![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/cityheights_oct-1.jpg\")
Fresh bread and pastries come out of the oven at Hilda\u2019s Bakery in San Diego\u2019s City Heights, Oct. 15, 2026. (Zo\u00eb Meyers for inewsource)<\/p>\nThe two-and-a-half mile stretch of University Avenue that runs through City Heights is a testament to the cultures and countries from which residents of the San Diego community hail.\u00a0<\/p>\n
On the west end: a Mexican bakery where the smell of pan dulce wafts from dawn to dusk, a Salvadorean eatery slinging pupusas; an older woman selling tamales from a pushcart, a small line gathered on the sidewalk.\u00a0<\/p>\n
On the east end: Men sit in plastic chairs outside of a notary and sip Somali tea from styrofoam cups; red paper lanterns at a Buddhist temple sway in the breeze; a young server in an Ethiopian restaurant peruses her phone, waiting for the evening rush to begin.\u00a0<\/p>\n
More than 30 languages and dozens of dialects are spoken across the fewer than seven square miles that make up City Heights. Over the decades, waves of immigrants from Southeast Asia, East Africa and Latin America have settled in among more than 70,000 residents.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Some call it the \u201cEllis Island of San Diego.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
Fresh bread and pastries come out of the oven at Hilda\u2019s Bakery in San Diego\u2019s City Heights, Oct. 15, 2026. (Zo\u00eb Meyers for inewsource)<\/p>\n
But in recent months, a hush has fallen over the neighborhood\u2019s streets, some community members said. As President Donald Trump\u2019s push for mass deportations reaches its most intense escalation yet, many residents will tell you: People don\u2019t go out anymore.<\/p>\n
In July, the latest month for which data is available, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested almost 2,000 people in San Diego and Imperial counties and nearly 50,000 across the U.S., the highest monthly total of Trump\u2019s second term. Most people arrested that month had no criminal convictions<\/a> or pending charges. <\/p>\n While the agency has not provided neighborhood data, a string of ICE incidents in City Heights late this summer brought renewed attention to this lower-income, higher-density area.\u00a0<\/p>\n Aggressive arrests near schools, along busy thoroughfares and in popular shopping areas \u2014 videos of which have gained thousands of views online \u2014 are sending fears soaring.<\/p>\n \u201cThis is public terror,\u201d said Diana Ross, who has worked in the area for 16 years and leads a community organizing and advocacy nonprofit known by its acronym, Mid-City CAN.\u00a0<\/p>\n There, amid the rainbow of storefronts and multilingual business signs, City Heights is confronting a question likely to play out in immigrant communities across the country: What happens when a place celebrated for its diversity is targeted, on some level, because of it?<\/p>\n \u201cIf there\u2019s an ideal version of this country \u2014 and I want to believe that there is \u2014 I believe it exists right here,\u201d San Diego City Councilmember Sean Elo-Rivera said during a rally protesting ICE arrests last month.\u00a0<\/p>\n In the days leading up to the rally, ICE arrested a mother and father from Haiti just after the couple dropped off their two kids at school and detained two U.S. citizens after tense confrontations near a busy shopping center on Fairmount and University Avenue, the heart of City Heights.\u00a0<\/p>\n Speaking from the same intersection the next day, Elo-Rivera told the hundreds gathered that his office received multiple reports of federal agents stopping a high school girl on her way to class that week.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cWhen they searched her bag and found her school ID, they sent her on her way and told her she was lucky,\u201d the councilmember said at the rally.<\/p>\n But in this community, where generations of newcomers have arrived with little and built lives with hard work and grit, fear over the immigration crackdown is only part of the story.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cThe bigger question is what comes after that,\u201d Elo-Rivera said.\u00a0<\/p>\n In some ways, City Heights residents are already answering that question.\u00a0<\/p>\n Help sustain careful reporting that covers San Diego neighborhoods.Give $10<\/a><\/p>\n Volunteers bag diapers and canned goods at a nearby church to deliver to families too afraid to leave their homes. An immigrant mom arrested by ICE this year lets former detainees with nowhere else to go stay with her.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cThey\u2019re tough\u201d said Maria Gutierrez, 75, at a food pantry in City Heights last month. She spoke to inewsource in Spanish.<\/p>\n \u201cAh\u00ed no entra migraci\u00f3n f\u00e1cilmente.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Immigration authorities don\u2019t get in easily, she said.<\/p>\n The harmony and the anxiety<\/p>\n On an overcast and unseasonably warm September afternoon, Diana Ross stared outside the window of her fifth-floor office in City Heights<\/p>\n \u201cCan you hear it?\u201d she asked.\u00a0<\/p>\n The rumble and hiss of the city bus arriving at its stop on Fairmount and University avenues as people spill onto the sidewalk.\u00a0<\/p>\n The ringing bell of a paletero pushing an ice cream cart down the block. The Cuban salsa classic \u201cLa Cartera\u201d playing over speakers at an auto mechanic, interrupted by occasional drilling.\u00a0<\/p>\n The chatter of teenagers fresh out of class. Police sirens. Heavy construction equipment.\u00a0<\/p>\n To Ross, this is the soundtrack of daily life in busy City Heights \u2014 a cacophony of sounds as layered and multidimensional as the immigrant community itself.