This story was reported in partnership with LA Public Press and Block Club Chicago.
CHICAGO — When federal immigration agents detained a South Los Angeles tamale vendor, her husband and their customer in June, a multiracial group of neighbors organized a march and vigil to denounce the arrests and collect donations for the affected families. Neighbors grieved collectively and laid flowers at a makeshift altar.
“This cement, this corner needs transformation,” a speaker said at the vigil, a demonstration of cultural pride and unity among different racial and ethnic groups in the face of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrests, according to social media posts about the event.
Over the months that followed, neighbors have been meeting in back yards and community spaces to develop plans to protect each other and “reclaim” their streets. Their work offers insights on how people across racial and cultural backgrounds are showing up for each other as federal agents sweep across communities.
In recent weeks, Block Club Chicago and LA Public Press have spoken to residents in both cities about building multiracial solidarity and caring for families affected by widening immigration enforcement efforts. For some, Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations in both cities reflect a reality about state violence that Black people, including Black immigrants, have known for decades: Under the premise of law enforcement, armed agents can swoop in, wreak harm on a community and snatch people seemingly with impunity.
Enrique Gaspar, an organizer with the anti-poverty nonprofit Community Coalition, which organized the South LA march and vigil, told LA Public Press solidarity has become a daily practice after months of witnessing beloved neighbors get disappeared by federal agents.
“We made a plan to protect ourselves,” Gaspar said in Spanish. “Because an attack against one of us is a strike against all of us. We need to confront ICE terror together.”
After a spate of immigration arrests in the area, primarily Black and Latine neighbors came together to organize a “reclaim our streets” campaign to protest local ICE activity, inform immigrants about their legal rights and care for people affected by raids, Gaspar said.
People leaned on each other again when the time came to advocate for rent control in LA, or to canvas the neighborhood in support of Proposition 50. Members of the organization also drop off food and other mutual aid to neighbors who are too afraid to go outside due to their immigration status.
Neighbors realize they need to stand up for each other, regardless of anyone’s racial identity or citizenship status, because federal agents’ violent behavior is a threat to everyone, Gaspar said.
“We’re a multi-racial coalition working for a better place to live,” Gaspar said. “This is a community that needs to be defended. We’re affected by the same problems.”
South LA is home to a large number of immigrants, primarily from Latin America, though it was once a historically Black region of the city before waves of migration and gentrification changed its demographic makeup. It’s now a predominantly Latine region of LA.
The demographic changes reflect a nationwide trend of Black communities being pushed out by gentrification, disinvestment and pro-developer policies. As South LA changed, tensions emerged between groups, especially as public services were cut or social safety nets collapsed, but opportunities for mutual aid and solidarity also sprung up.
Gaspar, a former newspaper editor from Mexico, is clear-eyed about the challenges in building multiracial solidarity against ICE, but he’s not deterred by them. Cultural and language barriers come up during community meetings and they require deliberate, intentional work — and the financial capacity to hire translators — to ensure everyone can contribute fully.
Gaspar said Latine people must also work to eradicate anti-Blackness and racism if they’re to help build multiracial solidarity. Collective work on issues like rent control or immigrant defense helps neighbors identify the commonalities they share with each other, he said.
“We’re invaded by that [white supremacist] ideology, and the only way to rid ourselves of it is through education,” Gaspar said.
Immigration Enforcement In Black Communities
As both U.S. political parties have cracked down on immigrants and deported millions in recent decades, Black immigrants have been severely impacted, too.
Though images of predominantly non-Black immigrants being detained by ICE dominate news reports and social media, a review of federal immigration enforcement data reveals a more complex narrative.
Despite making up only 5.4 percent of the undocumented population in the United States, Black immigrants accounted for 20 percent of immigrants facing deportation based on criminal convictions, according to a data analysis by the Black Alliance for Justice Immigration and 76 percent of Black immigrants are deported because of contact with the police.
The study also found that people from predominantly Black countries who were detained by ICE were disproportionately more likely to be placed in solitary confinement.
Protecting immigrants from ICE raids and reforming immigration law isn’t an issue that solely Latine people must contend with, said Maraky, an LA-based Black Alliance for Justice Immigration member.
