The footage had been rolling in for days: Home Depot parking lot sieges, guys at a car wash getting picked off mid-shift, a fruit seller clinging to the trunk of a tree while masked agents tried to haul her away. Then a 6 a.m. raid in Pasadena’s Villa Parke at the tamale stand behind the back ball field. A few hours later, a woman driving a Nissan Cube circled the park shouting into a megaphone: “Don’t come out! ICE in the area!” She repeated it in Spanish.
Over the summer, people were calling out sick and staying home. I heard of a mother drawing up new custody paperwork in case she and her husband were deported and their child was left alone. A woman I met at Villa Parke, a teacher in Los Angeles Unified School District’s online program, said that the numbers of online students had ballooned since January. “If this keeps up, classrooms are going to be empty in the fall,” she said. On October 14, the Los Angeles County supervisors declared a state of emergency because of the ongoing federal immigration sweeps. The declaration intends to allocate funds for rent relief and legal services for families affected by the ongoing raids.
Locals galvanized, too. In June, a couple of days after the No Kings protest, Ana (whose name has been changed to protect her identity), a community leader with a strong network of public advocates, assembled a small team of women, including friends and fellow moms, to provide groceries to families staying home out of fear of being detained. Volunteers purchase a couple of weeks’ worth of food for families, using personal funds or independently soliciting donations to cover the bill.
There’s no contact between the shoppers and the intended families. Instead, Ana hands off the grocery haul to several liaisons, who then deliver bags to homes. Her husband says to me, “We watched The Wire. We know the buyers never meet the suppliers.”
On the day of the first drop, Ana facilitated a meetup at an elementary school under a canopy of California pepper trees in an affluent neighborhood. The small group of shoppers delivered their groceries during specific time windows so the milk and meat wouldn’t spoil. When the shoppers arrived, Ana and volunteers used painter’s tape to label bags for each family.
We piled the corn tortillas, pasta sauce, eggs, milk, juice, fruit, jalapeños, tomatoes, onions, potatoes, carrots, cucumbers, bread, meat, and cheese into the back of Ana’s SUV. She always packs something for the children, like juice or cereal. “Maybe we need antianxiety meds for the families, too,” she jokes.
The shoppers wore sweats, cutoffs, or linen pants. One had traveled from a multistory Spanish-style home where she had spent a long summer parenting her neurodivergent child, who refused to wear clothes or leave the house. Another was a social worker who’d recently sat bedside at a hospital with a dying man who had no next of kin. A third worked full-time and juggled parenting her four boys, including a set of twins. Car after car lined up at the drop-off location, labeled their bags, loaded them into the SUV, and then returned to their lives.
I later texted Ana to coordinate a future drop-off but had to postpone because my son had broken his leg and was recovering from surgery. “We can talk on the phone if you want,” she texted me. “But [your son] needs attention now. Remember it’s a marathon.”
The next operation was going to be massive. Ana had taken on many more families, including an entire apartment building where two tenants had been taken by ICE on their way home from work, leaving behind their teenage child and rattled neighbors. The location for this mission’s grocery drop-off was in the back parking lot off a main street lined with bars, sushi restaurants, and stores selling homemade dog treats. My husband and I delivered 75 gallons of milk in two carloads. Another friend hiked up my steep driveway five times to hand off loads of onions, potatoes, carrots, and bananas before she boarded a plane. Ana and her volunteers spent the entire day sorting food.
Ana and I planned to do all the shopping for the third drop ourselves. Ana says she’s finding a cadence, scheduling shopping runs every three or so weeks, a rhythm that she and her volunteers could sustain over time. We navigated the aisles at Super King pushing one cart each and pulling a third behind us. We were buying for eight families that day. Ana didn’t have on her usual red lipstick, but she still looked beautiful, exhausted, focused. We slowed the line with our full carts and the extra time we took sorting the piles into bags. The checkout clerk smiled at us, and then rolled her eyes. But the store manager closed the lane and helped us sort.
We drove to a duplex where one of Ana’s liaisons lived. There were large Rubbermaid bins in the front yard. I pulled over on the busy street and pressed on the hazard lights, and we unloaded the food—honeydew melons, limes, packages of cookies, corn, and tomatoes. The contact’s screen door slammed behind her as she walked to join us near my open hatchback. She had dark straightened hair and wore a tank top and stonewashed jeans. As she cradled melons in her arms, we laughed hoping they didn’t fall and split open on the sidewalk. Her husband came out to help, and we all filled the bins with the food. Then we quickly hugged before she got to work, trying to get food to our neighbors before the workweek began again.•
Kim Young is the author of the poetry collections Night Radio and Tigers and is at work on a book based on her friendship with Lee McCarthy.
