Echo Park in Los Angeles (Photo: Evan Symon for California Globe)
The Forgotten Victims in the Immigration Debate
While leaders argue over immigration, families in our communities live under the quiet rule of fear
By Hector Barajas, October 27, 2025 2:49 pm
I grew up in Echo Park when it wasn’t trendy or safe. The same park that now draws joggers and families once drew gang lookouts. Some of my neighborhood friends got out. Some didn’t. What I learned back then is that fear doesn’t ask for a political party; it just settles into a neighborhood. There were days when my friends and I couldn’t walk across the park without being stopped by the LAPD and asked for our names, affiliations, and where we were going. That was life then. This place has changed a lot, but for too many communities like it, the struggle hasn’t.
The immigration debate has become a political circus with mayors and governors fighting with the president, as the cameras roll when federal agents show up on the streets, and the protests follow. But lost in the shouting is a truth too many of us in working-class, immigrant neighborhoods live with every day: it is the criminals who have always been prey within our own communities.
I’m not talking about people trying to build a better life. I’m talking about those who build their lives by destroying others. The ones who charge “rent” to local food trucks, who threaten business owners, who use families and storefronts to launder money for cartels. The ones who turn our streets into open-air drug markets and our teenagers into recruits.
The headlines don’t tell this story often enough. Just this year, a Los Angeles apparel wholesaler, C’est Toi Jeans Inc., and its executives were convicted for evading $8 million in customs duties and laundering over $17 million in narcotics proceeds. A Guatemalan business owner in Oregon pleaded guilty to laundering drug money through her chain of “La Popular” stores, wiring more than $4 million to Mexico. And eight members of MS-13, a gang that took root among Salvadoran refugees in Los Angeles, pleaded guilty to brutal murders and racketeering tied to transnational networks stretching from Houston to El Salvador.
These aren’t isolated cases. They represent a shadow economy that bleeds immigrant neighborhoods first. When food truck vendors are forced to pay rent to MS-13 to operate on “their turf,” when store owners are too scared to call police, when parents fear being branded as snitches and traitors for reporting crimes, the community loses twice. Once to the criminals. And again, to silence.
When ICE, DEA, or local police show up in these neighborhoods, the response has become instantly political. We’ve lost the ability to tell the difference between overreach and protection.
Yes, law enforcement must be held accountable. But they also deserve our recognition for removing predators from our streets. To label every operation as “anti-immigrant” is to leave the most vulnerable among us defenseless.
Protecting immigrant communities should mean exactly that. Protect them from everyone who preys on them. From gangs. From traffickers. From corrupt business owners.
If we can’t say that out loud because it makes some people uncomfortable, then we’re not protecting anyone at all.
I still believe in the neighborhoods that raised me. But belief without honesty won’t keep our kids safe. It’s time we stop letting politics blind us to the truth: the fight for justice in our immigrant communities isn’t about left or right, it’s about right and wrong.
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Immigration laws are being broken.
It is the duty of our government to serve and protect. End of story.
If someone has entered this country illegally that person(s) broke the law.
This opens the gateway for the gang crimes discussed here. The immigrant communities are bribed and threatened by the illegal criminals just like they were in many of their home countries. Human trafficking is another consideration.
ICE must be allowed to uphold our laws or we do not have a country!
This is not political it is common sense.
This article I am linking below highlights the female child victims of the human traffickers on Figueroa St. in Los Angeles. As young as 11 years old! The traffickers demand they each make $1,200 per night. Warning this article is heartbreaking!
Tom Homan is on a mission to put an end to this and other crimes related to illegal immigration.
https://archive.ph/ykHbm
Thank you for sharing. This is a heartbreaking article, and credit to the New York Times for covering it. What stands out is that this investigation lasted 2.5 years, and during that time, city leaders allowed the exploitation to continue unchecked. They should all be fired.
I saw what hapened to to the construction labor market since 1975 due to foreigners who would work for nothing in exploitative conditions. Also corruption made possible by communities of foreigners who are used to being treated badly by their home governments. The gangs, with senseless murders and drug violence. Then we have the drug addled homeless doing incomprehensable things in addition to setting fires and stealing everything in sight. The illegaly present need to be deported, the mentaly ill need to forced into treatment and criminals need to be experiencing some meaningful consquences.
