In New Orleans, immigrants are staying home and hiding out as city braces for Border Patrol operation
By Zoe Sottile, CNN
(CNN) — In New Orleans, people are used to having their resilience tested.
There was Hurricane Katrina, the BP oil spill, a major hotel collapse, a vicious early pandemic surge and a terror attack during the 2025 New Year’s celebrations.
Now immigrants and organizers say they’re preparing for what feels like may be another disaster heading for their community: Top Border Patrol official Gregory Bovino and roughly 250 federal agents are expected to launch an immigration enforcement operation in the city starting the first week of December, according to two sources familiar with the planning. Advocates and residents told CNN they’re preparing a bit like they would for one of the hurricanes that have ravaged the sinking city.
“The immigrant community is feeling absolute panic and terrified,” Rachel Taber, a volunteer with Unión Migrante, an immigrant-led advocacy group, said. “People are treating it like a hurricane as much as they can, buying groceries, staying in the house, planning not to be able to go to work.”
The 307-year-old city, a blue enclave in a Republican-led state, will be the latest target of the Department of Homeland Security’s operations, according to those two sources, part of the president’s pledge to enact mass deportations of undocumented immigrants.
In response to questions from CNN about the operation, DHS sent a statement from Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin: “For the safety and security of law enforcement, we’re not going to telegraph potential operations.”
Operations in other cities have featured the armed, masked federal agents and unmarked vehicles that have become a hallmark of immigration enforcement under the second Trump administration. The agents have also been criticized over their use of force against both US citizens and non-citizens, including shootings, tear gas and flash bangs.
About 23,400 immigrants make the Cresent City their home — roughly 6.5% of the total population, according to data from the US Census. Over half of those are non-citizens.
Around half of New Orleans’ immigrant population is from Latin America, according to Census data. And immigrants’ share of the population is smaller than in other cities where Bovino has led arrests.
But organizers and immigrant workers told CNN they’re the backbone of the city, helping maintain the service industry that welcomes millions of visitors each year. They cook the Creole and Cajun food that makes the city a culinary destination, and they clean the hotel rooms that host tourists visiting for Mardi Gras.
Immigrants also played a crucial role in the reconstruction of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina left 80% of the city underwater in 2005. Around half of the reconstruction workforce after the hurricane were Latino and a quarter were undocumented immigrants, primarily from Mexico and Honduras, a study from the University of California, Berkeley Human Rights Center found. Today, the city’s Hispanic population is twice what it was before Katrina.
Now some of the city’s immigrant workers feel afraid they too will be caught up in the Trump administration’s sprawling deportation campaign.
‘People are scared and they’re hiding’
At Tia Maria’s Kitchen, Jose Almendares strives to make authentic Honduran food the way his mother taught him: Baleadas made from handmade tortillas filled with beans, cheese, crema and avocado; fried sweet plantains; and pastelitos stuffed with fragrant meat and potatoes.
It’s made his restaurant a nexus for the local Latino community.
But in the past week, they’ve been short-staffed as employees say they’re scared to come to work with rumors of Border Patrol in town. On Saturday, which would usually be bustling, Almendares had to close early because there weren’t enough staff to cover the evening shift. He’s trying his best to make up the difference himself, working extra hours to fill the gaps in staffing.
For immigrants in the city, there’s “a lot of anxiety and uncertainty, because you’ve seen what’s going on in other cities,” he said. “And a lot of people are scared and they’re hiding.” He’s given his crew informal trainings on what to do if they’re stopped by federal agents, teaching them about their Fifth Amendment rights and urging them to always call a lawyer if needed.
The tension is personal for Almendares: He’s a Honduran immigrant who is protected by the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, known as DACA. “I’m choosing not to live fearful or scared, I know my rights,” he said.
Dropping revenue and understaffing
Ingrid Ferguson, who owns five grocery stores with a focus on Central American products in New Orleans, says she and her family have had to pick up extra shifts because their immigrant employees are scared to come to work — even those with work permits.
Daily revenue has dropped by almost half in the last week, she said, a change she attributed to lower foot traffic as Latinos in the city — the core of her customer base — are hunkering down at home. She’s started offering free delivery, her way of “trying to do what we can do.”
She’s considering temporarily closing all but one store next week if the staffing problem continues — a devastating step for the business she spent nine years building.
“Every single day I’ve been working so hard to get to this point,” she said. “To close the doors — it’s going to be very, very hard.”
Ferguson, a naturalized US citizen who has spent over 20 years in the country, says the Trump administration’s aggressive approach to immigration enforcement has made her consider returning to Honduras for the first time.
Coming to the US and building a flourishing business to support her family, “I realized my American dream,” she said. But now, “we don’t feel safe and don’t feel good anymore to be here … We want to, you know, not feel that they’re gonna come and catch me when I open my door.”
And the Mexico-born owner of a construction company, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, citing worries she or her family could be targeted by DHS, told CNN several of her contracts are effectively paralyzed as the immigrant employees she usually works with are frightened to report to work.
