When federal immigration officers swarmed Los Angeles in June to carry out mass deportations, Magda’s income dried up almost overnight. For years, she had supported her family by selling Guatemalan food outside the Guatemalan consulate in Frogtown. But as word spread of “la migra” snatching people off the streets and disappearing them to far-flung detention centers, Magda’s customers stayed inside. Eventually, the little money she was able to make didn’t justify the risk of being kidnapped, and she started staying home too.
Magda, who asked to be identified by only her first name, received her first eviction notice in July. By the time the court summons came in October, she had lost hope. People facing eviction in Los Angeles are not entitled to legal representation, and despite calling various agencies and organizations seeking assistance, Magda felt she had reached a dead end. After living in Los Angeles for 13 years, she self-deported to Guatemala.
Los Angeles County, with a population that is nearly half Latino, is a key part of the Trump administration’s mass deportation agenda. Random arrests, detentions and deportations have been relentless since federal immigration officers were deployed there in June, even as Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Patrol have taken their operations to other cities. In September, the Supreme Court greenlit federal agents’ practice of deploying roving patrols to arrest people based on their race, spoken language and place of work — making Spanish-speaking street vendors and day laborers particularly vulnerable to detention and deportation.
Like many of the progressive cities the Trump administration has targeted with aggressive immigration enforcement, Los Angeles has some of the highest housing costs in the country, forcing immigrant workers to make an impossible decision: Go to work and risk arrest, or stay home and risk eviction.
“An eviction notice on the door is sometimes equal to a deportation,” Lucy Briggs, a member of The Rent Brigade, a collective of organizers fighting against predatory landlords in Los Angeles, said in an interview. “If you’re undocumented, you’re not necessarily going to want to go to court to fight an eviction,” she continued, citing fear of appearing in government buildings, language barriers and access to legal counsel.
Forcing people to self-deport, or voluntarily leave the U.S., “is enabling what the Trump administration is hoping to see in Los Angeles — that immigrants are leaving, the city is in a state of crisis, there’s even more instability, precarity and chaos,” Chelsea Kirk, a member of The Rent Brigade and a Los Angeles Tenants Union (LATU) organizer, said in an interview.
The Trump administration has used the fear of arrest, brutal detention conditions, and even financial incentives to convince immigrants to leave on their own. Leaving the U.S. without resolving pending immigration claims could lead to a ban on reentry in the future, even for those who previously fled their home countries for safety reasons.
Elected officials in Los Angeles have expressed near-unanimous opposition to ICE raids in their city. But they have repeatedly refused to do one of the few things within their power to meaningfully protect Angelenos from ICE: enact eviction protections.
There is precedent for county officials making it harder for people to be evicted during times of emergency. The Los Angeles Board of Supervisors has previously passed temporary restrictions on evictions for people impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic and the January 2025 wildfires. For months, a coalition of grassroots organizations called Evict ICE Not Us has been lobbying the board to treat immigration raids as an issue similarly affecting people’s ability to stay in their homes.
After initially calling for an outright moratorium on evictions, the coalition threw its support behind a compromise measure introduced by Supervisor Lindsey Horvath, which would have increased the amount of money a tenant must owe in order to be evicted to three months of Fair Market Rent, which is established annually by the federal government. A similar measure that applied to only a small part of LA had passed earlier this month — but when Horvath’s county-wide measure came up for a vote the following week, not a single board member joined her in support, leaving many LA County residents vulnerable to eviction for owing any amount of rent. (Some parts of LA County, including the city of Los Angeles, have an eviction debt threshold of one month Fair Market Rent.)
The vote came during a weekly public meeting, which, as always, opened with a recording of a land acknowledgement: “We acknowledge that settler colonization resulted in land seizure, disease, subjugation, slavery, relocation, broken promises, genocide and multi-generational trauma. This acknowledgement demonstrates our responsibility and commitment to truth, healing and reconciliation and to elevating the stories, culture and community of the original inhabitants of Los Angeles County.”
