“We’re in survival mode” after Fashion District raids

ICE raids – A year after federal immigration raids rattled Los Angeles’ Fashion District, Joel Galvez and Leonor Torres say their quinceañera and prom dress businesses still haven’t recovered. With debt rising, rent due, staff cut back, and thieves breaking into their sho

On a recent Saturday morning in the Los Angeles Fashion District, Joel Galvez opened a spiral notebook and wrote the date—and a prayer.

“Dios bendiga este día. Amen.”

The same prayer appears on every page. So does a running log of what he sold at one of the clothing stores he owns—dresses he figures he can still move when the world feels determined to slow everything down. In years past, he would note dozens sold. A year ago. the Trump administration targeted the shopping district as part of a mass immigration crackdown. and the numbers stopped behaving like they used to.

Federal immigration agents targeted at least one business in the Fashion District, arresting more than 40 immigrant workers and triggering civil unrest as they carried out sweeps across Southern California. For Joel and the family businesses he co-owns, the effect was immediate.

The stores sell dresses for proms. special occasions and quinceañeras. a Latin American rite of passage marking a young girl’s 15th birthday and her transition to adulthood. Before the raids, weekend foot traffic was steady—packed Saturdays filled with girls and doting mothers choosing gowns. Afterward, the quinceañera shops often sat empty. Customers called to cancel ball gown orders.

Joel, 41, owns two stores that cater to women. His wife, Leonor Torres, 56, has a shop that specializes in quinceañera dresses and, with Joel, co-owns a second quinceañera shop. Once, their Saturdays were their busiest days: each store would sell 50 dresses or more. Now, they might sell 10 each.

Leonor said she went from selling 20 dresses a week to around three—maybe more on good days.

The shock radiated outward to other small businesses orbiting quinceañeras: makers of embossed invitations. sellers of tiaras and crowns. choreographers. caterers. florists and more. Leonor said her sister and brother. who co-own a banquet hall in the city of Commerce. soon lost a year’s worth of bookings. Along with his men’s store, her brother also owns a limousine business, which also saw cancellations.

“It’s been a real struggle,” Joel said.

The timing also hit them while they were building something new. A month before the June raids, Joel and Leonor opened their second quinceañera shop. Their monthly rent hovers around $11,000.

As the couple tried to keep the lights on, the debt they say they carried shifted sharply—from $20,000 to about $150,000.

On another recent Saturday, Leonor described the grind while closing up after another slow day. Rent was soon due, and she said they could afford only a partial payment.

“I don’t want to stress too much,” Leonor said. “Six months without sales. It drains you.”

Then, even the stores they could still open were getting hit.

Weeks earlier, thieves broke into Leonor’s store at night, stealing about $8,000 in cash that included the store’s monthly $5,500 rent. Leonor said the situation left them with no margin.

“We’re in survival mode,” she said. “If we can sell enough to pay rent, I’ll be happy.”

The stress, the couple said, isn’t only economic. It threatens to pull at family life—turning long hours of uncertainty into arguments, silences, and worry that doesn’t end when the doors shut.

Joel had a life planned long before the Fashion District became his livelihood. He was born into a middle-class family in El Salvador and attended a school that emphasized discipline. He said he planned to attend the University of El Salvador and study electrical engineering.

But in the 1990s. under the Clinton administration. the United States began deporting a record number of Salvadorans back to a country still reeling from its bloody civil war. which claimed an estimated 75. 000 lives. if not more. Joel said many deportees were convicted criminals and members of Mara Salvatrucha. or MS-13. a gang Salvadoran refugees had formed in response to the violence they faced from street gangs in Los Angeles.

He described the gang’s reach as something that didn’t stop at the people who already lived in fear. Joel said gang members used death threats to force young people to join.

“If you don’t join us, then you’re a rival, and we’ll have to kill you,” they told him.

Joel refused, putting his life at risk. His mother, fearing for her youngest son, pleaded with him to flee the country.

“I don’t want to bury you,” he recalled her saying.

His sister was already living in the United States, and at her insistence he entered the country illegally in November 2005, settling in Los Angeles. Joel found work as a dishwasher at an Indian restaurant in Beverly Hills. Almost immediately, he said he wanted to become a cook.

He studied an Indian cuisine book he bought in MacArthur Park and pushed himself into the kitchen, cooking orders before he was shooed away. He said he didn’t stop.

“Little by little, they let me stay in the kitchen longer and longer,” Joel said. “It got to the point that they were calling me in to help cook on busy days.”

In March 2016, when the owners closed the restaurant, Joel decided to treat the shutdown as an opening. Working in Beverly Hills shaped what he imagined for himself, he said—like the homeowners on Hillcrest Road.

