July 4, masked men wearing uniforms with Border Patrol insignias arrested a man working at a taco stand in Eagle Rock during ongoing summertime Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids, a July 6 article said. According to the article, the man was identified as Luis Thomas Mejia-Canil, a Guatemalan national accused of overstaying his visa. Since the beginning of June, Southern California has been the target of thousands of immigration arrests aimed at deporting undocumented people.
LA continues to be at the epicenter of ICE raids as the US Supreme Court overturned a federal judge’s order Sept. 8. The overturned order had prohibited federal agents in LA from stopping people and profiling them about their immigration status based on their ethnicity. LA Mayor Karen Bass held a press conference near a Home Depot by MacArthur Park the same day to address the court’s decision.
“I want the entire nation to hear me when I say this isn’t just an attack on the people of Los Angeles, this is an attack on every person in this city, and in every city in our country,” Bass said. “From the beginning, we have known that Los Angeles has been used as a test case for total dominance and unchecked power by the federal government. We have been used as a test case to begin to normalize military intervention and takeover of our cities.”
Representatives from eight organizations spoke as well, including the American Civil Liberties Union Foundation of Southern California, The Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights (CHIRLA), the Los Angeles Worker Center Network (LAWCN) and National Day Laborer Organizing Network (NDLON).
At the press conference, Armando Gudino, the executive director of LAWCN, said the U.S. Supreme Court has empowered authoritarianism and revealed itself as prejudicial.
“Immigration agents are now being given the power to profile, stop, detain and arrest people because of the color of their skin, the language they speak or the work that they do,” Gudino said.
According to Communications Director Palmira Figueroa, NDLON focuses on improving the lives of day laborers, low-wage workers and undocumented immigrants. The immigration raids have been detrimental to the safety and well-being of day laborers and low-wage workers who are undocumented, Figueroa said.
According to Figueroa, when immigration raids became prevalent in Los Angeles in early June, NDLON focused on continuing to build their resources for the protection and defense of immigrants.
“We work around our organizing theme, which is ‘Solo el pueblo salva al pueblo’ (Only the people save the people), so we’ve been trying to enlarge the way people are involved in this type of work, with a lot of rapid response teams,” Figueroa said. “The ‘Adopt a Corner‘ program was launched about two months ago, and I can say now that about 2,500 people have been trained on how to start a group around street corners, so they can protect the most vulnerable workers, which are day laborers.”
According to Figueroa, before the increase in summertime ICE raids, many of NDLON’s volunteers and members had signed petitions and supported workers’ rights campaigns. These actions focus less on defensive measures and more on supporting efforts to protect undocumented people on the side, Figueroa said. Now, many of the organization’s volunteers are heavily involved in defense, by getting information about detained people, creating GoFundMe pages and helping assign lawyers to detainees, Figueroa said.
“We have seen a wonderful rise of interest and more and more people coming and engaging our seminars and signing up to adopt corners and other strategies that we are putting out for people to be more engaged,” Figueroa said. “I definitely think that this has been a call to action for people that haven’t done this before, and have been called to work for justice.”
According to Figueroa, day laborers in LA are particularly at risk of being detained because of how they find work by standing outside businesses and other public spaces. As a result of the raids, workers who are essential to the LA economy are feeling scared and severely impacted, Figueroa said.
“The idea that day laborers can just stay home and not go to work comes from a little bit of ignorance and not knowing what a day laborer does,” Figueroa said. “If they don’t go and seek work, they don’t get work.”
In the midst of ICE arrests, local businesses are also stepping in to help undocumented immigrants survive the uncertainty of possible detainment, according to Daniel Johnsen, the co-owner of Potluck Local in Eagle Rock. Johnsen said he and his wife, Kim Johnsen, opened the grocery store in February 2025 with the intention of providing a community business that supports locals. According to Johnsen, when the Border Patrol raids ramped up earlier this summer in June, he and K. Johnsen partnered with the Mad Collective to donate groceries to undocumented immigrants who are unable to leave their homes to safely shop for food.
“There are friends of ours who this directly affected,” Johnsen said. “For everyone that works in the food and beverage world, you know a lot of people that suddenly became very scared to move around, to go to work, and so immediately our first thought was, we need to feed them.”
According to Johnsen, Potluck Local has been able to combine their personal donations with some from the community to put grocery bags together that typically last a family a week.
“When we work with the Mad Collective, we tell them the number of grocery bags we have, and then they send someone, a volunteer from the community, to pick it up, and to deliver it to a location that will disperse it, or distribute it directly to people’s houses,” Johnsen said. “We started doing this in the early stages of ICE coming to town, pre-July 4th.”
Johnsen said he and his wife are committed to continually doing everything they can to help people who are impacted by the immigration raids.
“In every place I’ve ever worked, especially in every restaurant, the hardest working people are people that are undocumented,” Johnsen said. “They are friends and family, and I ask myself, ‘What can I do, what can we do to help?'”
Contact Olivia Correia at ocorreia@oxy.edu
