Trump turning immigrant communities into ghost towns

Posted on: April 30, 2025 at 16:39:11 CT

MAGA!

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/trump-s-deportations-are-turning-immigrant-communities-into-ghost-towns/ar-AA1DTVaN?ocid=hpmsn&cvid=e083771cb04d4c75831b27ef5e7cc064&ei=48

In the hills above California’s Half Moon Bay, immigrant families are not leaving the farms where they work. The once-bustling streets of New York’s Jackson Heights have grown eerily quiet. And in Chirilagua, Virginia, some are saving money to return to their home countries.

Donald Trump’s shock-and-awe deportation campaign has had a chilling impact across the country, turning thriving communities into ghost towns.

The Independent visited three immigrant neighborhoods across the U.S. to investigate the impact of Trump’s policies on the communities in the crosshairs.

Chirilagua, Virginia

The streets of Chirilagua once boomed with the sounds of merengue and salsa.

Vendors flooded the small main street of the Alexandria, Virginia neighborhood, dealing out aguas frescas and Latin American treats minutes away from the nation’s capital.

Today, the noise and business are both muted. Shopkeepers say customers are staying home because the area’s residents are afraid of deportations, with rumors that Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents are staking out nearby parking lots and arresting people in apartment complexes.

Alicia Cabrera, 60, the owner of Marcella’s Bakery, a Chirilagua staple known for its fresh-baked empanadas and conchas, said she’s reduced staffing hours due to declining foot traffic. Twenty years after immigrating from Bolivia, she’s shocked by how the neighborhood changed in just weeks.

“Everyone that comes here says ‘do what you came to do and get out,’” Cabrera told The Independent during a weekday visit. At 2 p.m., few customers dotted the business's main dining room as baked goods piled inside glass cases.

“At this time, we normally would be really busy. Now, we’re waiting for clients to come.”

When Trump came to power in 2017, Cabrera’s business went unscathed. This time it’s different. Even though she knows she is not at risk at deportation, she remains fearful of an encounter with ICE. “I don’t know how to protect myself,” she said.

To be in the States right now is surreal sometimes. I think, ‘hold on, are we really living this? Is this a dream?’

An anonymous Virginia shop worker worried that her neighbors will be deported

Other local businesses are laying people off because of poor sales or are struggling to get their workers to show up because they fear raids. One clothing store attendant, who did not wish to be identified, told The Independent she’s seen owners temporarily shut their doors with tears in their eyes, worried immigration officials will show up any moment.

Hjarman Cordero, the executive director of Casa Chirilagua, a non-profit serving the community, knows his organization can do little to protect his clients from immigration officials — although he is trying to build better relationships with law enforcement by sitting on a newly formed city police advisory board.

Some of the community fear, Cordero says, stems from residents not knowing the difference between local police and ICE. During our interview, cop cars — who do not perform immigration raids — were stationed in parking lots across from the once-thriving businesses.

But Cordero thinks there are signs of hope amidst the pervasive fear. He pointed to a bus stop steps away from his office, which he notes is packed with early morning commuters.

“People are not walking with their heads looking down,” Cordero said, leaning back in a patio chair.

But one local says the neighborhood’s transformation is undebatable.

Normally, there would be many more roaring along, Alvarez, who is from Honduras and has called Chirilagua home for 20 years, remarked after the game.

Most of his friends are leaving the house less and saving so they can to go back to their countries. Some of his family and friends have already been deported this year.

“They feel like prisoners,” said Alvarez of his fellow residents. “They don’t want to keep living here because of Trump’s politics.”

Even though he has permanent residency, he fears for his family. He has a wife and three US-born children — two sons, 15 and 9, and a daughter, 12. He tells them to study hard so they won’t have to labor on construction sites as he does.

One anonymous shop worker, a US citizen who was raised nearby, sometimes comes to work an hour early to ensure ICE aren’t waiting outside. “I feel like I have a better chance in case something was to happen,” she said.

When Trump won the 2024 election, her heart sank. She quickly put together a plan for her children and gave them copies of their birth certificates and passports should they run into immigration officials at school or on their way home — an unlikely fear, but one many Latinos are facing daily.

“To be in the States right now is surreal sometimes,” she said, helping a customer. “I think, ‘hold on, are we really living this? Is this a dream?’”

Half Moon Bay, California

On California’s Highway 1, most travelers’ eyes are glued to the coastline. Visitors flock to Half Moon Bay, a rural stretch of coast about an hour south of San Francisco, for the famous big-wave surf contest, the small-town charm, or the views of wild poppies in meadows above the Pacific Ocean.

They might miss on the outskirts of this village as many as 3,000 farm workers, often from Mexico, some of whom are undocumented, hard at work growing Brussels sprouts, artichokes, pumpkins, peas, and flowers.

So far, farmworkers in places like Half Moon Bay and the state’s agricultural Central Valley have mostly been spared from large-scale immigration raids, though the Border Patrol kicked off 2025 with one mass operation near Bakersfield. Due to social media, where both verified Spanish-language news stories and rumors spread, the next raid never feels far away.

Javier Torres, 72, who has been working on farms around Half Moon Bay since the late 1970s when he arrived from Guanajuato, Mexico, says he sees posts on Facebook that toy with immigrants.

“There are times when American people are saying ‘immigration is coming’, but they don’t come. It’s nothing more than trying to scare people,” he told The Independent in Spanish. “It’s pure gossip from American people that want us intimidated.”

