ICE raided their city, taking parents, spouses and friends. That’s not where it ends

Last summer, Angelenos began to vanish.

Armed, masked immigration agents plucked people off street corners and out of their workplaces, in parking lots and department stores. Partners and primary breadwinners, grandparents and children, carwasheros and coffee shop regulars were arrested, detained and deported – disappearing from their neighborhoods.

Families are still living under the shadows of those raids, sorting through the emotional and administrative aftermath. They are filing paperwork to bring deported relatives back to the US, suppressing flashbacks to the chaos they witnessed last year, figuring out school pickups with one parent missing, rebuilding daily routines without a loved one.

These are their stories.

Noémi, whose husband was deported to Mexico: ‘The future is all just a blank’

Noémi’s husband, Jesús, still wakes her up every morning – no longer with a gentle nudge and a kiss, but with a phone call: “Good morning, love.”

He calls the kids next: Dhelainy (16), Esther (15), Angel (11) and little Gabriel (6). He dismisses their whines and pleas for 10 more minutes of sleep, saying: “It’s time for school!”

Before immigration agents swarmed the Westchester Hand Wash in Westchester, where he had worked for 10 years, before he was detained in El Paso and deported to Mexico, he would have kept some breakfast ready for them, and coffee.

But now he’s in Kiní, Mexico – where he used to live, before he moved to Los Angeles in 1992, before he met the love of his life and made a family with her.

“He is my first love, my love at first sight,” said Noémi, who was 16 when she first saw him – thick hair, square jaw – playing soccer outside the apartment complex in Inglewood where they were both living at the time. They married two years later, and until the day Jesús was arrested last June, they had hardly spent a night apart.

As soon as Jesús was arrested, Noémi looked for a lawyer to help the family remain together – as the husband and father of US citizens, he could have applied to become a legal resident. But he didn’t have his glasses when the immigration agents who detained him pressured him to sign a document; he didn’t realize he had signed away his right to remain in the US.

After everything, Noémi and the kids visited him in Kiní. They considered relocating the whole family to Mexico before coming to the painful realization that it was best for the kids, and their education, if they returned to Inglewood. Dhelainy and Esther were taking classes in community college – Dhelainy in law and political science, and Esther in software engineering. The kids were taking music lessons – trumpet, bassoon, violin, cello, piano, guitar – and dance classes. They were playing sports. “When we become parents, we want them to do and have everything we didn’t get the opportunity to do,” Noémi said.

Noémi and her son Gabriel at Westchester Hand Wash. Photograph: Aleksey Kondratyev/The Guardian

Still, the rhythms of their daily life in LA are dissonant without him.

Noémi misses him a lot at lunch time. He’d often bring her tacos or takeout and they’d eat together – a pocket of time just for them. He still calls her at midday, and they talk as she eats.

Dhelainy misses walking the dogs – Booka and Benji – with her dad in the evenings. “Now I always call my dad when I walk them,” she said. She tells him about how she went to Sacramento to speak about their family’s situation, and advocate for immigrant rights. She’s thinking about becoming an immigration lawyer.

Angel – who plays soccer, basketball, baseball and football – misses training with his dad on the weekends. Now it’s usually Gabriel who gets roped into playing. “It’s always play, play, play outside,” he mocked, and Angel rolled his eyes and gently shoved his little brother on the shoulder. “I have other interests!” Gabriel protested, his tongue pushing through the gap in his front teeth as he giggled.

Gabriel doesn’t fully understand why his dad is away, though he has wondered why his mom is always crying, and why his dad can’t come to his kindergarten graduation ceremony.

“Because I have waited my entire life for that day,” he explained. And Noémi wiped her tears and burst into laughter.

She cannot dwell on all the other milestones that Jesús will have to miss. They’ve submitted a petition to get Jesús a green card – but applications are currently backlogged and could take six years or even longer to process.

Both the girls will have graduated by then – definitely from high school, maybe even college.

Noémi is looking for a lawyer who might be able to help them reunite sooner.

“I wish somebody could tell me: ‘OK, he’s going to be there two years, or three years,’” she said. It would be hard, but she could cope. Instead, she doesn’t know when he’ll be able to come home. The future, she said, “is all just a blank”.

Christopher, whose uncle disappeared in ICE custody: ‘He had no idea his family was searching for him’

One year ago, Christopher knew next to nothing about immigration policy. Then his uncle Daniel was taken. “And I basically had to learn,” he said.

It was about 10am on 17 June when Christopher got the call.

Daniel had been strolling around their neighborhood in east Los Angeles – as he often did, collecting recyclables, greeting some of the neighbors and their dogs – when immigration agents in an unmarked vehicle pulled over, and cornered him.

Daniel – who has significant mental and intellectual disability, and very limited speech – didn’t know how to respond. For decades, he had been under the conservatorship of his siblings. He understands Spanish, but not much English. He can’t cope with loud noises or disruptions to routine.

Neighbors who witnessed the arrest immediately called his family.

Christopher was at his work at an ad agency when he found out. He wanted to break down, to explode, but he didn’t. “I’m one of the youngest in the family,” he said. He is a US citizen, fluent in English, American accent – the best situated to help his family navigate the immigration system. So he stayed calm, and he started to Google.

Using ICE’s online detainee tracker, he traced his uncle to the federal building in Los Angeles, then rushed over after work. The national guard stationed outside blocked him from visiting.