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n How City Heights became an immigrant enclave is a story that echoes that of similar communities across the country.\u00a0<\/p>\n Once the independent city of East San Diego, the area was annexed by San Diego in 1923 and came to be called City Heights. Dense housing development offered affordable homes to immigrants fleeing conflict and war in their home countries.\u00a0<\/p>\n In the \u201870s, Vietnamese immigrants leaving behind the war and, later, the Fall of Saigon were first brought to the U.S. Marine base at Camp Pendleton before moving into City Heights, joined by Cambodians and Laotians. Refugee aid groups helped newcomers to the area.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n Beginning in the \u201880s, East African refugees escaping violence in Ethiopia, Eritrea, Somalia and Sudan arrived in City Heights. Some Somali immigrants had initially trained at Camp Pendleton before settling into the neighborhood.\u00a0<\/p>\n Civil wars in Central America pushed migration toward the U.S. while Mexicans joined established communities. In recent years, migrants from the Middle East and Haiti have become some of the newest arrivals.<\/p>\n By the late \u201880s, Ross said City Heights had become a \u201cforgotten community.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cWhite flight\u201d accelerated in City Heights, driven by growing crime, falling investment in urban communities and suburbanization.<\/p>\n A city planning document from 1984 put some of the community\u2019s most pressing issues succinctly: \u201cThis growth has exacerbated the lack of public facilities. Schools are now crowded. With the exception of a few canyons, open space is non-existent, in addition to the area being deficient in parks and recreation facilities.\u201d<\/p>\n When development did happen, it sometimes came at a cost to residents.\u00a0<\/p>\n In the \u201890s, more than 1,100 businesses and homes across eight blocks in City Heights were bulldozed to make way for Interstate 15.\u00a0<\/p>\n The next decade, prominent philanthropist Sol Price poured tens of millions of dollars into revitalizing the community, loaning money<\/a> to the school district, the city and a private developer. But the development didn\u2019t come without controversy.<\/p>\n A new commercial area being planned at the time nearly excluded a medical clinic used by low-income immigrants and residents in favor of a Trader Joe\u2019s, according to the documentary \u201cThe Price of Renewal\u201d<\/a> released in 2006 by the director Paul Espinoza.\u00a0<\/p>\n Today, the community is celebrated by local leaders for its rich and diverse array of cultures, but City Heights still has continued challenges.\u00a0<\/p>\n Gentrification threatens to displace lower-income residents as outsiders move in looking for cheaper rent. Meanwhile, a recent report from the San Diego Fair Housing Lab found that the neighborhood had the lowest \u201copportunity tier\u201d score, a state classification system based on school performance, employment, poverty rate and environmental quality.\u00a0<\/p>\n The report also found that 15% of homes had more people living in them than they were designed for, almost triple the city of San Diego\u2019s rate.\u00a0<\/p>\n A surging immigration crackdown may just be the latest challenge the community takes on.\u00a0<\/p>\n Inside of a dimly-lit restaurant on University Avenue, a woman going by her nickname Dulce has been selling Mexican candies, bracelets with Catholic iconography and bagged peanuts for six years. With black and gray curly hair and pink lipstick, she brightens the corner of the room where she sits, smiling at passing patrons.<\/p>\n Her eyes light up as she describes the \u201charmony\u201d she sees in City Heights. Its residents, in buying her wares, have helped her raise money for sick family members and grandchildren.\u00a0<\/p>\n But that has changed recently.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cThere aren\u2019t people like before,\u201d she said. <\/p>\n She\u2019s not the only one noticing emptier streets.<\/p>\n At the El Super, one of the area\u2019s main grocery stores, rows of freshly misted produce are labeled in Spanish first, then English, and seashell-shaped pastries glow in the fluorescent lighting behind clear plastic doors. A security supervisor said fewer customers are shopping lately.<\/p>\n \u201cI don\u2019t really know how El Super is gonna stay open,\u201d the supervisor said.<\/p>\n Noelia Martinez, the namesake of Noelia\u2019s, a pi\u00f1ata and party store on University Avenue, has spent some 40 years in City Heights. With more ICE agents visible in the last few months, it has \u201cchanged drastically,\u201d she said, speaking to inewsource in Spanish.<\/p>\n She sees it most on her drive home, when pedestrians would fill the sidewalks after work hours. Now, residents she describes as \u201cpeople who strive everyday to get ahead\u201d prefer not to go out. Celebrations that would be incomplete without a pi\u00f1ata are postponed.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s affecting us a lot as business owners,\u201d she said.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u2018We come and we feel safe\u2019<\/p>\n By early afternoon, the sunlight lands just right to illuminate the yellow and green stained glass windows of a Haitian church in City Heights. One recent Sunday, the light enveloped the back of the room, falling on rows of mostly empty cream-colored leather chairs.\u00a0<\/p>\n Once, Pastor Johny Oxeda said, the church would regularly fill with 400 to 600 congregants for Sunday service. Last month, only dozens showed up.