So many people showed up to speak in support of eviction protections that public comment on the measure was capped at one hour. Hundreds of people also submitted written comments.
“We are living in a real emergency. Raids, harassment from the federal government, constant fear in our communities. This feels like terrorism. Our families are living with anguish every single day,” a man named Antonio, a member of the grassroots group Community Power Collective, said in Spanish, communicating through an interpreter. “Housing is a right, it’s not a privilege. It should not depend on one’s zip code.”
“The raids continue and keep us in a state of terror. Many of us can’t go out to work without fear. They’ve taken many coworkers and street vendors, people who were only trying to make a living. We can’t keep putting ourselves in danger. Protection for our communities is in your hands,” Esmeralda, another Community Power Collective member, said in Spanish with an interpreter.
Landlords and representatives of apartment associations urged board members not to raise the debt threshold for eviction, calling the measure “legalized theft.” (The measure would not erase the debt, and landlords owed money by tenants can seek payment through the county’s rent relief funding.)
After one hour of public comment, most of which expressed support for the measure, Horvath moved to initiate a vote.
“Is there a second?” asked Hilda Solis, the board chair.
The room fell silent. The motion failed.
“COWARDS! COWARDS! COWARDS!” members of the public chanted, before the supervisors left the room and continued meeting in closed session.
That meeting was the culmination of a months-long campaign by organizers to push county officials to protect those at risk of ICE raids from eviction, and by extension, self-deportation.
“ICE raids are a matter of life and death,” LATU organizer Lupita Limón Corrales told HuffPost. “We have seen folks here in LA chased to their deaths in response to an ICE raid. ICE is occupying hospitals — people face intimidation just going to get basic medical care. We shouldn’t wait until the death count hits a certain number for us to take action. We should be preemptively protecting people.”
Tenant organizers started hearing from immigrant members that they couldn’t afford their rent only weeks into the federal raids in Los Angeles. Some were too scared to leave the house to go to work. Others had lost their family’s sole breadwinner to arrest and detention or deportation. Even those who risked going to work found, as Magda did, that their customers were minimizing their time outside and had little money to spend.
LATU was already organizing ICE defense centers, food distribution and fundraising to buy out vendors’ products so they could afford to miss a day’s work. But they quickly recognized the need was greater than any fundraising effort could support, and they coalesced around a campaign for a county-wide eviction moratorium.
Their first major action came in July, when they held a rally, complete with an ICE piñata, outside the building where the board meets, before disrupting their weekly meeting to demand an eviction moratorium. But it soon became clear the board members were more interested in passing rent relief, funding paid to landlords whose tenants fall behind on rent. Such funding is aimed at keeping people housed, but landlords with rent-controlled units often stand to make more money by evicting tenants and significantly raising rent than by recouping unpaid rent.
Board members were “fixated” on rent relief,” Kirk said, describing it as a position that gave them “political cover to dismiss demands for an eviction moratorium.”
Tenants rights organizers felt the board was dismissing the extent of the crisis, and began pulling together data to prove the dire need for eviction protections. “We knew that many people were being impacted,” Kirk said. “We just needed evidence. So we put our research skills to use and began surveying immigrant renters.”
In August, The Rent Brigade surveyed 120 immigrant renters across LA County and found that their weekly earnings had dropped by an average of 62% since the start of the raids in June. Twenty-eight percent of respondents said they owed their landlords more than one month of rent and 71% said they had returned to work out of fear of eviction, despite feeling unsafe.
Organizers spoke about The Rent Brigade’s findings during public comment at the board’s Sept. 16 meeting and the board voted to approve $20 million in rent relief and to explore options for an eviction moratorium. The following month, county supervisors approved a Proclamation of Local Emergency for Federal Immigration Actions, which appeared to lay the groundwork for the board to approve county-wide eviction protections. (The board typically only has authority to pass such measures for the unincorporated parts of Los Angeles, which accounts for 10% of the county’s residents.)
