Iconic city is grinding to a halt as ICE raids send its many migrant workers into hiding
As the California city tries to recuperate from wildfires, businesses and developers have revealed they do not have the manpower to get these crucial jobs done.
LA has one of the nation's largest immigrant workforces, with nearly 38 percent of workers originating outside the US, according to 2023 data.
Estimates from the Public Policy Institute of California suggest than one in 10 workers in the Golden State are undocumented immigrants, while the Migration Policy Institute reports there are roughly 950,000 'unauthorized' residents in LA county.
Donald Trump 's immigration crackdown has sparked concern among a significant portion of LA's laborers - especially after a recent bout of raids.
'Papers or not, fear spreads quickly,' real estate consulting firm Hilgard Founding Principal Joshua Baum told Bloomberg.
'When workers do not feel safe showing up to job sites, it slows down not only the pace of construction but also the willingness to propose new projects in the first place.'
Immigration agents arrested more than 1,600 people in LA between June 6 and June 22, Bloomberg reported.
A prominent raid occurred as recently as the Fourth of July, with the City of West Hollywood condemning one conducted at a car wash that morning.
As a result, job sites have been deserted, and construction and renovation projects have been delayed.
'We don't have enough people to staff the work and we're scrambling to figure it out,' Arturo Sneider, the CEO of Primestor, which manages more than 3,000 apartment development projects and $1.2 billion in shopping centers, told Bloomberg.
Contributing to what many see as a labor crisis, more than 16,000 structures were wrecked by wildfires from Pacific Palisades to Altadena.
The damage may cost LA more than $250 billion, the Los Angeles Times reported.
In order to tackle rebuilding the affected areas, the Urban Land Institute reported 70,000 workers will have to be added to LA County's 145,000 construction force by mid-2026.
Roughly 14.5 percent of LA construction workers are undocumented, according to the Los Angeles Economic Development Corp.
LA officials, as well as California Governor Gavin Newsom have been fiercely battling federal governments efforts to arrest undocumented immigrants.
During the anti-ICE riots that broke out at the start of June, Trump sent 4,000 National Guard troops and 700 Marines to LA to intervene and protect federal property.
California filed a lawsuit over the use of the National Guard following the first deployment, claiming Trump 'trampled' the state's sovereignty and sent troops without the governor's permission.
Meanwhile, city officials said the demonstrations will ultimately cost taxpayers $32 million.
Last week, Trump sued LA for failing to comply with federal agents.
LA Mayor Karen Bass vowed to fight against the lawsuit, claiming the raids are causing 'severe economic damage.'
'We know that Los Angeles is the test case, and we will stand strong,' Bass said.
'We do so because the people snatched off city streets and chased through parking lots are our coworkers, our neighbors, our family members, and they are Angelenos.'
West Hollywood officials wrote in their Friday statement: 'We reaffirm: our immigrant communities are not threats — they are vital contributors to the social, cultural, and economic fabric of our city, our state, and our nation.'
While local officials have pointed fingers at the Trump administration for LA's alarming economic state, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has issued a blunt response.
'If there was any correlation between rampant illegal immigration and a good economy, Biden would have had a booming economy,' DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin wrote to Bloomberg.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Telegraph
an hour ago
- Telegraph
How a single bullet changed Donald Trump forever
The chart showing immigration numbers was usually displayed in the closing minutes of the stump speech and on the other side of the stage. So, when Donald Trump turned his head to the right to glance at the graph, escaping an assassin's bullet by millimetres, many thought they saw the hand of God. 'There's a confluence of things that happened to avert tragedy, and I think he talks about how there must have been some divine intervention,' says Steven Cheung, the White House communications director, who was present on July 13 2024 in Butler, Pennsylvania. 'That is the change.' It was the day a bullet grazed Mr Trump's ear, upending the 2024 election campaign and changing the president forever. Thomas Matthew Crooks, the 20-year-old would-be assassin of Mr Trump was shot dead by the Secret Service at the scene. Crooks also fatally shot audience member Corey Comperatore, and injured two other people in the crowd. Since then, Mr Trump has talked about his nerves when people move around in the crowd at his rallies, flirted with the idea of uniting the nation, and described his mission to save America as the work of God. This weekend, however, there will be little in the way of commemoration. An interview with Lara Trump, his daughter-in-law, is due to be broadcast on Fox News on Saturday, when he will reflect on the past year. And that is all in keeping with a man who prefers not to look backwards, say insiders. 