As ICE Raids Continue, CIELO Connects Indigenous Residents to Friends, Food and Familiar Cultures
The young mother with a four-month-old baby strapped on her back has not been able to afford any meat for her family of four for weeks. That’s because her husband is too fearful to leave his home every day for his restaurant job after federal immigration agents launched raids in Los Angeles in June, instilling widespread terror in the community.
Since then, the family’s weekly income has plunged by nearly half, to about $400 a week. They no longer go out to eat. The mother, Andrea, said she is too scared to go grocery shopping – and their anxiety has deepened since her husband’s friend was detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents.
“We try to ration what we get,” Andrea said in her native language of K’iche’, a Mayan language popularly spoken in the western highlands of Guatemala. “We’ve really been affected.”
But on a recent afternoon, Andrea received a box of food – stuffed with fresh produce and a big bag of chicken – at a safe space she and other Indigenous people in Los Angeles have come to rely on: Comunidades Indígenas en Liderazgo (CIELO). The nonprofit, supported by grants from the California Community Foundation, works with Indigenous communities to fight for language rights, cultural preservation, access to food and other essentials.
As ICE raids sow fear and depression throughout communities, CIELO has met the moment with home deliveries of food, online mental health workshops and social gatherings to bring solace and sustenance to Indigenous residents – many of whom already struggle with isolation. Indigenous immigrants in L.A. County speak 37 or so different languages and aren’t necessarily fluent in English or Spanish.
A grant from the CCF Los Angeles Neighbors Support Fund assists CIELO’s weekly distribution of food, which is provided by Food Forward and the World Harvest Food Bank, along with other acute needs that the immigration raids have exacerbated.
“There’s always this constant fear people have that immigration is just on the block or they’re coming,” said Janet Martinez, who co-founded CIELO with her mother, Odilia Romero, in 2016. “There’s a deep sense of insecurity in the city because of the terror that we’ve been living through.”
Now CIELO members are facing another crisis – along with millions of other Americans who need help finding enough food to eat. Access to food stamps is set to shut off on Nov. 1 due to the government shutdown, deepening hunger for families across the community.
“We are bracing for the worst,” Romero said.
She said many Indigenous community members, however, have not signed up for food stamps even if legally entitled to them because they don’t want any record of them taking government benefits – which could label them as a “public charge” that would diminish their chances for a green card. Even so, CIELO is already seeing longer lines for its food boxes among not only Indigenous community members but also neighbors of other backgrounds as well.
The ever-present anxieties were demonstrated during a recent food distribution day, when word spread that ICE agents had detained someone not far from the CIELO center in South Los Angeles. Volunteers shepherded the line of people waiting for their food boxes inside the fence for safety.
“Shall we patrol the neighborhood?” Romero asked.
“No, we have to stand our ground,” Martinez replied.
The scare passed and volunteers went back to work checking in people to receive the food and handing them boxes of squash, peppers, cabbage, beans, potatoes, garlic and other items. The need dwarfs the resources. CIELO has a list of about 5,500 community members; reservations for the weekly food boxes close in just a few hours.
But volunteers noted a drop off in the number of people who came by to pick up their boxes that day – dipping to 135 compared with the usual number of 200 or so. Orlando Leon, a regular volunteer, said fear of venturing onto the streets amid reports of an ICE detention, may have driven down the number.
“Usually it’s busy, nonstop, but people might have heard about the raid,” he said.
To ease the anxieties, CIELO has started some home food deliveries and provided other essential items, such as diapers, that people are running short on because they aren’t shopping as much. The group also has begun offering online mental health workshops.
One community member, for instance, said he used to relax on the bus ride home after work, catching up on sleep, but is too scared to doze off now in case immigration agents were to come onboard. Andrea, the Guatemalan mother, said the family is no longer able to enjoy such favorite pastimes as picnics at Santa Monica beach.
“People are so scared, we have to think of creative new ways to serve,” Martinez said.
Romero and Martinez, both Zapotec women, said they face other challenges amid the federal crackdown on immigration and diversity work. The core of their mission is providing language support for Indigenous community members. Yet requests for CIELO’s translation work in courts, schools, hospitals and other spaces have declined by half as federal funding for those services has been cut, Martinez said.
Another major issue is the paucity of data on the size of the Indigenous community and the number of languages they speak but a new state law pushed by CIELO will help address that information gap. Beginning in 2028, the state Department of Public Health will begin including in their data collection people of major Mesoamerican Indigenous nations and their preferred languages, such as Mixteco, Triqui, Zapoteco, K’iche’, Mam, and Kanjoba.
The data will help the communities become more visible – but that is a double-edge sword in these perilous times, Martinez said.
“There’s all these kidnappings on the streets, and I think that’s really one of the challenges that we face: How do we allocate resources to an underserved community without also putting them in danger by creating visibility?” she said.
To help address the escalating needs, Martinez and Romero called on allies in the philanthropic world to step up as “pioneers and leaders” to invest in the work of grassroots nonprofits like CIELO to protect and support vulnerable families in Los Angeles.
The impact of CIELO’s work was evident – not only materially but also emotionally – at the recent food distribution at the organization’s new center in South L.A. One volunteer said he regularly comes to help out in between his thrice-weekly kidney dialysis appointments because the social interaction with those who speak his Indigenous language of Yucatec Maya boosts his spirits.
The volunteer, Jose, came to Los Angeles in 1986 and has worked mostly as a painter. But since the ICE raids, he said he is too fearful to travel from Koreatown to Whittier, his go-to location to look for work. As a result, he’s had to rely on his daughter to help pay his rent.
Jose said he lived through previous attacks on undocumented immigrants – including the 1994 passage of Proposition 187, which denied public services to those without legal status before being struck down by federal courts. But he said he never before has been too scared to work. “Everything happening now is the worst,” he said.
And yet he was able to relax, smile and greet the people who came for food, marking a bright spot in his life.
Pedro is another migrant grateful for CIELO’s support. He takes two buses to come to the center – recently bringing two of his six children he is raising alone. Pedro came to Los Angeles in 1998 from the Huehuetenango area of Guatemala and speaks Q’anjob’al. He found a job in the garment industry sewing shirts, earning enough money to send back home and buy land.
When his wife walked out a few years ago, leaving him with the children who now range in age from four to 16, he was depressed and distraught. But he began to come to CIELO for food, companionship and support and the community members who gather here have helped him turn his outlook around.
“It’s really good when I’m here because I can speak in my language,” Pedro said. “I’m very happy.”
– Teresa Watanabe