‘You Can’t Trust Anyone’: In Oakland, Fear of ICE Raids Grips Day Laborers

Weekdays at the Walgreens parking lot in Fruitvale have grown eerily quiet.

On a typical morning months ago, upwards of 60 men in work boots and dark hoodies would have been gathered around light poles and pop-up food stands in the large lot, chatting and drinking coffee out of paper cups. But on a recent gloomy Friday, only about a dozen day laborers milled about, hoping to find work.

“I think people are starting to feel it. I’m scared,” a man in a black hooded sweatshirt, leaning against the Oakland drugstore building, said in Spanish. “It’s not like last year. Right now, I’m just scared. You can’t trust anyone anymore.”

He and other workers who spoke with KQED anonymously, fearing identification by immigration officials, said the number of day laborers gathering there has dwindled in recent months as the immigration raids sweeping through Southern and Central California stoke a foreboding feeling that they’ll hit the Bay Area next.

Since President Donald Trump took office with a campaign pledge to carry out mass deportations of undocumented immigrants, Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s daily arrest targets have swelled as its operations pick up significantly across California. And there’s little sign of a slowdown — in July, Congress granted ICE an additional $75 billion over the next four years to hire more officers and expand detention capacity, making it the largest law enforcement agency in the country.

Raids have shaken gas stations, farms and hardware stores across the state, and ICE officers have taken to arresting people outside immigration courts and local immigration offices where they’re summoned for check-ins on their asylum cases — a tactic previously unheard of by immigrant advocates.

On Tuesday, officials detained six people, including a teenager and a young adult with Down syndrome, after raiding a house in East Oakland.

Outside the Walgreens in Oakland, the man in the black hoodie said he’s been watching this unfold on the news. Though he is increasingly wary of the risk it puts him in, he still comes here most days because he needs the work.

Now, he said, he stays more alert and regularly checks his phone for any warning of ICE activity.

He recounted what he’s been told to do if ICE officers appear: “They say, ‘Don’t talk, don’t say anything. If they stop you, if they detain you, you’re never going to say anything. If they take you to the immigration, never say if you have papers. You will never speak and that’s it.’”

The man said he knows his rights and carries a red wallet-sized card that says in both English and Spanish that he does not want to answer questions, speak with immigration officials or hand over any documentation. But he also relies on faith to keep him safe.

“I know that I have faith in God and I ask God and I am sure that if God tells me that it is my time, then it is my time, my destiny,” he said.

‘A chilling effect’

That morning, a team of outreach workers with Street Level Health Project, an Oakland nonprofit that serves undocumented immigrants and is part of Alameda County’s Rapid Response Network, also headed out of their Fruitvale office onto deserted roads.

The team regularly checks in with day laborers at the Walgreens store on Foothill Boulevard. While walking there, executive director Gabriela Galicia told KQED that Street Level has had fewer clients coming in over the past few weeks, and she’s seeing fewer people on the streets and in stores in the neighborhood.

“It’s definitely apparent that there is a chilling effect,” she said.

Although Galicia said Street Level saw an increase in weekly clients during the first few months of the Trump administration, she believes some are now worried the office itself could be a target for immigration officers.

“We’ve received community members that have stated very upfront that they are scared to sometimes leave the house, go to work, do their normal activities in the neighborhood or take their kids to summer programming,” she said.

One laborer outside Walgreens told KQED he’s drastically reduced how much time he spends out of the house, leaving virtually only to work at this point.

“I don’t think there’s a way to protect yourself,” he said. “What you can do is avoid going out a lot, and only go out to the [day laborer] stops out of necessity.”

He’s also altered his work routine. On days he might have once stood around on Foothill through the afternoon, he now waits just a few hours in the morning to see if a truck rolls into the lot with a job.

“You only come out here for a bit because there’s no other way, and after that, you get exhausted,” he said. “Before, with more confidence, people stayed longer. You felt more free.”

Struggling to find work

Laborers said even as their numbers drop, work is becoming harder to find.

Potential employers “don’t come” any longer, one told KQED in Spanish. “Some say they are afraid. They are afraid of coming to hire people.”

Workers said there have been weeks when they’ve found work for only a few days. Other weeks, there’s been none at all.

Multiple day laborers told KQED that they used to work for companies but were recently let go or had their hours cut short. One works for an electrical company where he’s promised 25 hours of work a week.

But he said he’s only been getting about five hours consistently, and he has had to supplement his income by picking up more one-off jobs.

“The company also went down and has less staff and is letting people go,” he said. “We don’t know the motive.”

Federal immigration law bars employers from hiring people who are not authorized to work in the U.S. Historically, the government has rarely targeted companies or people who do hire these workers, but it’s possible that they could face prosecution, fines and even jail time.

Although some employees at Street Level believe the labor downturn could be a regular summer slump, the nonprofit’s employment advocate, Steve Robles Ramirez, doesn’t anticipate work picking back up in the fall. If it does, he said, Street Level will be focused on trying to help protect immigrant laborers from the new reality they face under the Trump administration.

“We’ve heard from a lot of day laborers that they fear that a lot of bosses now can freely be comfortable with their bigotry and their racism,” he told KQED. “I think this has become normalized, unfortunately. The people who are employing our day laborers already have that power over them, which could just lead to a lot of exploitation.

“While this isn’t new … I think it’s been amplified to another level, to where it’s a real crisis,” he said.

KQED’s Gina Castro contributed to this report.