,\u201d said DeSipio.\u00a0<\/p>\n California, the state with the nation\u2019s\u00a0largest number<\/a>\u00a0of undocumented immigrants, has long pushed back against federal crackdowns, from the border militarization of Operation Gatekeeper in the \u201990s 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cI believe that is why they came to Los Angeles first,\u201d 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. \u201cThey wanted to test us and test all of the protections we had in place and try to break those protections.\u201d<\/p>\n At the beginning of Trump\u2019s 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\u00a0published a map<\/a>\u00a0highlighting hotspots of enforcement activity.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n \u201cICE thinks it\u2019s all about them, and it is about documenting their abuses, but first and foremost it\u2019s about rapid response aid to the people who are being impacted,\u201d Salas said.<\/p>\n Since Trump\u2019s 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n During an\u00a0interview with CNN<\/a>\u00a0months before the raids, Tom Homan, Trump\u2019s 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cIf we got to play that cat-and-mouse game, that\u2019s what we are going to do until every one of them is gone,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n The street patrols and raids began five months later.<\/p>\n Visible Workers Become Easy Targets\u00a0<\/p>\n During the summer surge, agents increasingly conducted at-large arrests \u2014 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\u00a0\u201cfear, chaos and politics.\u201d<\/a>\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Families Living in the Aftermath<\/p>\n Many families lost their main breadwinner. That\u2019s 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\u2019s life alone. She fell into depression.<\/p>\n \u201cThe only person who worked was my husband and he paid all the bills,\u201d she said. \u201cHe was the pillar of the house and that\u2019s why it affected us so much, financially and emotionally.\u201d<\/p>\n The family lost their apartment and moved in with relatives for the eight months Blanca\u2019s partner was in detention. Her little girls, both under 5, asked constantly where their father was.<\/p>\n Since her husband returned home, Blanca said she is afraid every time he leaves the house, and she rarely goes out with her daughters.<\/p>\n The full fallout from the raids has not yet been measured, DeSipio said.<\/p>\n![\"Department](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/DSC09254-scaled-1.jpg\")
Department of Homeland Security agents guard an entrance to Los Angeles\u2019 Metropolitan Detention Center during a protest in June 2025.Jeremy Lindenfeld \/ Capital & Main<\/p>\n![\"Giovanni](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/KG_GIOVANNI_01-scaled-1.jpg\")
Giovanni shares a letter his wife, Maria, sent him while he was in detentionKarla Gachet \/ Capital & Main<\/p>\n![\"Cartoon](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/20260121edpmc-a-1.jpg\")
Pedro Molina\/Tribune Content Agency<\/p>\n![\"Federal](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/DSC09937-scaled-1.jpg\")
Federal agents wield crowd-control weapons during a protest in Paramount, California, in June 2025.Jeremy Lindenfeld \/ Capital & Main<\/p>\n![\"Community](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/LOSANGELES_KG_24-scaled-1.jpg\")
Community members gather in Altadena, California, on June 13 to protest the Trump administration\u2019s immigration enforcement actions and show support for immigrant workers.Karla Gachet \/ Capital & Main<\/p>\n![\"Federal](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/LOSANGELES_KG_50-scaled-1.jpg\")
Federal immigration agents have conducted raids targeting day laborers at Home Depot locations across Southern California, including at this Hollywood store.Karla Gachet \/ Capital & Main<\/p>\n![\"The](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/LOSANGELES_KG_47-scaled-1.jpg\")
The now-shuttered Crenshaw Imperial Car Wash in Inglewood was one of the first raided by federal immigration agents in 2025.Karla Gachet \/ Capital & Main<\/p>\n
![\"Maria](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/KG_GIOVANNI_26-scaled-1.jpg\")
Maria and Giovanni share a quiet moment at their apartment following his release.Karla Gachet \/ Capital & Main<\/p>\n