Arteaga’s Food Center employees Martha Rangel (right) and Adolfina Mateo restock the pastries shelves at the store on June 16. MUST CREDIT: Manuel Orbegozo/For The Washington Post Let us read it for you. Listen now. Your browser does not support the audio element.
Lupe Lopez’s Latino market in Newark, Calif., has been a shopping and social hub for decades — until recently.
Now the aisles are often quiet, the parking lot near empty, she said. Neighboring businesses are no different, she added: Restaurants, party and clothing stores, and even the big-box retailers seem to be emptier since the Trump administration increased its mass deportation campaign, raiding businesses across industries and targeting day workers in retail parking lots.
“The fear is felt in every aspect — no one is doing a party, no one is going anywhere,” the 68-year-old said of her customers. “The shelves are just untouched.”
From California grocery stores to chicken chains in suburban D.C., businesses that serve large immigrant populations are reporting shifts in consumer behavior — fewer in-store visits, lower receipts and more delivery orders — that threaten to drag down local economies, according to interviews with business owners, as well as spending data.
As part of the promised crackdown on illegal immigration that helped propel President Donald Trump to victory in 2024, the White House is pushing to expel at least 1 million undocumented immigrants in the first year. As such, federal immigration authorities have increasingly raided workplaces across the country — triggering protests in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, Atlanta and other cities — and conducting about 2,000 arrests a day, Trump border czar Tom Homan told The Washington Post earlier this month.
Lopez says deportation fears are affecting who comes into her stores, noting that some of her undocumented customers are sending their U.S.-born children to pick up groceries. Even those here legally are afraid to be out during the day, she added, and many people carry their passport with them in case they are stopped.
“If this doesn’t stop, I feel it’s going to break our economy.”
Communities with significant foreign-born Latino populations have been particularly affected by the immigration raids, according to business owners and Hispanic business groups across the country, as Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents have descended on Home Depot parking lots, car washes and restaurants.
Hispanic consumers are cutting back on grocery shopping: Food and beverage sales slid 4.3 percentage points in the first quarter, compared with the same three months in 2024, according to spending data from Kantar, a marketing data and analytics company. The same goes for discretionary categories, such as apparel, which slumped 8.3 percentage points during that same time period.
Among non-Hispanics, by contrast, food and beverage spending dipped 0.1 percentage point during the same period, while discretionary categories like apparel and home goods climbed 0.9 and 1.9 percentage points, respectively.
Such shifts can have implications for the broader economy, given that immigrants across the board accounted for 18% of total U.S. economic output in 2023, or $2.1 trillion in 2024 dollars, according to the Economic Policy Institute.
The White House did not respond to a request for comment.
Some business groups describe a climate of fear in which undocumented immigrants — and even family members who are here legally — are not showing up for work.
“That is not to say that anyone is for open borders. It is not (to) say that all of the workforce concerns are because they’re employing unauthorized” workers, according to Monica Villalobos, president of the Arizona Hispanic Chamber of Commerce in Phoenix, where 42% of the population is Latino and 1 in 5 is foreign-born. “But when you threaten one member of a multi-status household, you threaten the entire family.”
But Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, a think tank that supports fewer immigrants and increased enforcement, including the use of ICE raids, says that any disruption such tactics may cause in regional economies should be seen as the cost of upholding immigration law.
“Any transition like that is going to have dislocations,” he said. “Some people are going to be inconvenienced if we have allowed illegality to spread with impunity for years.”
Trump’s approach to immigration enforcement will probably have greater effects on local economies than that of the Obama administration, which notably oversaw a vast number of deportations, according to immigrant experts.
Former President Barack Obama, whom immigrants rights advocates labeled the “deporter in chief,” recorded 5.3 million removals during his two terms. There were subtle effects on the economy because immigration arrests also occurred at worksites during those years, said David Leblang, a professor of politics and public policy at the University of Virginia. The difference is that enforcement focused on people with felony convictions, he said, while the current campaign is targeting anyone without legal status.
“During the Obama administration — and even during the first Trump administration — you didn’t have migrants not showing up at work sites, whether they’re legal or illegal, because they were worried that ICE was going to show up and basically grab everybody, pull them off the streets and send them either to jail or put them on a plane and send them to … another country,” Leblang said.
Now, the “fear is by design.”
Trump’s deportation campaign is playing out in urban centers across the nation’s interior: ICE has been conducting raids at hotels and restaurants, farms and packing houses, car washes and retailers’ parking lots.
“There will be no safe spaces for industries who harbor violent criminals or purposely try to undermine ICE’s efforts,” Tricia McLaughlin, an assistant secretary for the Department of Homeland Security, said earlier this month. “Worksite enforcement remains a cornerstone of our efforts to safeguard public safety, national security and economic stability.”
