Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers conducted sweeping raids on car wash operations across Los Angeles this week, targeting businesses that rely heavily on the city’s vast population of undocumented workers willing to work for below-market wages.
The enforcement actions are putting intense pressure on car wash owners to hire American workers at competitive wages or invest in labor-saving automated washing technology. The shift from manual labor to automation could reduce the burden on taxpayers who ultimately bear the costs of housing and supporting an illegal workforce paid substandard wages.
The left -wing prospect reported Some of the inspections:
Jasmine Delgado, a member of Westside Rapid Response, a community network that tries to send witnesses to ice workplace attacks while they occur, arrived at the car wash on Sunday, just when ice cream threw people in unparalleled vans. The only ones left after the raid were children of one of the workers who worked with their father on the spot. “It’s fast. They appear, grab people who can, and then leave,” she said. “They don’t want to make a scene, they don’t want to stay too long. And what I hear they try to make quotas.”
Witte borders progressives and manual trade unions increasingly contain illegal migrants and their market -treating employers. So the editor of the prospect describes the removal of black market work as a “catastrophe … for families, communities, the local economy and the structure of the city.”
Twitter offers Lots of videos from the operation and the closed car wash sites, and of people protesting Or blocking ice:
John Sandweg, who led ICE during the Obama administration, told The Washington Post that the agency is under unprecedented pressure to increase deportation numbers and is focusing on “low wages where you are probably that you will find people who do not have papers—that means car washes, parking spaces for Home Depot, wherever you have low, low-paid work.”
The strategy represents a shift toward targeting the economic incentives that draw illegal immigration rather than just border enforcement. By hitting businesses that rely on undocumented workers, ICE aims to eliminate the job magnet that encourages continued illegal border crossings.
ICE has conducted similar operations targeting car washes in Connecticut, Illinois, and Pennsylvania, suggesting a coordinated national strategy to disrupt industries dependent on exploitable migrant labor.
