One year after Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) operations surged through Los Angeles County, many Latino businesses are still struggling to recover the customers, revenue and sense of security they lost.
A UCLA Latino Policy and Politics Institute (LPPI) report found that 989 formal businesses within a half-mile of nine immigration enforcement sites in Los Angeles County recorded 46,000 fewer visits and an estimated $3.16 million in lost revenue in the two weeks alone following operations in June 2025.
The cost estimate is conservative, as the study — which combined anonymized mobile-phone mobility data with surveys and focus groups — did not include lost wages, reduced productivity, deferred investment, accumulated debt, nor the informal businesses, like street vendors, food trucks and home-based businesses, that comprise a substantial part of the Latino small-business economy.
“We know that there were hundreds of arrests in June 2025. The arrests continue across Los Angeles and haven’t stopped,” said Amada Armenta, director of LPPI and an associate professor of urban planning at UCLA, at an Aug. 12 webinar. “This figure doesn’t even count the 50,000 vendors I know who live and work around Los Angeles, so the economic losses are far larger.”
An instant drop
The effects were immediate.
Business visits fell in eight of the nine enforcement zones studied — in some areas by more than 10% — in the two weeks following the ICE activity.
Of the business owners surveyed, every respondent reported an instant drop in customers and sales, 59% reported declines exceeding 50%, while another 20% reported declines between 26% and 50%.
Sixty-eight percent of business owners temporarily closed or cut their hours, and 51% said staff missed work due to fears surrounding enforcement.
Just a 1% drop in foot traffic results in $114 million in revenue losses across LA County over a month.
“Fear in our communities shows up as red ink in our economy,” said Armenta, adding that many businesses “started operating behind locked doors, screening their clients.”
Businesses also lost income from canceled graduations, quinceañeras, weddings, baptisms, festivals and other summer events. One restaurant owner told researchers he lost $20,000 in catering bookings alone as clients pulled out one by one.
Many owners who stayed open did so by absorbing the losses themselves: laying off staff and taking on their work, consolidating locations, shelving expansion plans and taking on debt that in some cases reached six figures.
‘It became a ghost town’
For Gonzalo Monti, who has owned his Inglewood furniture store X-Elence for eight years, the drop in customers forced him to cut staff and take on work that had previously been done by two or three employees.
“My sales were reduced, but also we had to remove individuals from our business because we didn’t have any sales,” Monti said through an English interpreter during the briefing. “Several clients called us that their husband or wife were deported, or they were captured,” leaving some families unable to continue paying for furniture they had bought.
“We are not talking about only money,” he continued. “We are talking about human love. It’s very important for the development of any business, the human contact.”
The financial strain, however, has continued.
A year after the enforcement surge, 52% of surveyed entrepreneurs said their revenue no longer consistently covered operating costs, while another 43% said they were breaking even with little or no profit and 95% continued to experience financial stress.
When the operations intensified, “it became a ghost town everywhere that I saw. Nobody was coming out,” said Vanessa Gutierrez, a small-business owner and president of the El Sereno Night Market. “Unfortunately, I feel that we are not yet in recovery mode. I feel that we are still surviving this.”
The toll on health
This stress has also carried a health burden.
The survey found that 76% of entrepreneurs “reported a substantial emotional impact,” including insomnia, panic attacks, depression, gastrointestinal disorders, worsening chronic conditions and other stress-related illnesses.
Gutierrez raised over $16,000 through a vendor-support fund after temporarily suspending her night market when the raids began. She also organized a volunteer patrol group and a delivery service so vendors could continue earning without appearing in public. Her support funds went directly to vendors to help cover expenses including rent, car insurance and food, but many continue to feel the strain.
For Aurora, a Los Angeles flower vendor, plummeting sales — while extreme heat wilts her stock — have made it hard to afford school clothes and supplies for her two children, while she and her husband experience insomnia and other health issues.
“Every single day, I cannot sleep because I’m thinking what’s going to happen next year,” she said. “The future is an uncertainty, what happens tomorrow for our children.”
The response gap
Rudy Espinoza, president and CEO of Inclusive Action for the City, said persisting losses partly owe to how quickly emergency support disappeared after the raids receded from public attention.
“These raids did not simply impact undocumented people. These raids were an attack on all of us, and they attacked our entire economy,” he said, adding that fears among business owners around going outside also affected the frontline organizations that helped these owners: “Our staff are impacted directly by what’s taking place in these threats. We have seen funders step back because they’re afraid of also being targeted.”
While Inclusive Action and its partners established a fund like Gutierrez’s for street vendors affected by the operations, Espinoza said government-level help has remained limited.
As examples of this help, he suggested city- and county-level marketing support for affected commercial corridors, California’s entrepreneurial training and grant SEED program and Senate Bill 635, which Inclusive Action worked on with state Sen. María Elena Durazo to protect street vendors’ data when obtaining permits.
Dr. Rocio Flores, founder of BELLA Entrepreneurs — a nonprofit for Latina entrepreneurs in Los Angeles which also launched a relief fund after the sweeps and continues to provide business micro-loans — said that as the threat of future sweeps remains, business owners need not only capital resources but trusted ways to help them navigate these resources.
“Our response when there’s a crisis is good, but what are we doing in between” she continued, calling for simpler grant applications as one way to mitigate stress for business owners already under major pressure.
“We can’t let this mobilizing end. This requires all of us. It’s an effort. We can’t do it alone,” Flores added. “We can’t come in when there’s a crisis and leave. Folks need to see us every day. That’s the challenge for all of us, to continue to be present.”