'He's a busy man. There's a lot to get on with,' said a senior administration official. In the past year, Mr Trump pulled off an extraordinary political comeback, becoming only the second president in history to serve non-consecutive terms. He has governed at a rapid pace, slashing the federal workforce, axing foreign aid, challenging the world to a trade war, reducing illegal immigration, and bringing media critics to heel. Mr Cheung said there had been no time to take a step back immediately after the assassination attempt. 'Immediately we went into the Republican National Convention (RNC),' he said, 'Immediately he went back on the campaign trail.' Just two days after being wounded, Mr Trump made his triumphal entry at the RNC in Milwaukee, pacing down an entry corridor in front of a camera, looking every inch the heavyweight champ returning to the ring. Thousands of supporters embraced the religious parallel. 'July 13 was the same date when the Holy Mother revealed the third secret of Fatima,' said a Catholic attendee. That was the date in 1917 when the Virgin Mary appeared to three Portuguese children, entrusting them with her prophecies. The vision foretold an attack on a 'bishop dressed in white,' and was only revealed in 2000, 19 years after an assassin tried to kill Pope John Paul II. 'You can't make this stuff up,' added the Trump supporter. For a while Mr Trump held his rallies indoors, reducing the threat of a copycat sniper. But six weeks later his security team rejigged the setup with bulletproof screens allowing the Republican candidate to resume his trademark events. His ear had healed quickly, but Mr Trump admitted some other scars might remain. During a rally in New York in September he appeared startled by a sudden movement in the audience. 'I thought this was a wise guy coming up,' he said. 'You know, I've got a little bit of a yip problem here. Right? That was amazing. I was all ready to start duking it out.' There were other effects from the shooting, according to Blake Marnell, who travels around the country attending rallies and who was in the front row at Butler, resplendent in his distinctive brick-patterned suit. He said older voters remember the anger and violence in the country around the time of the murder of John F Kennedy. If anything, the shooting this time helped voters coalesce around the wounded leader. 'When you look at the other effects post Butler, you can't ignore the fact that that is one of the driving factors that got Robert F Kennedy and president Trump speaking, which led to the Make America Healthy Again (Maha) coalition,' he said, referring to a member of the famous liberal political clan, who was best known as an environmental lawyer. 'That also crystallised Elon Musk's support for the president.' The world's richest man endorsed Mr Trump on the night after the shooting. And he appeared on stage with him when the Republican candidate returned to Butler three months later. For a while Mr Trump's speeches took on a more bipartisan air. Aides described how a caustic convention address was toned down in the interests of national unity. 'The discord and division in our society must be healed. We must heal it quickly,' he said at the start of his 90-minute speech. 'As Americans, we are bound together by a single fate and a shared destiny. We rise together. Or we fall apart.' Headlines about a softer Mr Trump did not last long, however, as he quickly resumed his scathing attacks on Joe Biden, the then president, and Kamala Harris, his election opponent. What endured was a greater sense of mission in a man who pulled off a surprise win in 2016 and at times struggled to impose his will on Washington during that first term. Mr Trump himself used religious framing to describe his campaign after his narrow escape in Butler. He was often seen taking part in group prayers, the president in the middle, head bowed, as supporters reached out to touch his arm, an elbow, the back of his chair. 'I would love to think it's God, and it's God doing it because he wants to save America,' he said in an interview. 'He sees what's happening. God sees what's happening in America.' He shrugged off questions about PTSD or mental scars, but has returned repeatedly to the idea that surviving that day has toughened his resolve and his faith. 'It changed something in me,' he said a month after returning to the White House. 'I feel, I feel even stronger. I believed in God but I feel much more strongly about it.' The result was a greater sense of purpose, said Mr Cheung. 'I think it was a further resolve of how important it was to work on behalf of the people, and that the mission took on an even greater importance,' he said.