Hi Hector, thanks for saying the quiet part out loud!
the legal immigrant communities are the 1st victims of illegal immigration. It is their kids, businesses and neighborhoods who bear the brunt of the criminal cartel element’s presence. the Dems don’t really care about illegal immigrants. they want to use them as pawns for Congressional Apportionment. if they really did care for them, they would be cheering in the streets each time Tom Homan deports a child trafficker!
CaliGlrl, thank you for the kind comment. I truly appreciate it.
I worked with a guy who had been a gang banger, his parents were from Latin America, presumably Mexico. He had a bunch of tats all over his body, including writing over his lips. He got to thinking of his kids when he was in prison, and asked to leave the gang. I asked about being green lighted (being killed for leaving the gang), he said he was told he could go, but if he ever came back to prison he would then be green lighted. He told me he had recruited several high school kids, they are now all dead from gang violence. During the time I knew him he struck me as hospitable and humble. There were others who all treated me well, but on one crew during lunch one day, they got to talking in a spanglish slang, that is often difficult for either spanish speaking mexicans or english speakers to understand, about a peseta (probably a child molester) who was being released from prison. I gathered that he would be killed if he returned to the neighborhood. One individual that flew into my orbit was someone who seemed to me was decent turned out to be from a family of notorious gang bangers from the lical barrio. He was convicted of at least being periphially involved in the murder of a young woman he had been dating. There were several others of his banger bros who were convicted of her actual murder. There was a guy from the local barrio who was running for city council, he seemed reasonable in his presentations. However, after a drug deal went bad, he chased his cousin down and murdered him by the tracks. He didn’t spend a night in jail, was probably not arrested, and the news was strangely silent about it.
It’s Crazy. That was some crazy people you ran into. You are right about the child molestation. If in prison or the neighborhood, there will be street justice by the gangs. Minors are off limits when it comes to that. Thank you for sharing.
Hector, I have had the privilige of knowing some older people from the barrio, there’s some wild stuff going on there since the 1940’s, including a heroin dealer who somehow managed to scrub his image and was actually elected to city council maybe 55 years ago while still dealing, that’s probably where the more recent individual referenced above got his idea to run for city council. The deceased heroin dealer’s life story is much more nuts than that, which I’m not getting into, too close to home and too close to his descendents. I had attended some funerals and memorials with a former girlfriend who grew up in that barrio, but on one occasion she told me I shouldn’t go because “they” would think I was a cop. Sure enough, there was a police helicopter circling overhead and the vicinity was saturated with patrol cars. It’s funny, maybe 100 or so years ago, there were two families living next door to each other who hated one another, now everyone in that barrio is related in some fashion (some in the most confusing and complex of ways), and even the school kids have animostity to this day. The stories I have heard are either fall over laughing funny, or full on WTF?.
Peseta: Either a coin or a prisoner in protective custody.
A lot of people ask why the employers of illegal aliens aren’t punished. I forget the finer details, but a retired border patrol agent essentialy told me that they could do a lot more towards employers before congress passed some additional laws so that now they have to make a case they don’t have the resources to investigate and carry out. That may or may not be correct, but that is my best recollection of the conversation. It seems to me there is plenty in USC Title 8 to send a lot of employers to prison for a long, long time. Particularly when an 13 year employee changes payroll names and social security numbers every 3 months.
How the “smarter” of the criminals get away with it: one I know of had a full time job he showed up to every day, he also had a side business staffed by an older relative where he laundered his money and he conducted his illegal trade away from his home town. He kept his illicit activities covered up with acting as a low key, respectable citizen, bribery and other means. After he died he was lauded as “an example to latino youth” in the semi regional press. He was a coniving, evil person. Another has a business in someone else’s name, which keeps his properties out of legal risk. I won’t get into the specifics, but he’s done just about everything but murder for hire and pimping women. He’s getting too old to play the game for much longer. The mexican black tar heroin dealers from a couple decades ago would blend into the population, nothing flashy. Not anything like the home grown black ghetto drug dealers who just have to buy flashy cars, throw money around and act like they’re all that in front of everybody. For decades mexican drug dealers have jacked up Indian reservations – where they’re generally safe from the law – with meth while impregnating practically every woman possible on the rez. Then I get to wondering about all those mexican restaurants popping up everywhere in the aftermath of covid by people who have no money while long time, local restaurants were closing their doors. Many years ago I patronzed a cash only restaurant where every few months the business had “new owners” and the name changed, but the place always stayed the same way, including the employees. They never had enough business to cover the cost of operation. Money laundering?