“The ICE dragnet makes all Black people vulnerable,” said Maraky, whose last name is being withheld by Block Club and LA Public Press due to credible fears of retaliation over their activism. “Immigration enforcement is an extension of anti-Black policing. We’re overpoliced and oversentenced.”
Since the second Trump administration began its recent crackdown on immigrants, the Black Alliance for Justice Immigration has been providing support for Black immigrants in LA and across the country.
LA County is home to at least 74,850 Black immigrants, the largest such population in California. Nationwide, one in 10 Black people are immigrants, according to a 2022 Pew report.
Black and Latine people share common struggles against state repression and injustice, Maraky said. Recent examples of solidarity between groups like the Brown Berets and Black Panthers provide roadmaps for how to challenge oppression together, they said.
But people have to keep showing up for each other, Maraky said.
“We have this shared class struggle that requires us to be able to be in solidarity with one another,” Maraky said. “But it’s important that solidarity not always fall on the most marginalized to produce their part in solidarity, and we look to our non-Black people of color in LA to really think about how we are showing up for each other.”
Maraky said LA Mayor Karen Bass should prevent the LA Police Department, known as LAPD, from providing support, even indirectly, to ICE operations. The department has faced criticism from residents who say LAPD’s actions — from standard traffic control to confrontations and, in some cases, violence against ICE protesters and journalists — during immigration arrests are a form of direct collusion with federal agents.
A spokesperson for Bass said the LAPD is prohibited from supporting immigration enforcement but her office didn’t answer questions about the department’s behavior when it responds to calls for support by federal agents.
From Slave Patrols To ICE Raids
For LA resident Joan Agoh, there’s a throughline between ICE arresting immigrants and the violence that the United States has inflicted on Black people for centuries.
The mechanisms targeting immigrants and the infrastructure caging people arrested by ICE is the same that criminalizes Black people, said Agoh, an organizer with the human rights organization Black Alliance for Peace.
When ICE agents have U.S. Supreme Court approval to factor someone’s race and whether they speak Spanish into justification for arrest, Agoh hears echoes of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which required police to arrest people believed to be fleeing enslavement.
“As Black folks in the United States, we know intimately what it is to be walking down the street and to be stopped simply for the color of your skin,” Agoh told LA Public Press. “These struggles are deeply connected.”
Seeing ICE agents clad in body armor and carrying high-powered rifles, Agoh sees remnants of undemocratic U.S. military interventions that have destabilized countries like Haiti.
She also sees the results of the ongoing “1033” federal program, which has transferred over $7 billion of U.S. military equipment to over 8,000 local police agencies in recent decades.
The LAPD and the LA County Sheriff’s Department have received over $3 million and $14 million, respectively, in equipment from the program, ranging from helicopters and rifles to sand bags and mine resistant vehicles, according to federal records analyzed by The Marshall Project.
“Where is ICE getting their armor from? It’s the same Pentagon pipeline that militarizes police nationwide, and it gets deployed oftentimes in Black, and indigenous and Brown communities,” Agoh said. “There’s no world in which we’re shouting to end police violence and say nothing about ICE.”
Block Club and LA Public Press were unable to verify the claim that Department of Homeland Security agencies such as ICE acquire equipment from the 1033 program.
BAP is calling on the federal government to shut down the program.
Since immigration enforcement operations surged across Southern California this summer, Black Alliance for Peace members have participated in protests against raids, mutual aid programs, and volunteer patrols tracking federal agents’ activity in various communities.
Over the past six months, Victoria, an LA-based member of Black Alliance for Peace, has joined other volunteers on morning patrols tracking ICE around Central LA. Riding in cars, on bikes or walking around, patrols also check in with people in the community and ensure day laborers are safe.
“We’re in a symbiotic relationship with the rest of the community to tell us if they’ve seen suspicious cars, or if they don’t recognize someone in their neighborhood taking pictures or harassing people,” said Victoria, whose last name Block Club and LA Public Press aren’t sharing due to concerns about retaliation stemming from their activism.
Victoria said the multiracial solidarity among patrollers has been vital in their work to keep immigrants safe, especially when communicating about new tactics federal agents employ or where sweeps are happening.
“I’ve seen a lot of community building of people who normally wouldn’t be talking to each other but are coordinating for the benefit of each other’s safety,” Victoria said. “There’s a strategic narrative that this is a certain type of person’s fight. ICE activity is going to affect all of us.”