Daily Mail
an hour ago
- Daily Mail
90 Day Fiance star Eric Rosenbrook 'arrested after slapping his wife when she was holding their baby'
90 Day Fiancé star Eric Rosenbrook has reportedly been arrested for slapping a woman who is believed to be his wife of seven years, Leida Rosenbrook. The alleged incident took place on the 4th of July in Adams, Wisconsin, reported TMZ on Friday. The victim - Leida is not named in the document and the victim has gone under LNM but the site believes it's her - reportedly told authorities that Eric had been drinking when he went to pick up food, but did not return in a timely matter. The 35-year-old then noticed that Eric was 'passed out' in his car outside the apartment, which she allegedly videotaped, the site claimed. When she woke him, he came in the house and slapped her when she was holding their baby girl, it has been claimed. Eric has confirmed the accusations to the site. Rosenbrook was arrested and booked at around 2am on July 5 and has been charged with misdemeanor battery and disorderly conduct. The victim went into detail about the incident. She had said that when she woke Rosenbrook up in the car, she had their baby with her in her arms and he woke the child up, the site claimed. He reportedly then wanted to hold the baby but the victim said no because he was too drunk. That is when the reality TV star allegedly slapped the victim. The victim said she had been abused since they wed in 2018, the site reported. Eric went back to his car and fell asleep again, police told the site. The authorities said he admitted to hitting the alleged victim, the site added. TMZ spoke with Eric who admitted he did hit her when she was holding their daughter. But he said that he did not the child. However, he then decided to leave the apartment. And he shared that the fight has led to their split. Rosenbrook married Leida after meeting on 90 Day Fiancé during season six of the show. She filed for divorce last year, but her petition was withdrawn, it has been claimed. In 2019 he was linked to another ugly situation when he was accused of hitting Leida. He explained his side of the altercation during an Instagram Live video for fans but denied he struck her. She claimed her husband pulled her hair and scratched her scalp during their fight. In the text messages, Leida claimed that Eric 'pulled my hairs really hard and grab it until I can stand up and grabbed my wrist both of them and put me on the corner.' In his video response, Eric disputed some of the details, but his account hued fairly close to Leida's original allegations. He admitted: 'Leida and I had an altercation. 'She was threatening self-harm, I wrestled a knife from her. But my training took over, it triggered my I went too far. Nothing serious was caused, other than emotional trauma, which is severe. I may have scratched her scalp, I did not realize I did that. After I wrestled the knife from her, my training took over and the only thing I could think of was to restrain her. 'It went too far. I attempted to stand her up on her feet so I could look her in her face and restrain her wrists, but I pulled her up by her hair. She did not resist, had she resisted it may have snapped me back to reality and I would not have done it. I like to believe that I would not have continued to do it that way. 'I do not excuse how it happened, I know I should've handled that differently.' 'After I stood her up I had to restrain her wrists, I was afraid of her hitting herself or myself. We argued and fought a little bit, not physically after that. 'I kept her against the wall in the kitchen, the corner as she says, it's not really a corner, it's just the end of the kitchen. And I kept her there because she would've had to pass the sink again and the knife, and knives, so I kept her there, I did not let her pass.' Eric went on to say that he had called the police at Leida's request, and that she had been taken to a hospital for an evaluation. He said he had offered to stay at a hotel to give her space, though it wasn't clear what their current living situation is. Neither Eric nor his wife seem to be disputing the most explosive part of the allegations, that Leida had a knife and was threatening to kill or harm herself. Leida's Instagram account posted an Instagram story referencing the fight. It read: 'A domestic incident did take place between Eric and Leida on 1/20/19. The couple asked that you please respect their desire to keep things private at this time. #privacy #respect.'
The Guardian
an hour ago
- The Guardian
Superman is super woke? How politics play into the new man of steel
Superman Woke! Variations on that headline splashed across all manner of non-Daily Planet websites this week in advance of a new Superman movie reboot, specifically the comments of writer-director James Gunn, who casually characterized the character as an immigrant and, as such, telling the 'story of America' in an interview. This rankled rightwingers including the former TV Superman Dean Cain, who acknowledged Superman as an immigrant but blanched at the idea of actively associating that as an American value, noting that 'there have to be limits'. Meanwhile, the former Trump lackey Kellyanne Conway, now a Fox News host, characterized the movie she hasn't seen as an ideological lecture, and added her supposed anger that the movie's star, David Corenswet, elided the old 'truth, justice and the American way' Superman slogan in another interview (referring to 'truth, justice, all that good stuff'). For those attempting to keep track: people involved with a Superman movie shouldn't attempt to evoke America, except when they should. Actually, for those keeping even closer track, the 'American way' bit was a phrase added to the radio version of Superman during the second world war, and further popularized by the 1950s TV show. It lived on primarily in reruns of that show, didn't appear in the comics until 1991, and has never been particularly central to the character in his original medium (or any of the movies, even). This is all to say that the reading of Superman as an immigrant is so commonplace, so arguably a part of the plain old surface text of the character, that it's even harder to buy any ginned-up outrage than usual. At best, it's a byproduct of suppressed guilt over the cruel and unusual immigration policies favored by anyone dumb enough to complain that this a 'woke' version