\u00a0<\/p>\n For some immigrants, even those with legal status, the fear of an immigration arrest has transformed even small decisions like going to church into critical ones. Haitians have become the latest, most visible group to be targeted.<\/p>\n In July, the U.S. Supreme Court allowed the Trump administration to end a temporary protection program, known as TPS, for Haitian immigrants. The program had allowed almost 350,000 Haitians to live and work in the U.S. since 2010, when a devastating earthquake ravaged the Caribbean nation.\u00a0<\/p>\n Today, Haiti is still gripped by rampant gang violence, but the Trump administration argued that conditions in the country no longer qualify for TPS and that the program was meant to be temporary. His administration said the same for the 12 other countries, including Afghanistan, Syria, Honduras and Venezuela, in ending their TPS designations.\u00a0<\/p>\n Soon after the Supreme Court decision, word \u2014 and videos \u2014 of ICE arrests of Haitians began to fill social media feeds.\u00a0<\/p>\n In August, an Instagram influencer posted a video showing a San Diego police officer holding a 1-year-old girl who had been left behind in a car after an apparent immigration operation involving a Haitian man. A spokesperson for the San Diego Police Department said federal officials called them to take the child.\u00a0<\/p>\n The next month, another video captured an ICE officer detaining one of the two Haitian parents who were arrested after dropping off their 2- and 5-year-old kids at John Marshall Elementary School.\u00a0<\/p>\n In the video, the officer is on top of the woman\u2019s body, holding her to the ground in an open doorway of a home under construction. The woman ran there after ICE stopped her and her husband in their car. Later in the video, the woman, who is barefoot, is seen struggling with an officer before falling to the ground.<\/p>\n ABC 10 reported<\/a> that the school district had to arrange for the children to stay with another guardian after the parents\u2019 arrest. The parents\u2019 Toyota Prius was left on the side of the road, photos of their children stuck to the dashboard.\u00a0<\/p>\n A statement attributed to an unnamed spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security said both parents entered the U.S. legally in 2022 but \u201coverstayed their welcome,\u201d without providing specifics.<\/p>\n Homeland Security claimed the woman \u201cbit an officer\u2019s hand while continuing to violently resist arrest,\u201d but federal court records do not show that she has been charged with a crime.<\/p>\n In court, the woman said she ran from officers not knowing they were ICE, because they didn\u2019t identify themselves, and she was scared. A judge later ordered her released from immigration detention after finding she had no criminal record.\u00a0<\/p>\n Homeland Security did not provide details on the incident involving the one-year-old girl, but said that ICE does not separate families or target schools for immigration enforcement. \u201cICE is not going to schools to arrest children\u2014we are protecting children,\u201d the agency said.\u00a0<\/p>\n Some local officials disagree.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/cityheights_oct-12.jpg\")
Lanterns blow in the wind at Thien Hau Temple Ch\u00f9a B\u00e0 Thi\u00ean H\u00e2u in San Diego\u2019s City Heights neighborhood, Oct. 15, 2026. (Zo\u00eb Meyers for inewsource)<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/20260916-INS-ICE-Out-City-Heights-11.jpg\")
Demonstrators march north along Fairmont Avenue in City Heights towards Euclid Elementary School on Wednesday, September 16, 2026. (McKenzie Patterson for inewsource)<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/cityheights-23.jpg\")
A small Cambodian flag hangs in a parked car in San Diego\u2019s City Heights neighborhood, Sept. 21, 2026. (Zo\u00eb Meyers for inewsource)<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/cityheights-21.jpg\")
University Avenue is one of the main thoroughfares in San Diego\u2019s City Heights neighborhood, Sept. 21, 2026. (Zo\u00eb Meyers for inewsource)<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/cityheights-2.jpg\")
El Super is a popular market for the immigrant community in San Diego\u2019s City Heights neighborhood, Sept. 18, 2026. (Zo\u00eb Meyers for inewsource)<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/cityheights-9.jpg\")
Many seats at a church in City Heights are empty during a usually packed Sunday service, Sept. 20, 2026. (Zo\u00eb Meyers for inewsource)<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/cityheights-16.jpg\")
Pastor Johny Oxeda speaks during a Sunday service at a church in San Diego\u2019s City Heights neighborhood, Sept. 20, 2026. (Zo\u00eb Meyers for inewsource)<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/FoodPantryClinic_0337.jpg\")
Volunteers hand out pantry items during the free legal and health clinic at the Employee Rights Center in San Diego on Saturday, September 26, 2026. (Sandy Huffaker for inewsource)<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/FoodPantryClinic_0029.jpg\")
Alor Calderon, the director of the Employee Rights Center, addresses volunteers during a free legal and health clinic at the center in San Diego on Saturday, September 26, 2026. (Sandy Huffaker for inewsource)<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/cityheights-19.jpg\")
A mural in Teralta Park celebrates the unity and diversity of the City Heights community, San Diego, Sept. 21, 2026. (Zo\u00eb Meyers for inewsource)<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/Sofia_Web_CTA.jpg\"\/)
<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/1792509406_387_iNewsource_icon.png\"\/){kind=icon}
<\/p>\n