Immigration Crackdowns Dealt LA Businesses A Multimillion‑Dollar Blow

A year after last summer’s immigration crackdowns that emptied parts of Los Angeles’ commercial corridors, damage to business owners and their landlords hasn’t been repaired.

Neighborhoods like the Fashion District and Little Tokyo are still coping with the fallout from a large-scale immigration crackdown and its subsequent protests, trying to recover millions of dollars in lost revenue even as fear persists.

Raids and street arrests over two weeks in mid-June 2025 led to the loss of more than $3M in revenue and 46,000 visits to nearby businesses, according to new research from the University of California, Los Angeles' Latino Politics and Policy Institute. 

Those figures only scratch the surface but provide the first insight into the business cost of the tumultuous period.

“What we didn't count was the food that spoiled, or the debt that piled up, or the wages that workers lost, or the suppliers who ended up losing orders, or the expansions that folks didn't make,” Nicholas Vargas, a coauthor of the report, told Bisnow. 

In Los Angeles County, removal orders — a legal command from the federal government to leave the country — increased 70% in the first eight months of 2025 compared to the first eight months of 2024, according to the Los Angeles Economic Development Corp.

Foot traffic in the Fashion District picked back up after agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement eased their focus on the area. But it hasn’t regained its pre-crackdown volume.

Visits to the Fashion District from Jan. 1 to June 30, 2026, were 3% above 2025 totals but 9.9% below 2024 totals, according to foot traffic data from Placer.ai provided by the Fashion District Business Improvement District. 

Decreases in foot traffic and drops in sales revenue were among the most common impacts for surveyed businesses, according to research from the LAEDC.

About 82% of businesses that participated in the survey in the fall of 2025 said they had been negatively affected by the raids, with more than half of those experiencing reduced daily sales or revenue.

The majority of the responding businesses — about 57% — were occupiers of commercial space, either a storefront, office or warehouse. 

Although large-scale immigration raids seen last summer are no longer taking place in the neighborhood, ICE is still active, and fear is pervasive. Bisnow visited the Fashion District to speak with business operators in the area, but none were willing to talk.

Many businesses in Los Angeles and across the region are still feeling the shockwaves of widespread immigration activity reverberate through their decision-making as they delay plans for business expansions, consolidate locations and work to make up for lost revenue. 

Although Little Tokyo did not experience the large-scale raids that occurred in the Fashion District, its location a block away from the federal detention center meant it had to weather protests, government responses to protests and a six-day nighttime curfew during June 2025.  

That short period took “months and months and months” to rebound from, said Kristin Fukushima, executive director of the Little Tokyo Community Council, a coalition of residents, business owners and other stakeholders in the neighborhood.

In the first quarter of the year, a food delivery driver was detained by immigration agents in Little Tokyo, Fukushima said. He parked his motorcycle in the same parking lot every day, and one day, agents were waiting for him. 

“It felt very targeted, but also on the surface a little bit random,” Fukushima said. “How did they know this is where he would be? At that exact time?” 

Immigration enforcement is ongoing and still has an impact on residents and workers, she said. 

Workers are still afraid to come into work, which poses a challenge for businesses that now have to think about how to support their workers, their business and their customers at the same time, knowing that each has different needs, Fukushima said. 

“The way it happened in the past, it was raids on businesses, but now it seems like it's more just picking up people on the street,” she said. “Public space itself is what doesn't feel safe.” 

From January to March 10, 2026, ICE agents arrested 2,581 people in the so-called Los Angeles area of responsibility, which includes locations in Ventura and Santa Barbara counties. 

That is a 148% increase from the 1,040 arrests that took place over the same period the previous year, according to government data provided by ICE, processed by the Deportation Data Project and analyzed by Bisnow.

As immigration enforcement has remained a part of daily life for many immigrant communities, so, too, have the far-reaching effects of these raids on their lives and livelihoods. 

“Investments that had been under consideration before June 2025 were deferred indefinitely as business owners focused on maintaining sufficient cash flow to remain in operation,” the UCLA report says.

Latino business owners who spoke to UCLA researchers said they had delayed expansion plans and consolidated locations as a result of changes to their businesses brought on by immigration enforcement in the summer of 2025, whether that’s growing debt or shrunken savings. Instead, many focused on just keeping the doors open. 

“The economic costs are far larger than what we illustrate in this report,” Vargas said. “Our number is really the floor, not the ceiling.”