of a 90-year-old superhero. In fact, the phoney outrage and predictions of boycott from people who don't go to the movies anyway could be a gag straight from the movie itself. It's one of plenty of real-world parallels in Gunn's movie. Most of them fall into the blockbuster realm of vagueness that makes it hard to tell if it was inspired by real events or just unsuccessfully sidestepping from evoking one international crisis straight into evoking another. (More on that in a moment.) But the most obviously first-hand quasi-political experiences Gunn draws upon all have to do with social media: this is a Superman whose weaknesses include Kryptonite, Lex Luthor-engineered software that anticipates his every punch, and … reading the comments. During one argument, Lois Lane needles her superpowered boyfriend by telling him she's seen him looking through certain hashtags guaranteed to frustrate and enrage even the virtuous child of Kansas farms who still says 'golly!' on the regular. This makes sense: James Gunn does not have experience in geopolitics, but he sure has experience online. The film-maker was semi-canceled over edgelord-y tweets (unearthed, in perfect discourse fashion, by rightwingers infuriated by his left-leaning politics); fired from the third Guardians of the Galaxy movie; and eventually rehired when Disney realized that maybe cast and fan loyalty was worth more than manufactured outrage. But in his between-Guardians downtime, Gunn made a Suicide Squad sequel for the previous DC regime, essentially auditioning for his current job. In some ways, he owes his stewardship of Superman and DC in general to the vexations of life online. So if it's a little cringe-y to hear about Superman glancing through social media, or for Gunn to go out of his way to show Lex Luthor training an army of monkeys to flood the zone with mean tweets, it's also a funny, oddly whimsical way of acknowledging our contemporary world. (Plus, remember that Clark Kent works in media, even if his newspaper still publishes a print edition.) It's certainly more surefooted than the movie's actual politics, which go further than the likes of Captain America: Brave New World but still fall short of anything more complicated than the actual thrust of Gunn's interview. (Which was that kindness is, in fact, good.) The immigrant stuff, first of all, is in the movie but not especially prominent. A plot turn involving Superman's parents could even be read as accidentally xenophobic; after all, if you're trading on the message that it doesn't matter where an immigrant comes from once assimilated into our culture, doesn't that by definition cast aspersions on other countries (or in this case, planets) and elevate whatever 'our' culture is? That's obviously not Gunn's intent in positioning Superman as an immigrant figure; he wants to elicit the empathy for outsiders that we've all felt at one time or another. The logical stumble is more a sign of a metaphor that isn't fit for front-to-back, one-to-one interpretation; that's not a problem on its own. More interesting is the story's offscreen inciting incident, where Superman intervenes in the affairs of two fictional countries. When the movie begins, Superman has recently stopped Boravia, which is led by a blustery despot who comes across like an eastern European Trump, from invading neighboring Jarhanpur. The latter has struck some viewers as coded Middle Eastern, implying parallels between Israel and Palestine, though in the comic books (and based on the leader's accent, here too) the countries are actually somewhere in Europe. That is to say, it looks more akin to Russia invading Ukraine, though Gunn has said he didn't have any specific real-life turmoil in mind when he concocted the scenario. The issue is really more interventionism: should Superman have acted unilaterally in stopping Boravia (and, indeed, threatening its leader with reprisal if he tries it again)? Lois Lane isn't so sure, bringing up the repressive nature of past Jarhanpur governments (and in turn bringing to mind Israel's attacks on Iran, though that particular conflict was in the news well after this movie was written, shot and probably almost or entirely finished). One of the most heartening things about Superman is that Lois's objections inspire a full conversation between her and Superman, in the guise of an 'interview' to make up for the fact that most of Superman's press is self-directed through Clark Kent. For a little while, the movie seems ready to dig into the genuine strife faced by a mega-powerful being who therefore has the ability to shape the world. Stopping people in another country from dying seems ethical. But what about issuing de facto press releases disguised as a real journalism? Of course, all of these questions are in the realm of hypothetical, so the movie mostly just invents hypothetical solutions that turn on the fact that Superman is, in fact, inherently trustworthy and moral. Lucky for everyone, huh? Then again, getting too far into the issue of whether Superman 'should' help people starts to look a bit too much like the Zack Snyder version that audiences and critics had such mixed-at-best feelings toward. Gunn wants Superman to be a bigger-tent affair than that, and it's an understandable impulse. He's not the first superhero character, but he's arguably the first one to achieve something resembling global ubiquity. That's going to lead to some varying interpretations. Limiting him to specific politics makes no more sense than keeping a world-saving god within Metropolis city limits. Yet in a weird way, the buffoonish outrage over Superman's immigration status has only served to highlight a void in the movie's broader emotional resonance. It's a sweet-natured movie that ends on a genuinely emotional note – it might particularly resonate for those with adoptive parents, another Superman mainstay – but misses the opportunity to make a more explicit parallel in the way Superman has emigrated both to the United States in particular, but to Earth in general. His global citizenship is more of a feelgood given than a powerful duality, and a Superman that truly grappled with our ability to see beyond national boundaries might have felt like a true update of the character for a new century, rather than another tacit plea for kindness. We have Paddington for that. Shouldn't Superman be able to lift something a little heavier?
