an ICE agent.<\/a><\/p>\nBut on this Saturday morning, the busiest stand was the one with the woman selling fresh orange juice and $5 chorizo and potato burritos. Almost every other shop along one stretch had a \u201cFor Lease\u201d sign taped to its glass door.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Outside a closed storefront, a woman browsed a metal rack, lingering on a zebra-print halter dress.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cFor $1?\u201d she asked the woman working the stand.<\/p>\n
\u201cNo, I can\u2019t,\u201d the employee said.<\/p>\n
\u201cCome on.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI can\u2019t. $5?\u201d<\/p>\n
The shopper walked away without the dress, and the employee shook her head.\u00a0<\/p>\n
A few weekends later, foot traffic was even slower. The streets were quiet save for the thump of a norte\u00f1o-sax song blaring from a speaker outside V&C Casual, a shop in the Stanford Wholesale Mart.<\/p>\n
The shop\u2019s owner, Regino Tirado, sipped his coffee as he waited for customers. But everything had been slow, he said, since \u201cEl Seis.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cAfter that day, no one wanted to come to the Fashion District,\u201d he continued, panning toward the sidewalk. \u201cLook, it\u2019s empty.\u201d<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/DSC08585-scaled.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
Regino Tirado stands outside his store in the L.A. Fashion District<\/p>\n
Tirado has worked in the Fashion District for more than 25 years through several other lean times, including the Great Recession and pandemic lockdowns. But the past year has been the hardest.<\/p>\n
\u201cEl peor de los peores,\u201d he called it. The worst of the worst.<\/p>\n
A shop across from him closed two months earlier, he said, and another in the plaza shuttered a month before that. Tirado\u2019s business, which sells women\u2019s puffer vests and jackets, had dropped by nearly 60% since a year earlier, and he doesn\u2019t know how much longer he can stay open.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s day by day,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
A feverish demand for Mexico apparel during the World Cup had brought some reprieve. Tirado sold more than 2,000 jerseys to his wholesale buyers for around $10 a piece, but even that put him below the $25,000 in sales he used to bring in most months. These days, he\u2019s lucky to make $10,000. And that\u2019s before paying employees and the $5,000 rent.\u00a0<\/p>\n
His wholesale buyers, some of whom live in Mexico, Costa Rica and Colombia, used to visit twice a month to check out new merchandise. Now they come every other month, he said, and sales have increasingly moved to transactions made over WhatsApp.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe main shoppers are Latino,\u201d Tirado said, \u201cand now everyone is scared.\u201d<\/p>\n
* \u00a0 * \u00a0 *<\/p>\n
That fear is still palpable for Francisco, the longtime garment worker.<\/p>\n
The 62-year-old, who specializes in sewing undergarments, spends his shifts picking up reams of fabric from vendors in the Fashion District and always keeps an eye out for parked SUVs, wondering if they might be unmarked ICE vehicles. He has stopped offering to pick up friends at LAX or taking occasional trips to visit his nephew in the Bay Area.<\/p>\n
Some fellow garment workers now take Ubers home from work to avoid the bus stop, where officials have made arrests, and others switched to night shifts to evade raids. His roommates \u2014 a couple and their young children \u2014 now hole up inside on weekends, and although it pains him, he understands. He had stopped going for Saturday morning runs himself.<\/p>\n
He followed news reports about the wrongful detention of U.S. citizens and the January killings of two protesters by federal immigration agents in Minneapolis, as well as the recent fatal shootings by ICE officers of immigrant men in Texas and Maine. The cases transported him to his childhood in the highlands of Guatemala, where he grew up during the nation\u2019s brutal civil war, in which the government orchestrated the torture and killing of thousands of civilians, many of them indigenous Mayans like Francisco.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt never crossed my mind that this would happen in the United States,\u201d he said. \u201cI came here to escape this.\u201d<\/p>\n
Francisco, whose first language was K\u02bciche\u2019, learned Spanish around age 8. As a teenager, he found work at a factory in Guatemala City sewing shirts for an American menswear brand. He eventually moved to Mexico, where he got a job in another warehouse, and then to Los Angeles in the early 1990s.<\/p>\n
He worked a variety of jobs, including for a flooring contractor, and started taking English classes. But when work dried up after the 2008 financial crisis, he returned to his roots, taking on sewing gigs in the Fashion District. He eventually got a job sewing masks at Los Angeles Apparel, the site of a massive workplace outbreak during the COVID-19 pandemic. He was exposed and got so sick he spent two weeks in the hospital.\u00a0<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Francisco-4-scaled.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
Francisco, a garment worker who is identified by his first name only for safety reasons, at work near downtown.<\/p>\n
After his release, his roommates were afraid of getting infected and asked him to move out. With financial help from the Garment Workers Center, an organization that advocates for workers, he moved into a hotel room for a time. He feels deeply grateful, he said, to have weathered that turbulent period.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut,\u201d he said, referring to the ongoing immigration crackdown, \u201canother wave came.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
