LOS ANGELES — In the era of Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown, even the simple act of buying pan dulce can set nerves on edge. So it was when Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass stopped by an East LA bakery one morning only to find the doors shut and the people inside conspicuously ignoring her knocks on the window.
It wasn’t until she pressed the mayoral seal printed on her jacket against the glass that the owners welcomed her in.
She attributed their squeamishness to her official car, a hulking SUV with tinted windows — to many Angelenos, a symbol of surprise raids and menace.
“It makes me feel sad that now, in the city, people are afraid of certain cars,” Bass said in an interview Friday at El Chapulín, a Oaxacan restaurant in Boyle Heights, the historic heart of Latino Los Angeles.
For the second time in just six months, Bass is the face of a city under siege. Her flat-footed response to the devastating January wildfires fed into a sense that Los Angeles was at the mercy of a hostile Mother Nature. Now, the nation’s second-largest city is bracing against a different antagonist: the federal government.
The combustible early stages of Trump’s immigration dragnet — the mobilization of federal forces, the raucous protests that led to burning Waymos and nights with downtown under curfew — has subsided. Roughly half of the National Guard, summoned by the president to Los Angeles over the objection of Gov. Gavin Newsom, has begun demobilizing. A federal judge temporarily blocked Immigrations and Customs Enforcement from using “roving patrols” to arrest people without reasonable suspicion they are in the country illegally.
Still, Los Angeles remains in an uneasy state of high alert, anxious about the next salvo that many feel will inevitably come from a president who often fixates on California. The Trump administration is seeking to overturn the court order limiting enforcement raids. Grassroots rapid response networks on Signal and Nextdoor warn of ICE sightings. Viral videos circulate footage of surprise and at times violent raids; a major operation at a cannabis farm earlier this month in Ventura County to the north resulted in the death of a farmworker who fell from a greenhouse roof.
Last month, ICE arrested more than 2,000 people in seven counties across Southern California, according to the Los Angeles Times. The Trump administration touts arrests of people with prior convictions, though the paper reported the majority had no prior criminal history. Immigrants who are in the country legally, and even some U.S. citizens, have been swept up and detained in the operations.
“It’s so hard because you just don’t know what’s going to happen next,” said state Assemblymember Mark González, a Democrat who represents Boyle Heights and other Latino communities downtown. “It’s like a game of Whac-A-Mole.”
Just as the city has been perceptibly changed by Trump’s migrant clampdown, so has its mayor. Bass, who’s long operated as an understated consensus-builder, has assumed the role of combatant for her embattled hometown.
It is a risky calculus for a city still reeling from historically devastating January fires and relying on the federal government for money to speed its recovery. It is also, politically, a potential lifeline as Bass heads into a 2026 reelection campaign — a chance to leap out of her defensive crouch from the fires and rally her city around a common adversary.
Downtown clashes after the initial ICE raids in early June attracted national news cameras. Workplace raids continued for weeks afterward and fanned out across the state, but the ripple effects through Los Angeles and surrounding communities have been harder to convey — people afraid to go to work, a drop-off in foot traffic, fewer congregants in the pews.
“We don’t go out with family. It’s just work, home, work, home,” said Dulce María Caro, the manager of El Chapulín, relaying in Spanish how her routine has changed in recent weeks.
“It feels strange,” said José Francisco, whose sister owns the restaurant.
“Like we’re closed off,” Caro interjected and Francisco agreed. “Like a prisoner,” he said.
“And we feel ostracized,” Caro added.
During a visit to Bell, a roughly 90 percent Latino city in southeastern Los Angeles County, Newsom described streets and businesses turned into ghost towns. He told reporters one local business owner said the steep drop-off in customers was worse than in the Covid-era. Another woman, who got her citizenship after a 1986 law signed by President Ronald Reagan granted mass amnesty, said the sound of helicopters during ICE raids terrified her, rekindling her youthful fears of immigration enforcement.
“They feel like authoritarianism has already come to their community,” Newsom said of Latinos, who make up nearly half of the county’s population. “They’re not even walking the streets. We were there, not just in businesses that are empty, [but] entire shopping malls empty.”
The fear extends even to those who have ascended to the highest ranks of power in state government, like Fabián Núñez, the former speaker of the Assembly.
“We’re all thinking, ‘Oh my gosh, it’s not just the gardeners and the cleaning people,’” he said. “Everyone who’s Latino feels like we can’t leave our house without a passport.”
Nationally, Democrats have vacillated on how hard to push back on Trump’s immigration plans; the president ran on mass deportations, after all, and rode that issue in 2024 to his strongest electoral performance, particularly with Latinos.
But even in Los Angeles County, where Trump’s 30 percent vote share last year marked a notable shift rightward, the raids have been broadly unpopular.
“It’s gone much farther than what was originally couched as ‘We’ve got to get rid of dangerous criminals, cartels and gang members.’ It’s gotten very personal for a lot of folks — whether or not they’re Latino – and it’s also having a horrible economic impact,” said Sam Yebri, an attorney and president of Thrive LA, a centrist political group. “I know many Trump supporters who do not support the raids, so I think the number of people who were supportive of this is certainly a very small minority.”
Tricia McLaughlin, a spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security, contested reports that most people detained did not have a criminal record. She said the government’s operations have arrested “drug traffickers, MS-13 gang members, convicted rapists, convicted murderers — people you would not want to be your neighbors. And yet, Karen Bass, instead of thanking law enforcement, continues to demonize them and attack them.”
