---
title: "A year of ICE raids cost LA County Latino businesses millions, a UCLA study finds"
description: "Researchers tracked cellphone foot traffic and surveyed owners across nine targeted neighborhoods. In the two weeks after raids, they counted 46,000 fewer visits and about $3.16 million in lost revenue, alongside what the report describes as sustained fear among the people who run the shops."
category: "Los Angeles"
category_url: https://herald.la/category/los-angeles
author: "Brandon Cole"
published: 2026-07-22T13:48:00.000Z
updated: 2026-07-22T13:48:00.000Z
canonical: https://herald.la/article/a-year-of-ice-raids-cost-la-county-latino-businesses-millions-a-ucla-study-finds
tags: ["ice", "immigration", "small-business", "ucla", "los-angeles"]
---
# A year of ICE raids cost LA County Latino businesses millions, a UCLA study finds

Researchers tracked cellphone foot traffic and surveyed owners across nine targeted neighborhoods. In the two weeks after raids, they counted 46,000 fewer visits and about $3.16 million in lost revenue, alongside what the report describes as sustained fear among the people who run the shops.

A year of immigration raids across Los Angeles County did measurable economic damage to the Latino businesses in the neighborhoods where they landed, according to a new study from the UCLA Latino Policy and Politics Institute and the nonprofit Inclusive Action for the City, [reported by LAist](https://laist.com/news/politics/ice-raids-la-county-latino-businesses-ucla-report). The researchers put numbers to something owners have described anecdotally for months: when the raids came, the customers stopped coming.

## How they measured it

The method matters here, because the claim is a causal one and the researchers built it carefully. They identified 989 businesses within a half-mile of nine neighborhoods that had been targeted by immigration enforcement, then used anonymized cellphone location data to compare foot traffic in the two weeks before each raid with the two weeks after. They also surveyed and ran focus groups with 75 business owners.

The neighborhoods studied were Cypress Park, the Fashion District, Huntington Park, Pacoima, Paramount, Whittier, Ladera Heights, the Warehouse District and Westlake, a spread that runs from the garment blocks downtown to the suburban commercial strips of the southeast county.

## The numbers

In the two weeks after raids, the study counted roughly 46,000 fewer visits to those businesses, which it translates into about $3.16 million in lost revenue over that short window.

Read those figures for what they are: a snapshot of the immediate aftershock in a defined set of blocks, not a countywide annual total. That is a strength, not a weakness, of the study. It is measuring a specific, datable drop tied to specific events, rather than estimating a vague economy-wide effect. The drop is what happens when a working commercial district empties out because the people who shop and work there decide it is safer to stay home.

## The part that is not on a spreadsheet

The report's authors are direct that the revenue figure is the smaller half of the story. From the surveys and focus groups, they describe owners carrying debt they took on to survive the slowdown, laying off employees, and shelving plans to expand. They also document a heavier human toll: what the report calls "chronic fear and psychological distress," a "sustained sense of fear, anxiety, depression and hypervigilance," and physical consequences that ran to stress-induced paralysis and, in at least one case, a relapse into drinking.

Amada Armenta, who directs the UCLA institute and led the research, said that in the focus groups the distress was almost universal. Without exception, she said, "at least one participant would end up in tears."

## Why it belongs on the front page

This is a story about enforcement policy, and reasonable people disagree about that policy. But the economic finding sits underneath the political argument rather than inside it. Whatever one believes immigration enforcement should look like, a raid in a commercial district has a cost that lands on citizens and noncitizens alike: the U.S.-born cashier who loses shifts, the landlord who does not get rent, the supplier two towns over who sells less.

The study does not tell Angelenos what to think about the raids. It tells them what the raids did to a set of neighborhoods that are among the economic engines of the county, and it puts a verified number on the first two weeks of the damage. The Herald will follow the report's authors as they extend the work, and will report the county and business-group responses as they come.

## Sources

- [A year of ICE raids in LA County has cost Latino businesses millions in revenue — and so much more](https://laist.com/news/politics/ice-raids-la-county-latino-businesses-ucla-report)