ICE raids forever changed the work of these gun violence prevention workers: ‘The panic is still there’

Violet Gallegos, Volunteers of America

Gallegos is a youth service and gang intervention worker for Volunteers of America, which runs extracurricular programs for local youth in South Los Angeles to steer them away from street life.

The ICE raids last summer were devastating. It really affected our work. We have kids that don’t even have papers, so they weren’t going to school. So that dream of them maybe going to college was out the window, and they’re living in fear. It’s slowed down now, but the panic is still there. There were some kids who didn’t want to come to our program [any more]. They were coming to change their lives here and transform. Now you’re taking them away from everything they know and then you’re isolating them. We’re really resilient people, but a community that builds in fear will always be on shaky ground, because they don’t feel secure.

How do you stop them from picking up guns? You stay visible. I live in the community so I get to hear everything that’s going on. I’m at a park and they constantly know that I’m nosy and I’m pulling up on them and I’m like, “Hey, what are you doing?” When they know that somebody cares, they’re more careful about what they’re carrying and what they’re doing.

The raids made us resilient, it taught us that we can’t just have kids come to our workshops. Right now I have a workshop for journaling and we’re teaching people how to put their emotions [on the page]. So if they can’t come to the workshop, let’s teach them how to journal at home. Now we’re teaching the kids: “How are you gonna deal with your anger? Are you going to go and fight, or are you gonna write down your emotions in a notebook and really reflect on what you’re thinking?”

I also started a workshop called “The Journey” where I’m training other people how to be leaders in their community. God showed me I can’t do everything by myself, so I have to train people who can be out there too. Even though federal immigration enforcement brought fear, we’re all struggling with the same thing together. It’s no longer like, “What block, what neighborhood you’re from.” They’re taking all our people. So I feel like it’s brought unity in a very weird way.

Guadalupe Serrano, Youth Alive

Serrano is the program manager for Caught in the Crossfire (CiC), Youth Alive’s hospital-based intervention program helping survivors of gun violence in Oakland.

We definitely saw a decrease in people going into the hospitals to treat their injuries or do follow-ups. We had clients who had to do surgeries to treat their wounds to avoid infections and stop treatment, which affected them later down the road. They’re doing a longer recovery with physical therapy and therapy sessions. When it came to enrolling new patients, they were very hesitant; the trust wasn’t there.

We had clients who would say, “Oh, I saw ICE roaming around the hospital or the parking lot.” We had conversations with the trauma social workers, our point of contact there [at the Highland hospital in Oakland], and they’ve been really good with the whole ICE situation. So I think it was just like more of the participants being scared.

Clients would also ask for legal advice. Even though we would try to advise them the best that we could, they would get frustrated or they would stop being responsive because they were not getting the answers they wanted to hear.

Salvador Marquez, Arise & Go

Marquez is a community violence intervention specialist serving LA’s Harbor Gateway area, which is home to a large Latin American immigrant population.

Intervention is being able to show the community that you’re here for them. There’s a lot of times that you don’t do much but just give someone a hug or sit there and cry with them for their loss or for their joy, and you notice that means a lot to people.

Summer Night Lights is a parks program that was designed for gang members. They said, “Let’s have the parks open from 6pm to midnight; we’ll have activities, we’ll have food.” They saw that it worked and it came here to Normandale Park in 2010. Everyone loved it, and everybody took pride in it because they would hire youth to do the activities and pass out the food to the community.

When the immigration [crackdown] started, the attendance started going down, and the people that were showing up were too fearful to sign in. When a program comes in, city staff always wanna see the outcome – how many people came, got fed, and how many people got serviced. We couldn’t show that [any more].

The city cut the funding for this park. Instead, we started barbecuing hamburgers every Thursday, we were bringing jumpers for the kids, and other activities. But the attendance just wasn’t there. People were not coming. People were too fearful.

I know that violence has gone down. Is it due to ICE, Covid, LAPD? Is it due to our work? We’re not sure, I think it’s a little bit of everything. We had our first murder out in the Harbor [area] a few months ago. One murder is one too many.

When somebody from the community sees a car that they don’t think belongs here, they start letting everybody know that ICE was here, that they took people, so now my job is to go out there and really find out if they did take somebody – it’s the same rumor control. Now, I have to adapt. How do I still pass out resources that I have and be able to bless these families without them feeling that they’re gonna get detained? I’ve had conversations with gang members, seeing them angry because it’s their grandmother, father, mother, older brothers or sisters that are at risk of getting deported.

If [community members] ask if I would go to the grocery store for them, then I will. That’s the only way that I could win their trust back. I think that’s a new thing that we started doing with our intervention work, at least in my community. I think it puts people at ease knowing that someone is there for them.