With ICE crackdown looming, New Orleans activists prepare to resist

Whenever someone asks me what New Orleans is like, I usually confirm that what they’ve heard about the vibe and energy of the city is true. Despite the vast social inequity, class division and histories of racial disharmony that have attempted to fragment it, New Orleans by and large is a neighborly city. It’s a community where being offered a hot plate of food from a stranger or sharing laughter with someone you just met on a parade route is so common that it’s unremarkable.

The history of New Orleans cannot be separated from the history of Latin America. For example, so many people from Honduras call the New Orleans area home that the metro area’s Honduran population has at times been second only to Tegucigalpa’s.  Twenty years ago, during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, Latino construction workers helped drive the rebuilding of New Orleans. In “Rebuilding After Katrina: A Population-Based Study of Labor and Human Rights in New Orleans,” researchers Eric Stover, Laurel E. Fletcher, Phuong Pham and Patrick Vinck found that “Latinos comprise nearly half (45%) of the reconstruction workforce in New Orleans.” In that, they were a bigger share of the people rebuilding New Orleans than were white people (28%) and Black people (24%). In 2025, those from Spanish-speaking countries who live in New Orleans aren’t visitors; they’re family and friends.

The history of New Orleans cannot be separated from the history of Latin America.

“This is an absolutely terrifying time,” Sue Weishar, a former policy and research fellow at Loyola University New Orleans’ Jesuit Social Research Institute, told a New Orleans television station. She rightly described federal immigration agents as being brought in “to terrorize community members, the same community members who were the workforce that saved New Orleans after Katrina.”

Emerging from the city’s  neighborliness is a resistance to the presence of federal agents who have begun staging in New Orleans and are looking to carry out the administration’s deportation plans after similarly fascistic operations in Chicago, Los Angeles, Memphis and Charlotte. New Orleanians across racial, cultural and ethnic backgrounds are declaring their refusal to lose their neighbors to what the Trump administration is insultingly calling Operation “Swamp Sweep.” The ramped-up deportation drive, welcomed by Louisiana’s MAGA governor, Jeff Landry, is expected to last up to two months.

“We were doing last-minute power of attorney letters, which is a really heavy and awful thing that a lot of immigrant families are having to do,” said Rachel Tabor, a volunteer activist with Unión Migrante, a local nonprofit fighting for immigration reform and providing training for  immigrant communities. “We were helping people get passports for their U.S.-born kids and fill out that paperwork, helping them talk to immigration attorneys so that they know if they were to get arrested, would they fight their case from within detention or would they be deported, because unfortunately, they’re giving immigration bonds to almost no one in Louisiana these days.”

“We’ve been hosting organizing meetings because it’s so important to bring more people into the struggle right now,” Cecilia Paz, an organizer with the Louisiana Party for Socialism and Liberation, told me. “We have to unite all people of conscience to stand boldly against this crackdown.”

Such organizing has not come without cost. For instance, Alfredo Salazar, an organizer with Unión Migrante, told me he was beaten and had his retinas forcibly scanned even before the federal presence ramps up.  A U.S. citizen, Salazar told me, he was eventually released from detainment. His “crime,” he said, was refusing to tell a federal agent where he was born.

Other cities that have been occupied by federal immigration officials have served as a blueprint and an inspiration for New Orleans organizers who believe they have a good idea of what to expect and how to resist.

Some New Orleanians are doing their immigrant neighbors’ grocery shopping to help them avoid potential encounters with ICE.

As some activists are helping immigrant families get their paperwork in order and others are conducting trainings, some New Orleanians are simply doing their immigrant neighbors’ grocery shopping for them to help them avoid potential encounters with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE. Tabor, who mentioned “traumatized children” terrified that ICE is coming for them or their parents, said some schools have been organizing carpool shares to minimize risk for parents fearful of being in public.

“We’ve got a lot of allies and a lot of people who are enthused to help out. So it’s in line with what we know about New Orleans. It’s diverse, it’s multicultural, and I think that’s something we’re going to be counting on in these next two months,” Unión Migrante organizer Rafael Delgadillo told me. “I think we’re preparing for the worst, which is why you’re seeing so many people fill out those power of attorney forms. But I’m counting on our vigilance. It’s going to get ugly here, but we’ve got to keep our hopes up.”

New Orleans advocates are meeting the challenges of these times with both vigilance and care, characteristics needed to survive the grim circumstances they have been presented with.

“Every time we see ICE activity, we’re filming it anonymously and spreading the word,” New Orleans hip-hop artist and social justice advocate Alfred Banks said. “We’re warning people — if you don’t hear from me randomly, you should be afraid something happened.”

In 2017, when ICE was threatening to deport a man from El Salvador who had applied to stay in New Orleans as his daughters received necessary medical attention, First Grace United Methodist Church gave him sanctuary inside its church building and allowed him to stay there for 222 days until officials relented. The church had a message on its marquee that spoke to the city’s solidarity with the father that is still resonant today: #JOSEISMYNEIGHBOR.