As ICE raids continue, volunteers say grocery deliveries are still critically needed

Mara Harris loads a box of produce into her car, along with canned food and boxed goods. It marks the second week in a row she will drive the groceries to families across Los Angeles who say immigration raids are keeping them inside their homes.

“I got involved because I live in Highland Park, which is a primarily Latinx neighborhood, and I was feeling really frustrated and angry about our neighbors being unfairly treated,” Harris said.

Harris is a member of Nefesh, a Jewish outreach community that has partnered with local faith leaders to deliver goods. Her role is straightforward: pick up the groceries, drive them to families who have requested help, and drop them off.

“My husband is an immigrant,” she said. “I just think about the anxiety that we have going through the process, even with the resources we have access to, and I think about how impossible it is for other people to navigate that.”

She added, “It’s just chance that some people were born in countries that are safe and that provide them with opportunities, and other people are not. And I think the U.S. has an obligation to extend that opportunity to those people.”

The grocery deliveries are being organized by a Koreatown church that has seen a decline in attendance at its regular food distribution program in recent months. At the request of church leadership, The LA Local is not naming the church or its congregants out of privacy concerns and to avoid drawing attention to their immigrant community. It’s just one of a network of faith-based organizations responding to the need, and as raids show no signs of slowing down anytime soon, the group is seeking to expand its delivery hubs to more church sites.

Before the recent enforcement activity, the Koreatown church’s regular food distribution served between 500 and 600 people, according to one church organizer. In early February, they saw around 350.

“People are afraid, and unfortunately don’t know about services like this,” she said.

Multiple families have said they’re just too afraid to go out into the neighborhood, according to church leadership.

Since last summer, federal agents have carried out workplace raids, targeted day labor sites and arrested people in public spaces across the region. The Department of Homeland Security reported in December that more than 10,000 people had been detained in the LA area since June.

“There are members of our congregation that have immigration concerns that have told me they’re afraid to go out,” the pastor of the Koreatown church said. “I’ve spoken to at least four different families that are just afraid to go get groceries, are afraid to take their kids or their grandkids to school, and are worried about ICE activity in the neighborhood that’s been happening over the past seven months or so.”

In response, the church began coordinating home grocery deliveries in partnership with Clergy and Laity United for Economic Justice, or CLUE. The partnership started last summer after church staff noticed a drop in attendance at their weekly food distributions.

“A lot of people were afraid to go to the food bank at (the church), so they saw a big decline and understood that it was because people were afraid to come out, so CLUE partnered with them to do this delivery service,” said Liz Bar-El, a community liaison for CLUE.

Another staff member who has worked at the Koreatown church for six years said operations have been directly affected by enforcement activity in the area.

“I’ve been doing this for about six years. Last week, we had to stop at 11 a.m., and we used to close at 12, 12:30 because the ICE agents were around here,” he said. “And the number of people is decreasing because of ICE raids.”

The church pastor said families do not simply call and request food; there is a screening system to ensure that the program reaches those who are most concerned about leaving their homes.

CLUE has “folks that help call through the list of people that requested it to confirm for the day of their deliveries. They also have somebody that does a screening process to make sure that the people that are getting the deliveries qualify for the parameters of the program so that they’re not just getting people who are like ‘Yeah, you can deliver food to me’ but rather are really concerned about their status,” he said.

But Bar-El, the organizer with CLUE, said identifying families can be difficult.

“It’s likely due to fear of trusting somebody, they are hiding in their homes,” she said. “One way to reach them is through their pastors and the rapid response network that CLUE is a part of.”

Many of the requests stem from sudden changes in a family’s circumstances.

“This current situation with grocery delivery is mostly people who need help getting food because somebody got detained, deported and or the main breadwinner lost their job,” Bar-El said. “In one case, the husband was recently bonded out, and the wife was left home with three very small children.”

For Harris, the volunteer delivering food across multiple neighborhoods, the work is personal. She often thinks about her own family’s immigration status.

“My husband is British and he’s been working here off work visas for six years. He just applied for a non-conditional green card last year. So I take our anxiety and worries and extrapolate it,” she said.

Organizers don’t expect the need for this service to ease anytime soon. Bar-El said they plan to expand the effort to another church in Hollywood and are seeking more volunteers.

“I believe it’s my responsibility as someone who is one of the lucky ones and who does have resources and privilege to do what I can for my neighbors and for my city that I love that is so diverse and wonderful,” Harris said.