Marines and national guard members during a rally against ICE raids, at the federal building in Los Angeles on 4 July 2025. Photograph: Carlin Stiehl/Los Angeles Times/Getty Images

The next day, at the crack of dawn – as soon as the field office hotline opened – he started making calls. “I had written my script: ‘I know you have my uncle in detention, here’s his name, here is his birthday, he’s under conservatorship, he has cognitive disabilities,’” he said.

Christopher didn’t know how to obtain his uncle’s A number, which he learned was a unique identification number that the Department of Homeland Security assigns to noncitizens. Prior to his arrest, Daniel had never interacted with the immigration system and didn’t have an A number.

Like thousands of Angelenos, Christopher began researching immigration lawyers. Many weren’t available. Some were charging tens of thousands of dollars, with no guarantees. Eventually, a friend connected him to a trusted local attorney, who referred him to the legal aid group ImmDef. They found his uncle at the Adelanto detention center in the high desert east of LA, and one of the family’s lawyers was able to briefly meet with him.

“He was scared. He was confused,” Christopher said. But now, at least, there was a team fighting to free Daniel from detention. Christopher began to exhale: “It could be OK.”

Days later, he got another call at work: his uncle had disappeared from the system. Maybe he had been released – was he alone in the desert?

“I dropped everything and I drove to Adelanto with my sister,” he said. “I had packed the first-aid kit, some like energy drinks, like water, whatever I could think of in the hopes that I would find my uncle.”

They drove for two hours, checked local restaurants, parks, gas stations and medical clinics. Daniel wasn’t there.

“I wanted to prove that the federal government can’t just trample and disrespect and dump immigrants,” he said. “I felt like I had failed.”

He lay in bed. What next?

One of the lawyers from ImmDef reached out to the Mexican consulate. Meanwhile, another attorney thought Daniel – like most Mexican deportees – had likely been sent to San Ysidro or Tijuana, and began to reach out to local charities there. Finally, volunteers at a reception center in Tijuana said they had met a man that fit Daniel’s description.

“He was actually referred to go to a local medical hospital in Tijuana,” Christopher said. They found Daniel there – he had no idea where he was, or that his family had been desperately searching for him.

It took more than nine months for lawyers to help Daniel to get paroled back into the US. Christopher said he has been able to breathe easier now that his uncle is back with his family. But he still worries about other family members without legal status. He still doomscrolls though reels tracking ICE activity in LA.

“That ever-looming fear and anxiety, it still exists,” he said. “God forbid I have to be put in this position again … I at least feel a little bit more experience in knowing what to do.”

It has also helped, he added, to see so many other people across LA pushing back on Trump’s immigration enforcement policies. “It’s really now just on the most confident and the bravest of us to get in front of the right people to push for real change,” he said.

Mario, who was arrested at a carwash: ‘The cold was so intense we had to huddle like little chicks’

Mario, a father of three, was arrested at the carwash where he worked during the ICE raids in Los Angeles, California. Photograph: Aleksey Kondratyev/The Guardian

Mario had never been the type to stay still.

He had been working, pretty much non-stop, since he first came to the US from Mexico, 33 years ago.

He’d leave his house in the San Fernando valley, all the way north-west, at 6.30am, to commute to the carwash in Santa Ana – 80 miles (130km) to the south-east – and wouldn’t get home till about 8.30 in the evening. For three decades, he didn’t really have much of a life outside of work, but he didn’t mind.

“I was always the breadwinner,” he said. It was a point of pride for him, his wife, Alejandra, said, that she never had to work – he always earned enough to take care of her and their three children (now 24, 29 and 32) and his elderly parents back in Mexico City.

This is why, Alejandra said, it was so hard for her and the kids to convince him to stay home at the height of the immigration raids last summer. “They kept telling me to take a break, but I didn’t listen,” he said.

On 19 August, he reported to the carwash as usual. He was working at the computer in the back, when he heard yelling and saw his co-workers running. He rushed into the restroom, and could hear officers questioning one of his co-workers and then detaining him. “Then there was a pause,” he said. An officer swung open the bathroom door. Not long afterwards, Mario was in handcuffs.

The rest of it still loops in his mind. Six nights sleeping on the floor of a holding cell, which he calls the “ice box”. “The cold was so intense, so awful, that we had to huddle like little chicks next to each other to keep each other warm,” he recalled. Two months at the Adelanto detention center, where he was knocked out by some powerful contagion – maybe the flu or Covid – which spread through the detention center in waves. He was released on 24 October, after his lawyers filed a petition of habeas corpus, challenging the legality of his detention.

Life has been a sort of purgatory since then. Mario has to check in regularly with ICE via a mobile app, and he cannot work while he awaits a final deportation hearing on 27 July – a date that no one in the family likes to bring up.

His son has been paying for his rent and food. “I was the breadwinner for my family,” he said. “Now I am his charge. I am a burden for him.”

Alejandra remembers that during his first few weeks back, Mario refused to even leave the house. She had never seen him like that – barely eating, no energy to even take a shower. “I practically had to drag him to the bathroom,” she said. Her kids were worried; they told her to take him to her mother’s house, or the park, or even just the parking lot – to get him out of the house, and help him take in some fresh air.

“Let me sleep, I need to sleep,” he would say. “I am tired.”

“Of what?” she kept asking him, increasingly worried about her husband. “Tired of what?”

His body felt heavy, aching like it did at Adelanto when he was sick – though he knew his immune system had, in reality, already fought off the virus.

“Just because we have been released doesn’t mean we are free,” he said.

• The Guardian is using first names and pseudonyms to protect people’s safety and privacy.