“I want our residents to know that we are in this crisis with them — and I want us to have every tool at our disposal in this effort,” Supervisor Janice Hahn, who represents parts of LA with high rates of immigration arrests, said in a statement at the time. “For that reason, I think this emergency proclamation is not just symbolically important as a message to our residents, but critical to our response moving forward.”
By the time county supervisors passed rent relief and agreed to “explore” an eviction moratorium, Magda and her family were living without electricity, dependent on friends and neighbors for food. She had come to the U.S. in search of work and to provide her kids and grandchildren with a better future.
Before last summer, “we didn’t have any problems,” she said in an interview. “From what we sold, we were able to cover our expenses. We paid our rent, we were able to afford a car payment.”
But as ICE raids shook the city, her lack of income and mounting rent debt were a constant source of stress.
“I spent hours on the phone trying to find the solution to my rent. If I had found help, or a solution to pay my rent, I might not have left,” Magda said. “But I didn’t find help anywhere, and I was worried about how the rent was piling up month after month, and I couldn’t pay.”
Applications for the rent relief passed by county supervisors wouldn’t open until December — and even then, only landlords could initiate the application.
“We were trying to talk to [Magda’s] landlord to be like, ‘Rental relief will be made possible. We just need some time. Eviction needs to be the last resort,’” Limón Corrales said. “She was getting harassed on a daily basis — confronted about her unpaid rent any time she walked in the door.”
Tenant organizers told county supervisors and their staff about Magda’s unfolding crisis and the other tenants they had met who were considering self-deportation after falling behind on rent. They tried to communicate the urgency of a moratorium as an immediate stopgap protection.
In November and December, Rent Brigade surveyed an additional 112 immigrant tenants and found a ballooning crisis. One in seven respondents reported receiving an eviction notice since June and 57% said they were considering self-deporting because they couldn’t afford rent.
“Our lives have completely changed. I’ve lost all my catering work. My husband’s diabetes worsened from the stress, he had a finger and a toe amputated,” one respondent told the report authors. “We’ve lost everything and are considering leaving the country.”
“We rely on food banks, but are sometimes too scared to leave the house,” another said.
“Everyone is afraid,” said a third respondent. “They don’t know if they’ll make it home safely. The economy is failing, businesses are closing, many people can’t afford rent, many are in danger of eviction. Children have been left without their parents.”
The coalition of organizers also put together a legal memo with policy recommendations and analysis of various forms of eviction protections. Still, the Board of Supervisors stalled, adjourning for the December holidays without taking action on evictions.
In January, tenant organizers hosted a rent relief clinic in Huntington Park and asked attendees with rental debt if their landlords had applied for rent relief through the program passed by the county. Seventy-eight percent of the people surveyed said their landlords had not applied.
Finally on Feb. 3, eight months into the raids, the board passed narrow eviction protections — but only for tenants living in the unincorporated parts of Los Angeles county. The motion, introduced by Supervisors Hahn and Solis, raised the amount of money tenants must owe in order to be evicted to two months of Fair Market Rent. A week later, despite pleas from hundreds of Angelenos, the board voted down the effort to expand protections to the entire county.
Horvath told HuffPost in an email that she would “continue pushing for strong, practical protections that keep families housed and safeguard our most vulnerable residents.” The other four county supervisors — Solis, Hahn, Holly Mitchell and Kathryn Barger — did not provide comments.
In an interview the day before the vote, Magda said it had been difficult for her and her family members to start over in Guatemala. She hoped elected officials would help protect people in her situation from having to leave the U.S.
“It’s sad because all of the people who have emigrated to the United States do so to seek a better future, to work, to support their families, not to hide. You don’t go there to steal, you go there to work,” she said. “To work and pay taxes, to help move the country forward — that’s all we want. “
Ashford King contributed interpretation.
