Immigration raids in LA hit small businesses

Juan Ibarra stands outside his fruit and vegetable outlet in Los Angeles’ vast fresh produce market, the place in the city centre where Hispanic restaurateurs, street vendors and taco truck operators buy supplies every day.

- TIM REID KRISTINA COOKE

On Monday morning, the usually bustling market was largely empty. Since Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) officials began conducting immigration raids more than a week ago, including at a textile factory two blocks away, Mr 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 US illegally have stopped showing up.

Mr 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,” Mr Ibarra said. “It's almost Covid-like. People are scared. We can only last so long like this — a couple of months maybe.”

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