He resolved to open a business, to be his own boss.

One day he wandered into the Fashion District and ran into a childhood friend who told him there was money to be made selling dresses. Joel said he used $25,000 he’d saved as a cook to open Galvez Fashion. When he looked back, he said he was mostly breaking even and barely had enough money for food. At lunch, he said, he could afford only corn on a stick.

“I would devour them,” he said.

Across the street, Leonor watched with amusement.

“He was eating it like, ‘Wow, this is the best corn I ever had,’” Leonor said, laughing. “Little did I know that this dude was hungry.”

Leonor said she learned the man she saw eating corn was also from El Salvador. One day he crossed the street and they began talking. Leonor and her staff offered to help him; if someone bought a quinceañera dress at her store, she said they’d point mothers toward his store for gowns.

Leonor’s own path to quinceañeras began by accident.

She said she had been serving as a case manager for disabled students for the Montebello Unified School District when she was let go due to budget cuts. She was 25. Her brother opened a quinceañera shop in East Los Angeles and told her it was hers to operate. Leonor moved the store to downtown Los Angeles, then the Fashion District, where she’s been for 11 years.

When Joel and Leonor later married, she said their businesses grew as their relationship grew. Then came COVID-19. She credited rent forgiveness and government help with helping their businesses survive, and she said when the pandemic abated, business began to pick up.

Then came President Trump.

The couple said they were unfazed by Trump’s promise to carry out mass deportations. They believed the policy would target only immigrants with criminal convictions.

Then came June 6, the raids Joel and Leonor described as the start of a new kind of uncertainty.

One raid unfolded a few blocks from their stores. Customers stopped coming.

“It was dead here,” Joel recalled. “That’s when our struggle began.”

For months before that. he said federal immigration agents had been conducting rolling patrols targeting mostly Latinos. regardless of their immigration status. Leonor and Joel described detentions of immigrants and U.S.-born Latinos on the street. at work sites. swap meets and parking lots of Home Depot.

Joel feared he could be detained and deported even though he said he had a pending immigration case as he sought to obtain a green card. He described the fear as tied to questions that could trap him.

“I didn’t want to go out,” he said. “The fear was that if they stop me, they’ll ask if I’m a U.S. citizen and my answer is going to be no and they’re going to take me, rather than listen to me about my pending case.”

They changed their routines. Joel said they stopped eating out and ended their monthly trips to the Morongo Casino. If Joel needed to run to Home Depot or fill his car with gas, he said he went at night—when it seemed raids weren’t going on.

Leonor said she considered whether to carry documentation even though she is a U.S. citizen.

As sales slumped, they said they fell behind on rent and cut staff by half, from four to two in some cases.

The financial strain, they said, added pressure to their relationship. They described small arguments about how to improve sales—followed by moments of silence and private worry.

Leonor said sometimes she went to her mother’s house to avoid arguing, especially when Joel would sit in silence, thinking. Joel said that when he’s alone, it’s hard.

“Sometimes when I’m alone, I cry,” he said. “But you have to keep faith.”

He told himself the raids would end.

“Everything is going to be OK, these moments don’t last forever,” he said.

Leonor agreed.

“We’ve been through a lot, but we survived,” she said. “I can’t give up.”

The couple said the raids eased after federal immigration agents killed Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minnesota. They said those deaths sparked nationwide protests and contributed to the removal of Kristi Noem as secretary of Homeland Security. and the removal of Greg Bovino. then-commander at large of U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

But the relief didn’t last.

Joel and Leonor said federal immigration agents returned to the Fashion District afterward. They said no one appeared to have been taken, but the presence drove off customers again.

They said they were recovering from that scare when. a few weeks ago. Trump’s border advisor Tom Homan announced another wave of mass deportations. They said they were also dismayed and confused by the news that green card applicants would possibly have to leave the country. They pointed out the announcement came as prom season was underway.

Business hasn’t returned to pre-raid levels, but on that Saturday morning in late prom season, Leonor and Joel said they saw movement. Cumbia music played in the background as customers arrived.

By 2 p.m., Leonor said she had sold five quinceañera dresses. Joel said he had 10 dress orders. One order was for six dresses for a quinceañera, and the rest for prom and a wedding. By the end of the day, Joel said he would sell 10 more orders and about 15 at his second store.

Inside Leonor’s shop, surrounded by pastel ball gowns decorated with lace and rhinestones, she said she felt optimistic.

“I know I’m going to make it,” she said. “I know I’m going to survive and at the end of the month, I’ll have money for bread.”

On the wall and in the notebook, the prayers remain.

“Dios bendiga este día.”

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