By Nigel Duara
Originally published Aug. 13, 2025
There’s a certain beauty in the notes not played. An entire symphony, if you’re listening.
The cars not backfiring. The sirens not wailing. The fireworks not erupting in sonic booms that bounce off hills and peal across valleys.
This is the consequence of the largest planned deportation in American history. The Trump administration’s goal is to make life as unnavigable, unstable and uncomfortable as possible for people in the country illegally. The administration’s hope is they leave on their own, or with their kids in tow.
“Self-deportation is a dignified way to leave the U.S.,” the Department of Homeland Security said in May as part of a pitch encouraging people to leave the country on their own.
What remains are places that used to be: a shuttered restaurant, empty benches on weekends at MacArthur Park and even an abandoned taco stand, meat still on the grill hours later. The silence is the point.
Beneath that silence, behind locked doors, is a population in hiding. They were dishwashers and garment factory stitchers. They sold fruit on the street. This is the echo of the city they left behind.
Los Angeles has always been the author of its own story, from Chandler’s Marlowe to Angelyne’s bright pink Corvette. Now immigration enforcement agents wearing masks, driving cars with license plates from other states, are rewriting the narrative.
LA’s long, nervous summer entered its third month in August, but the immigration worksite raids in June and the smaller number of street-level stops in the following weeks have not brought the city to a standstill.
But it is a city diminished.
The absences are seen and felt in areas where Latinos are the majority or plurality, and where people are less likely to be insulated by their own wealth.
That means car traffic is nearly unchanged from a year ago, going by the frequency of crashes, but bus ridership was down 1.5 million rides in June, compared to the same month in 2024.
UCLA and USC, are continuing to operate on schedule, but Cal State Los Angeles, which caters to a far higher proportion of low-income students, has given its students and faculty the option to take classes online. The school’s provost blamed “heavily armed immigration agents” that left students and faculty in fear.
Another empty space: The spot on immigration court documents where the names of Immigration and Customs Enforcement attorneys should be. Judges have permitted them to operate anonymously, according to a report from The Intercept. Asylum seekers and their attorneys must use their full names.
There’s also the missing space on Sergio Espejo’s left hand. The top half of his index finger was destroyed by what he describes as a grenade, fired by the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department during an anti-ICE protest.
In some of the quiet spaces, a small but coordinated resistance sprung up. Most of what they do is photograph immigration agents as they detain people. Sometimes, volunteers with immigration advocacy groups try to stop the detentions, and sometimes they are detained themselves.
The administration’s goal was for deportation squads to arrest 3,000 people each day — a number that administration attorneys would not admit to in court. In California, according to the state Justice Department, about 3,000 people are in ICE custody as of July.
One of them is Mario Romero, the father of Yurien Contreras, a 20-year-old whose whole neighborhood is waiting for what comes next.
A family retreats
It’ll really pile up on you, if you let it.
Contreras’ father was detained in the opening stanza of immigration enforcement action, a June 6 raid on a garment warehouse in the Fashion District.
He was the only one in the family with a full-time job. Contreras has confined herself to the house she shares with six people since the day he was taken — she rarely ventures beyond the gate bounding their South Central duplex.
When her two infant daughters are napping, when her brothers are out of the house, Contreras confronts the quiet in her home and in her neighborhood. Strangers are given a wary eye now – something Contreras said wasn’t true before the raids. Contreras said most of the people on her block fear a knock on the door from immigration agents.
Contreras was born in this country, but her mother was not. One of her brothers, age 4, has developmental delays and appears to be regressing into old behaviors without his father home, pointing and shouting at objects on a kitchen counter but not making clear what he wants.
When Contreras looked for work after her father’s detention, she saw openings for warehouse workers but was afraid to leave the house — afraid for her own safety and afraid of what might happen if her mother had to venture off the property while she was gone.
“There’s like, no like happy things,” she said. “And when there’s happy things like a birthday that just passed, we get even more sad because my dad’s not here.”
Family friends have kept them afloat by buying them diapers and groceries. In mid-July, Contreras made her first trip to the grocery store since the June 6 raid.
It had to be done with precision. Her undocumented family members waited at home. She brought her cousin with her – if something happens to her, she wants her family to know when and where she was detained. Her legal status gives her no real comfort — she’s read the stories about ICE detaining U.S. citizens.
The grocery store was out of tomatillos, something she’s never seen before.
“You could tell something was going on,” Contreras said. “Back then (before the first immigration raid), everybody was going out, families were together, kids were laughing. Now the markets are empty.”
She hustled inside the store, armed with a short list. She knew the shelves well enough to get where she needed to quickly. She left as soon as she could. She didn’t really take a deep breath until she was back home, behind the gate.
Contreras wanted to go to school for a certificate as a certified nurse assistant or ultrasound technician this fall, plans that are now on hold. The family also wanted to send one of her other brothers, 16, to a four-year college when he graduates high school, but now wonders whether that’s realistic.
And her anxiety attacks are back.
“I had already gone from, like, a year and a half without having … anxiety attacks, no panic attacks,” she said, “but when they took away my dad, it triggered it. So my anxiety attacks have been coming back.”
They kick in every week or two, and at the most inconvenient times, like when she’s already crying or when she’s arguing with her brothers. It feels like her heart is trying to jump out of her throat. Her breathing races. Sometimes she forgets her compensation strategy, which is taking deep breaths, and her friends have to remind her. Her father was good at calming her down.
“So I don’t really show it to, you know, to my mom either, because I want to be strong for her, for the kids,” she said. “So, it’s like, I can’t talk to anybody. I feel like I can’t talk even though I know I can talk to people about it, it feels like I can’t.”
She pauses.
“I’d rather sometimes not talk about it. So when I keep it to myself, it’s, you know, it’s even worse.”
It’ll really pile up on you, if you let it.
Searching for ICE in LA
Depending on your point of view, MacArthur Park is either a symbol of Los Angeles’ ascent to a truly global city or a symbol of its fall. Labeled as part of the city’s “Mayan Corridor” that welcomed immigrants from Mexico and Central America, its nickname is “the Ellis Island of the West.”
It’s also a place of intense poverty and the violence and crime that accompanies it, conditions that led the owner of longtime city institution Langer’s Deli to threaten to abandon the area.
One morning this summer, immigration agents arrived at the park in green Humvees and on horseback, a massive show of force to a mostly empty park – word of the immigration agents’ impending arrival got around in the preceding days. Very few people stuck around to watch the show.
Now, the 35-acre park is smaller somehow. There are fewer people manning its grills or playing music — though the church services held in front of little clusters of folding chairs still draw a crowd.
Watching from the fringes was a man named Francisco Romero, dressed in an olive green T-shirt, blue jeans, gray running shoes and, on his neck, a red bandana. He wore a large straw hat, visible “so people know where to run to” in case of a raid or street stop.
On a weekend morning in July, Romero’s phone rang. He listened for a few seconds.
“Put spotters on the 710 and the 110,” he said.