“Obviously the people are so scared,” she said. And as a Spanish-speaking “brown” immigrant herself, even though she has legal status, she’s worried she’ll be targeted.
Her company focuses on stucco and plaster, she said, which requires specialized workers, many of whom have been honing their skills for years. It’s impossible to replace them on short notice.
Lindsey Navarro, the founder and executive director of El Centro, a nonprofit that helps members of New Orleans’ Latino community open businesses, said she expects the restaurant and hospitality sectors to be most affected by staffing shortages ahead of the upcoming operation.
“People are really buckling down, and they’re just not willing to risk deportation,” she said.
A city ‘very accustomed to the federal government abandoning it’
At the same time, Navarro said she’s been heartened by an upswell of activism as the city braces for the operation. Residents are learning from the strategies used in Chicago and Charlotte, North Carolina, where locals mobilized other community members, training them on how to respond if they observe immigration enforcement actions.
There’s “this willingness and want to fight for the rights” of immigrants, she said.
She’s helped hand out whistle kits — which activists in other cities have used to report sightings of immigration officers — and signs for business owners to designate certain areas employees-only. So far, volunteers have distributed over 1,500 whistle kits, which include whistles, instructions, and “Know Your Rights” cards, according to Mich Gonzalez, a founding member of the Southeast Dignity Not Detention coalition, an immigrants’ advocacy group.
Taber, the organizer with Unión Migrante, said the organization hosted free immigration consultations with lawyers and helped people sign power of attorney letters and custody forms in case parents are separated from their children. Organizers helped immigrant parents of US citizen children apply for passports for their children, too, in case they need to travel to be reunited.
Gonzalez told CNN, “This city is filled with people who have deep culture, deep roots in organizing.”
Immigrants “are an integrated part of this city, absolutely, and most people right now are thinking about how to support them, how to help them,” he said. He added the distrust in the government left after its botched response to Hurricane Katrina has created a culture where residents look out for each other. Federal aid took days to arrive as tens of thousands of people were stranded without food or water in the aftermath of the storm.
“This is a city that is very accustomed to the federal government abandoning it when its people need it the most,” he said.
Cities are targeted based on ‘leadership team’ and ‘intelligence,’ Bovino says
New Orleans has been on the administration’s radar for months, with President Donald Trump floating the idea of sending in the National Guard in September. A Border Patrol operation there would follow Charlotte as the latest Democratic-led city in a Republican-led state where Bovino has led targeted, intense immigration enforcement efforts.
CNN asked Bovino last month how he chooses the destinations for his crackdowns.
“We’ve got a great leadership team that we work for that we look to for leadership and that would be President Trump, (Homeland Security Secretary) Kristi Noem, and all of those folks,” he said. “We pay attention to what they say, and we pay attention to what our intelligence says. We marry those up, and we hit it hard.”
The Crescent City and surrounding region is familiar territory for Bovino, who led the Border Patrol’s New Orleans Sector during Trump’s first term. The sector includes hundreds of miles of Gulf Coast across half a dozen states.
The city’s mayor-elect Helena Moreno, a Democrat born in Mexico, told CNN affiliate WWL she’s watching closely as the operation looms even as she’s received little information from federal officials.
“You have parents who are scared to send their children to school,” said Moreno. “At my church,” she said, “there is a one o’clock service, Spanish-speaking service every Sunday, that keeps getting smaller and smaller. People are really, really scared.”
Her office has released guidelines for interacting with immigration enforcement agents.
Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry, a Republican, has encouraged stronger immigration enforcement activity in the state and city.
“New Orleans is a place under which we’ve had illegal criminal activity, alien activity,” he said in an interview on Fox News last week.
Speaking about Kenner, a New Orleans suburb, he added, “when ICE is ready, we certainly welcome them to come into the city and be able to start taking some of these dangerous criminal illegal aliens off of our streets.”
Marco Balducci, a New Orleans-based immigration attorney, said that the operation “isn’t about public safety.”
“They keep invoking public safety,” he said. “But I think that it’s a pretext. If this were about public safety, then you would use criminal law enforcement.”
In the first quarter of 2025, the city saw a 20% decrease in violent crime over the same time period in 2024, according to the New Orleans Police Department.
Balducci said the anxiety is palpable among his clients. “We have a lot of experience down here preparing for natural disasters, and it kind of feels like that, but it’s different in that it’s like actually a siege,” he said.
Navarro, the executive director of El Centro, said the fear of arrest or deportation was especially powerful for immigrants who came to the US fleeing persecution or violence in their home countries.
Many Latino immigrants to the city “come here with the belief and trust that this is a place where what they endured in their countries won’t happen again,” she said. “And so for that to be happening again to them, it’s so disappointing.”
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CNN’s Karina Tsui, Dianne Gallagher, Priscilla Alvarez, Taylor Romine, Chris Boyette, and Michelle Krupa contributed to this report.