Agricultural regions across the state are experiencing something similar. Rumors about impending ICE raids are thought to have caused drops in attendance at local flea markets and Catholic mass services in Fresno. Around Modesto, volunteers scan the road for unmarked white trucks, usually harmless fixtures of rural life, but sometimes used by ICE agents.

Torres is here legally, owns a house, and his three children were born in the U.S — and he refuses to be deterred from doing what he loves, which is working the land along the coast.

“We will find a way, you know,” Torres said, adding, “It’s a life for me. It’s free. I like it.”

Other farm workers, physically and legally marginalized on hidden fields in the hills above town, have entered a deeply damaging isolation.

“I know of one group, they’re not coming out from the farm that they live in because they’re so scared,” said Dr. Belinda Hernandez Arriaga, a mental health clinician and founder of Ayudando Latinos A Soñar, a longtime advocacy and social services group in the area. “That is a mental health crisis…I have had very socially active mothers tell me they don’t want to come out anymore.”

This fear and tension is circulating just below the surface.

Robin Camozzi raises cattle, boards horses, and manages Half Moon Bay Feed & Fuel Company, a farm and ranch supply store that’s been open since 1911. She said her employees don’t seem overly concerned.

“My ranches’ employees, my employees here, are of Hispanic descent, a good portion of them. They are not at all worried,” she said. “In the feed store, in our business, everybody is working in the status quo.”

She pointed to a recent public celebration of vaqueros, Mexican cowboys, as a sign of the region’s continued Hispanic pride, though she noted there might be other discussions she’s not privy to.


“They all know each other, and they all know what’s going on in the community,” she said, referring to the town’s Hispanic population. “They just don’t talk about it.”

But racism has moved into the open, a new source of alarm in a town already scarred by a 2023 shooting that killed seven farmworkers.

People have begun harassing Latinos locally, including filming them, barging into a farmworker housing project, and telling them to go back where they came from. Someone sent threatening post cards to Ayudando Latinos A Soñar with the words, “Trump’s coming.”

For the first time, the organization — which normally offers services like a walk-in food pantry — has had to hire a security guard and build walls around its headquarters, a bright yellow house in the center of town.

“There’s been this permission for community members to be unleashed in a way that’s harmful,” Dr. Arriaga said. “We’ve never seen that before.”

Jackson Heights, New York.

For a little while, Jackson Heights felt like a safe place for Marcia Guamangate. She traveled with her brother across seven countries to get here from Ecuador, through the deadly Darien Gap jungle, before arriving in this melting pot of a neighborhood in 2022.

Her parents had arrived six months earlier and helped her settle in. She found work as a housekeeper, her father and brother got jobs in construction, and her mother at a Manhattan hotel. They moved into apartments on the same floor as each other and filed their asylum applications together. The process can take years, but they kept going to their appointments and were somewhat settled.

Then, Trump’s mass deportations started.

“The truth is, we can't walk in the streets now because I think we could be arrested at any moment without having committed a crime,” the 27-year-old tells The Independent.

“I'm afraid for my parents and brother. They go out to work every day. But even though we're in pending asylum and doing things right, we're very afraid. What President Trump said, that he'll only deport criminals, is a lie,” she adds.

Guamangate, who met her husband here and became a mother to a 1-year-old girl, now stays at home most of the time, afraid to go out for fear of being detained.

Jackson Heights has been the first stop for immigrants arriving in the U.S. for generations, from Colombia in the 1970s, India and Pakistan in the 1980s, Bangladesh, Tibet and Nepal in the 90s and 2000s and more recently Venezuelans.

It used to be a very bustling neighborhood, but people are nervous.

More than 60 percent of the neighborhood’s residents are foreign-born, and it houses the largest share of undocumented immigrants in the city.

The neighborhood is one of the most densely populated in the city — with as many as 160,000 people living there. The buildings are a mix of apartment blocks and family homes, most of them crowded with more people than they were designed for. Basements often house multiple families, apartments are split into two or three, and people are arriving constantly.

From the Northern Boulevard, a highway that cuts through the middle of the neighborhood, you can get a clear view of Manhattan’s skyscrapers, where many residents travel to work each day as construction laborers, cooks, delivery drivers and cleaners.

But today, these usually bustling streets are noticeably quieter. Reynaldo Carvajal, 56, the manager of the La Abundancia bakery, says business is down around 30 percent since January. Some of his own staff stopped coming into work out of fear of ICE raids, even though they have papers.

“People in this area come here every day when they go to work into the city. And now they don't go into work because they are scared about the situation,” he says.

The parking lot of the Home Depot in the neighborhood, where many undocumented immigrants wait to find casual day labor, was empty when The Independent visited.

The fear has been fueled by events both real and imagined. ICE raids hit New York just a week after Trump’s inauguration. Since then, group chats constantly buzz with news of sightings of ICE agents or an upcoming raid — although much is just rumor, says Nuala O'Doherty-Naranjo, an immigration attorney who runs a support center for migrants out of the basement of her Jackson Heights home.

These days, she tells everyone who shows up at her center not to let fear rule their lives.

“You came all the way here,” she says. “You walked from Colombia or wherever.
You can't give up now.”

She believes the Trump administration has been trying to scare people into deporting themselves, or at least into hiding.

“It's working,” she says. “It used to be a very bustling neighborhood, but people are nervous.”