The fear permeating Latino life has added resonance for Bass; her late ex-husband was Mexican American and many family members, including her late daughter, her step-children and grandchildren, have Latino heritage.
“So yes, it impacts me personally, because I know that all Latinos are suspect now, anybody that looks Latino,” Bass said, pointing to border czar Tom Homan’s comments that “physical appearance” was sufficient for federal authorities to detain someone. He later said appearance could not be the sole reason for suspicion. But the federal judge who blocked the roving immigration raids in Los Angeles said officials were relying on improper factors, such as race, occupation and speaking with an accent, during their operations.
McLaughlin said it was a “convenient and disgusting smear to say that law enforcement targets based on skin color. It is about it is about legal status, that everything and criminality. That’s what we’re focused on.”
Beyond the family bonds, Bass said, leaning into immigrant rights is “fundamentally who I am” — a culmination of years of community activism, of anti-apartheid advocacy, of collaborations between Black and Latino communities in the 1980s and 1990s.
“It’s not because it’s politically in. It’s not because of some calculation of what happened in the first part of the year,” she said. “This is an issue that has been fundamental to me for my entire adult life.”
Loathe as Bass is to make comparisons to her handling of the fires, the contrast is notable, even to her closest allies. The mayor was hamstrung from the start of the blazes, when she was out of the country, and she failed to regain control of the narrative upon her return. This time, Bass has ramped up her media presence; during her brief stop at El Chapulín, she squeezed in two Zoom interviews with Spanish-language media, and she has been a regular staple on national cable.
“She is really trying to paint a different picture of what is going on here — not letting Breitbart and Fox tell the story,” said Courtni Pugh, a senior adviser for Bass’ political operation. “We really tried very hard to put a human face on the toll.”
When militarized federal agents, including officials on horseback, descended onto MacArthur Park in the heart of downtown in an intimidating though largely theatrical display, Bass rerouted from a ceremony marking the six-month anniversary of the fires to the scene, demanding to speak to whoever was in charge.
With her seafoam pantsuit and barely-veiled exasperation, she was derided by some as exuding an “I’d like to speak to the manager” energy. But to supporters, it was the type of in-your-face confrontation that hasn’t typically been Bass’ calling card but was apropos for a defender staring down an invading force.
“She wasn’t acting angry. She was angry,” said Mike Bonin, a former city councilmember who now serves as executive director of the Pat Brown Institute at Cal State Los Angeles. “When she was saying, ‘Get out of here,’ that was coming from deep down.”
Emiliana Guereca, founder of the Women’s March Foundation and a longtime Bass supporter, said, “We’re seeing a different side of her, a different side of leadership that is tougher than what we’re used to seeing from her.”
What qualifies as bombastic for Bass, however, is still relatively contained, especially compared to Trump’s ability to push boundaries and dominate the political conversation. Among some Angelenos, there’s a persistent desire for Bass to do more, to meet the president’s aggressive tactics with equal pugnacity.
“People want more from her, and I think that there’s an expectation around her being tougher,” Guereca said. “But just because she is not louder doesn’t mean she’s not tough.”
That’s unlikely to sway people like Gina Zapanta, a Los Angeles-based attorney who has used her significant social media presence to give tutorials on one’s rights against ICE raids. When it comes to Bass, she wonders, “Where’s the punch?”
“Basically, we just got a lot of press conferences of her expressing a lot of disbelief,” she said. “And we don’t need that. We get that. Tell us how you’re gonna lead.”
Zapanta said she does not envy the mayor’s position, recognizing there are limitations in what a mayor can do to stop federal immigration enforcement. Bass has sought additional aid for immigrants affected by the raids, including a cash assistance program funded by philanthropies. But the clamor for more underscores the tall task of achieving media saturation in a city as sprawling as Los Angeles.
“Your constituents who have voted you in … are expecting you to react right now, and if they’re telling you we don’t feel like you’re doing anything, well, you better work like hell to figure out how to address that,” Zapanta said. “Because if you are doing things, that needs to be communicated. So what’s the disconnect?”
There was little sign of that frustration among the customers in El Chapulín, who spontaneously burst into applause when she stepped into the restaurant, lined up for photos with Bass and showered her with a chorus of “gracias, Alcaldesa!” — thank you, Mayor — as Bass took her Sinaloa chicken to go.
While the mayor plays down any political upside she has garnered in this standoff with Trump, her allies are less circumspect. They say Bass has found her footing on a cause that feels second-nature to her and has been more willing to let the public see beyond her often-guarded exterior.
“Now you’re getting a front-row seat to Karen Bass — the full person, not just the one who smiles,” said Núñez, a longtime ally. “If there’s anything that could benefit her politically out of this, it’s that people are getting to see how she is as a leader … She’s figuring out a way to use the bully pulpit in a way that is showing the full breadth of who she is.”
Though Bass’ political fortunes looked moribund after the fires, she has not drawn any major reelection challenger. A GOP-led effort to recall her withered on the vine. And no local political figure has meaningfully countered her messaging when it comes to the immigration raids.
Rick Caruso, the billionaire developer who ran against Bass in 2022 and is mulling a run for mayor or governor next year, has struck substantively the same tone on immigration, calling the raids “cruel.”
Given the whipsaw year Los Angeles has already endured, predicting electoral implications can be a fool’s errand. The pullback of the National Guard could mean tensions in the city could soon deescalate. But few believe the immigration issue will quickly fade, not so long as Trump occupies the Oval Office.
“Here’s the problem,” Bass said. “We just don’t know.”