In LA County, solidarity is “a necessity” for communities of color, Agoh said. Black LA residents in particular have dealt with decades of violence and racial profiling by the LA Police Department, even after a U.S. Justice Department consent decree sought to reform the agency.
Agoh said multiracial coalitions won’t be built overnight or easily sustained, but the work of practicing solidarity must continue.
“If I’m interested in the liberation of my people, I’m interested in liberation for all people.” Agoh said. “We can’t say this isn’t our fight.”
‘Heartening’ Connections Emerge In Chicago
As Porsha Weekly folded clothes behind the front desk at La Tiendita, a “free store” hosted at an African Methodist Episcopal church on Chicago’s South Side, a Latine woman approached and asked her a short question in English.
The woman and others in her group sought to browse the collections of donated clothing, toiletries and home goods. Weekly, a Black resident of the Washington Park neighborhood, responded briefly in Spanish.
After years of inflammatory rhetoric around the cultural differences between the South Side’s longtime Black residents and its new Latine arrivals, that mundane exchange at La Tiendita reflects a community working in ways big and small to adjust to those differences.
The two women continued communicating, mostly non-verbally, until two volunteers fluent in Spanish stepped in to guide the visitors through the shop. One of Weekly’s children, wearing a hoodie obtained from La Tiendita, passed the time playing with a rambunctious toddler from the shoppers’ group.
Such connections across language and cultural barriers “are very heartening,” said Dani Salazar, a lead volunteer at the shop who emigrated from Venezuela when he was 11.
“I would like to think that it’s not just because the situation has gotten so much worse for the [Latine] community, but also that it’s because [Black and Latine residents] have shared space for a while, and we are bonding [and] forming a closer connection with each other,” Salazar said.
La Tiendita has since early 2024 operated out of Coppin AME Church’s community center in Washington Park, one of the overwhelmingly Black South Side neighborhoods whose demographics have noticeably changed since Texas Gov. Greg Abbott began sending immigrants from his state to Chicago three years ago.
Now, three months after the Trump administration escalated its immigration enforcement in Chicago and created even more chaos for Latine and Black residents alike, members of each community say the need for unity has rarely been more obvious.
La Tiendita’s most frequent volunteers — half of whom are Black, the others Latine — recognize that such solidarity will only be built through consistency, Salazar said.
“This is a place that was built in a moment of crisis,” Salazar said of the shop’s founding as thousands of people arrived in Chicago with few resources or connections.
But even as city officials have pared back the infrastructure they established amid that crisis, La Tiendita’s organizers are “committed to continuing the work, remaining a part of this community and continuing to serve the Black and Latine communities here that still need the services we provide,” Salazar said.
A Unique Struggle On Chicago’s Southeast Side
A few miles south of Washington Park, on Lake Michigan’s shoreline, are the neighborhoods of South Chicago and East Side. They’re split by the Calumet River and joined by two bridges, which alternately serve as symbols of division and unity in the community.
More than nine in 10 residents across these working-class neighborhoods are people of color, yet they’re largely segregated: 70 percent of South Chicago is Black, while 86 percent of East Side is Latine.
“We are so unique when it comes to Black and Brown struggle,” said Eva Maria Lewis, who is from the Southeast Side and founded the violence prevention nonprofit Free Root Operation.
Despite the clear differences in neighborhood makeup, the Southeast Side’s collective response to Trump’s crackdown draws on a long history of cross-racial organizing. The community was once home to massive steelmaking operations, which for decades attracted workers from a multitude of cultures.
The neighborhood’s “rapid response” team — which alerts neighbors to the presence of “la migra” and mobilizes existing aid networks — features many familiar faces from more recent environmental justice, labor and pro-Palestinian movements in the community.
“Solidarity is important, because who else is going to look out for us?” said Marcelina Pedraza, a union electrician at Ford’s Southeast Side assembly plant. “The people in my community, in the schools, across the street from me — we are going to keep each other safe.”
That’s not to say Chicagoans of color always form a unified front.
Anti-Blackness is rampant across the city, Lewis said. For example, as shops were looted in Latine communities like Little Village and suburban Cicero during the 2020 uprisings, some Black Chicagoans shopping in or passing through those areas were targeted with bricks, bats and harassment.
