Once It Was Mostly a Taco Website. Now It's Covering L.A. ICE Raids.

Yomiuri Shimbun

05-07-2025

It all happened so quickly. On June 6, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents descended upon Los Angeles, raiding businesses and arresting more than 40 people. Once word got out on social media, protests began and L.A. Taco's six-person news team headed out to the streets.
Investigative reporter Lexis-Olivier Ray captured video of police firing pepper balls at protesters and media outside a federal building in downtown Los Angeles. The next day, law enforcement shot pepper balls at him and other journalists, he said. In five years of covering protests and civil unrest in the city, he had never seen anything like that.
'It was shocking,' said Ray, 35. He doesn't know how many times he was hit but his backpack was riddled with pepper ball residue. 'There was a complete disregard that we were press.'
L.A. Taco was once a small website 'celebrating the taco lifestyle,' and a year ago faced the possibility of shutting down. But it's become an impactful and (for now) financially viable L.A. newsroom, going deep in the trenches as more than 1,600 people were arrested or detained by ICE in Southern California in June, according to Cal Matters.
'The journalism gets better year after year,' said Los Angeles Times columnist Gustavo Arellano. 'And now in this moment when L.A. needs as many eyes on the streets as possible, L.A. Taco has become indispensable.'
'This is the issue, not just right now but, honestly, of a generation,' he said of the city's immigration concerns. '… People are freaked the hell out and they don't know what to do.'
During the first week of providing nonstop news coverage, L.A. Taco Editor in Chief Javier Cabral said in a letter to readers that nothing would prevent the team from providing street-level journalism. Not a 'non-lethal projectile' or threatening comments on social media or the 'vivid' nightmares that kept him from getting any rest. And he thanked everyone who signed up for a paid membership.
'Your support means the world to our small team of six journalists, who care deeply about our city, friends, family, loved ones and neighbors and do it regardless of the low pay, constant threats and instability of an increasingly AI world,' he wrote.
News was coming in at such a rapid pace that Cabral announced L.A. Taco's coverage would pivot to a 'social media first approach.' It's risky because the site doesn't make money on social media. Its leaders had already been struggling to figure out how much content should go on social and how much should stay on their website behind a paywall, said Memo Torres, L.A. Taco's director of content, social media and engagement.
'This crisis of ICE raids threw everything out the window,' said Torres, 44. The team decided it was most important to 'do service journalism and … get the information out as quickly as possible.'
Since the first ICE raids, Torres has been sharing video from staff, the public and other media outlets with L.A. Taco's more than 500,000 followers on Instagram, TikTok and X, once information is verified. Most afternoons, Torres produces a short-video series titled the Daily Memo that he opens like a war correspondent reporting during the Blitz.
'It's Wednesday, July 2nd, the 27th day of the ICE siege of L.A.,' Torres said in one.
The recap of that day's events started with 'really depressing' footage of a man pleading for someone to help him while men wearing tactical vests dragged him into an unmarked car. It also included reports of arrests from the San Fernando Valley to West Los Angeles.
'If you were hoping that ICE was going to disappear after 30 days … well, think again,' Torres said.
L.A. Taco multimedia reporter Janette Villafana said what's unique about coverage from smaller newsrooms such as CALÓ News, LA Public Press and her own is that hyperlocal journalists understand the community because they are a part of it.
'We're communicating and building relationships and, more than anything, trust – whether it's regarding ICE or anything else,' said Villafana, 33.
L.A. Taco was founded nearly 20 years ago by publisher Alex Bloomingdale, deputy editor Hadley Tomicki and artist Colin Browne as a blog, Bloomingdale said. It celebrated 'the things we love about the city (mostly tacos, weed, and graffiti at the time),' according to its website.
'You would laugh more at the title than you would actually read or remember what they published,' Arellano said.
That changed in 2017 when journalist Daniel Hernandez became editor and relaunched it as a site with more local news. He left for the Los Angeles Times two years later and was replaced by Cabral, 36, who has been a food editor at Vice, a restaurant scout for famed critic Jonathan Gold and an intern at OC Weekly when Arellano was its editor.
A year ago, Cabral and Bloomingdale announced they had furloughed most of the staff and that L.A. Taco would shut down due to declining revenue unless they could secure donations and persuade people to pay for content that still also includes coverage of music, art events and, yes, tacos. They set up a fundraising drive and went from 1,500 to 3,500 subscribers. Subscription plans range from $59.99 to $999 a year, and all include free tacos.
'The response was immediate and incredible when we were honest about the situation,' said Bloomingdale, who goes by Blazedale on L.A. Taco. 'We were able to end the furlough after one day.'
Its recent reporting brought in 800 subscribers in the month of June, plus donations and social media fans. Eva Longoria pledged a dollar-to-dollar match for a $25,000 July fundraising drive. Bloomingdale said not only will L.A. Taco break even this year for the second time in its history, he expects the business, which has an annual budget of $500,000, to turn a profit.
'We're dreamers and we keep putting our earnings back into the company in the form of journalists, content and events,' including the annual Taco Madness festival, which is in its 16th year, he said. 'We have ambitions to create a new kind of media company, but we're doing it in a very DIY style.'
People have suggested that L.A. Taco transition from a for-profit to a nonprofit newsroom, making it more appealing to wealthy donors looking to give a large contribution for a tax deduction. It's not happening, Cabral said. L.A. Taco's readers have always come through, 'no matter how bad or unsustainable it got,' he said. 'We'd rather go out swinging than sell our editorial soul.'