The national surge of detentions in late June exacerbated fears that had slowly dissipated in the community, said Francisco, adding that four of his friends were detained in the June 6, 2025, raids across the region, including a fellow Guatemalan from his soccer team. That morning, Francisco had been a few blocks from the Fashion District when a friend messaged him to avoid the area.<\/p>\n
\u201cMe escap\u00e9 por un pelito de rana,\u201d he said, using a Spanish phrase similar to escaping by the skin of one\u2019s teeth.<\/p>\n
* \u00a0 * \u00a0 *<\/p>\n
During the June 6 press conference outside Ambiance, family members of detained workers stood not far from the spot where they had a year earlier peered past yellow police tape, watching their loved ones get loaded into vans. Other workers were detained from a separate location tied to Ambiance, whose representatives did not respond to a request for comment.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Some of the workers were ultimately released from immigration detention, including a man who introduced himself to the crowd as L\u00e1zaro.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat was a normal day \u2014 a day like any other \u2014 turned into a painful nightmare,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
A few minutes earlier, the crowd cheered as Ming Tanigawa-Lau, an attorney with the Immigrant Defenders Law Center, walked to the lectern. She had represented and helped secure the release from custody of another Ambiance worker.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat took place last year was just a preview of what we would experience. Not only in L.A., but across the nation,\u201d she said. \u201cIt tore families apart and left entire communities living in fear.\u201d<\/p>\n
In the crowd, Leslie Quechol nodded, cradling her newborn daughter to her chest.<\/p>\n
A year earlier, she had been scheduled to go to her first OB-GYN appointment since finding out she was pregnant when she heard chatter about a raid at Ambiance. She cancelled her appointment and rushed to the shop, where she saw workers in a line with shackles around their wrists.\u00a0<\/p>\n
One of them was her cousin, whom she considers an older brother. She screamed his name, but he couldn\u2019t hear her.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Quechol thought immediately of his wife and three children, especially his middle son, who has autism. He had recently made some big developmental progress. What would happen now, she wondered? And how would they make ends meet without their breadwinner?<\/p>\n
\u201cI knew everything was going to go downhill,\u201d said Quechol, who added that, in spite of their ordeal, the family took deep solace in the support of fellow members of the Zapotec community. Her cousin told a community organizer who served as a media liaison at the event that he and his family were too afraid to speak with a reporter.<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/DSC01656-scaled.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
The Ambiance building in the Fashion District, where immigrantion officers detained more than a dozen workers.<\/p>\n
* \u00a0 * \u00a0 *<\/p>\n
As the crowd dispersed, some family members stayed behind to dance to live music, and Francisco stood on a nearby sidewalk taking in the scene.<\/p>\n
He reflected on the many jobs he\u2019d had in the Fashion District \u2014 on the warehouse bosses who paid by the number of pieces sewn instead of hourly and how he sometimes earned as little as $300 a week. He had worked his way out of that place and into a more fulfilling, stable job where he has more autonomy.<\/p>\n
He could finally afford to have fewer roommates and no longer thrift all his clothes. Sometimes, he said, he even treats himself to a coffee from the trendy shop near his job, reminiscing over all the years he exclusively visited the corner store downtown to get a cup for $1.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt had more water than coffee,\u201d he said with a chuckle.<\/p>\n
And yet, for the first time in almost three decades, he is considering moving back to Guatemala.<\/p>\n
He misses his sisters and often thinks about the tiny home they grew up in and how he\u2019d like to help maintain it now that their mother is gone. He knows it hasn\u2019t been easy for his friend, the soccer companion, who got deported back to Guatemala. But the constant unease is wearing on him.<\/p>\n
The same search for a feeling of freedom that pulled him to the U.S. years ago was now pushing him away.<\/p>\n
Copyright 2026 Capital & Main.<\/p>\n
Photos by Jeremy Lindenfeld for Capital & Main.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"El seis, they call it.\u00a0 That day in June of last year when armed federal immigration officers descended…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":435411,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[48,52,51,47,50,49],"class_list":["post-435410","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-los-angeles","tag-la","tag-la-headlines","tag-la-news","tag-los-angeles","tag-los-angeles-headlines","tag-los-angeles-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/435410","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=435410"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/435410\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/435411"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=435410"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=435410"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=435410"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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<\/p>\n