On the flip side, some Black residents — many of whom descend from people who fled violence and poverty in the South during the Great Migration — have been among the loudest voices against the city’s support for migrants.
These barriers to unity are structural and intentional, locals said. On top of the mistrust sewn by decades of divestment, redlining and racial violence in Black neighborhoods, local leaders’ rollouts of migrant resources in those same areas have been plagued by flip-flopping and communication failures.
“It’s easy to take the bait when talking about resource scarcity in our communities,” Lewis said. “But when we are able to focus in on the root causes, it allows us to have more ammunition towards positive change.”
To overcome those barriers, some Chicagoans are turning to deceptively simple practices: self-reflection, pattern recognition and trust-building.
Weekly, who was a “shopper” at La Tiendita before she started volunteering, admits she was at first bothered by La Tiendita’s existence. With mostly Spanish-speakers running and receiving items from the shop when she first visited last year, she believed Latines were only looking out for their own in a neighborhood that’s 95 percent Black, she said.
But as Weekly continued to receive items and eventually volunteer — and as word about the store spread beyond Spanish-speaking communities — she said she saw the organizers prove their commitment to visitors of all backgrounds. By “very rough” estimates, La Tiendita’s visitor base is now about 70 percent Black and 30 percent Latine, Salazar said.
“I grew from that,” Weekly said of her initial frustrations. “I have befriended [Latine] friends, and I know a little Spanish. … We don’t see [race]. We see community and love and giving. That’s it, that’s all.”
Finding Common Ground, And Empathy
Amid the feds’ crackdown, residents are also drawing parallels between the seemingly exceptional violence of the immigration operations and the regularly inequitable tactics of local policing — and urging other Black and Latine Chicagoans to see their struggles as linked.
As agents chased and incarcerated immigrants around the city, they also detained, zip-tied and choked out Black U.S. citizens. Meanwhile, county and state police have for weeks arrested protesters of numerous backgrounds outside a suburban immigration processing center.
In one case, Customs and Border Patrol agents violently detained a young Black man outside an East Side Walgreens on Oct. 14, the same day agents fanned out across the community and crashed into, injured, arrested and tear-gassed people.
A month later, dozens of residents marched in the streets past the Walgreens and other sites of that day’s chaos with signs reading “Unity in Struggle” and “Until We Are All Free.”
“For me, it’s really valuable … to have a camaraderie with the neighbors,” said Frances Mercado, a biracial Black and Mexican woman who lives at the intersection where agents gassed residents in defiance of local cops’ requests.
“We all talk — maybe not in-depth, or not in [about] our whole family life — but at least we’re cordial and kind to each other and respectable.”
In another incident in South Shore, which neighbors the Southeast Side, 37 immigrants and additional U.S. citizens were detained in a military-style raid Sept. 30.
Weeks later, a small group of Black residents gathered on the sidewalk outside the South Shore building. Though the group had initially gathered to socialize, some shifted focus when they saw city workers filing onto the property to perform a code inspection.
Several in the group peppered a buildings department employee with questions about the city’s handling of the building, which had deteriorated for years prior to the mass arrival of immigrants in the neighborhood, let alone the September raid.
A few others, citing that same history, denied to reporters that Latine migrants were to blame for the property’s appalling conditions.
Black and Latine Chicagoans are also being brought together by fresh attacks on food access.
As the Trump administration refused to fund the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program during the recently ended government shutdown, Lewis’ Free Root Operation worked with Nuevo Leon Restaurant in Little Village to provide 260 people with free taco dinners one night last month.
Free Root Operation will continue food distributions, with further cuts to SNAP benefits on the horizon, Lewis said. Free meals allow neighbors in need to put “prejudices to the side” and focus on “the potential for us to get what we need — and for it not to come at the expense of each other’s wellbeing,” she said.
Extreme and visible pressures like sudden demographic changes, the immigration crackdown and cuts to federal benefits are pushing Chicagoans of color to find common ground. That gives community organizers an opportunity to build lasting connections, Lewis said.
“There is this line of empathy we can have on people,” she said. “There is a huge opportunity for us to learn from one another; an opportunity to be conscious around how these systems have caused our communities to play each other, and instead build and learn.”
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