Downtown LA residents and businesses deal with fallout from weeklong curfew

As downtown Los Angeles became the epicenter of resistance against federal immigration sweeps in the region — and subsequently fell under a weeklong curfew — resident Teresa Y. Hillery fielded phone calls from concerned family members asking if she was OK and whether she needed to leave the area.

“I’m thinking, what are you guys talking about?” said Hillery, who has lived in South Park for 20 years.

From her vantage point in South Park, Hillery said you wouldn’t really know anything was going on.

While the protests were mostly contained to a couple of blocks around City Hall and a federal detention center in downtown L.A., the curfew that Mayor Karen Bass instituted to curb vandalism and violence affected the entire neighborhood of more than 90,000 people.

From 8 p.m. to 6 a.m., the curfew zone extended east to west from the 5 Freeway to the 110 Freeway; and from north to south from the 10 Freeway to where the 110 and 5 freeways merge. The area was off limits to almost everyone except for emergency personnel, residents and people who work there.

Joseph Cohen May, who lives near the 7th Street Metro Center station, said the curfew was heavy handed.

“Putting aside whether the curfew was really necessary at all, it definitely felt unnecessarily wide of an area, and it didn’t feel like it didn’t need to be as long as it was,” he told LAist.

Hillery, the South Park resident, said she appreciated that there was a resident exemption, but said other strategies, like blocking off some streets around the hotspots, would have been more helpful.

“I think it gets lost on a lot of people that people live downtown,” Hillery said.

Bass announced that she was ending the curfew on June 17, saying it was “largely successful in protecting stores, restaurants, businesses and residential communities from bad actors who do not care about the immigrant community.”

Between June 7, a few days before Bass put the curfew in place, and June 16, LAPD said it made more than 570 arrests “related to protest activity.”

Survey finds most residents wanted curfew to end

The Downtown Los Angeles Residents Association conducted a poll Sunday of more than 350 residents and business owners and employees in the neighborhood. Most of the respondents said they wanted the curfew to end entirely or see a phased roll back.

“Ending the curfew sends a strong signal to the world that the city and people of downtown Los Angeles can live safely and in peace,” a resident of Historic Core said, according to results of the survey that the residents association shared with LAist.

One of the respondents’ chief concerns regarding the curfew was the effect it was having on the local economy and small businesses.

How businesses handled the curfew

LAPD officers block a street in front of Los Angeles City Hall as curfew goes into effect in downtown Los Angeles, on June 12, 2025.

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Patrick T. Fallon

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AFP

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To comply with the curfew, several downtown restaurants modified hours. That wasn’t enough to recuperate business, though, according to Courtney Kaplan, managing partner at Camélia, a restaurant in the Arts District.

“An 8 p.m. curfew really cuts into prime time for the restaurant,” Kaplan said.

Kaplan estimates the restaurant has seen 60% to 70% less activity than it usually sees each day of the week.

In the future, if there’s another curfew in downtown, Kaplan said “clear communication” would help with planning.

“We’re finding out these details at the same time that everyone else in the public is,” Kaplan said. “We’re having to just kind of look at the city webpage and refresh it.”

In a statement to LAist, the Mayor’s Office said it used several channels, including social media and emergency alerts, to communicate the curfew, and notifications were transmitted in “multiple languages.”

Nolan Marshall III, the CEO of the Social District, said the curfew, in addition to the fear that the immigration sweeps have instilled in some workers, has been “incredibly hard” for the South Park businesses his organization represents.

“ Certainly we need to be intentional about protecting certain businesses in downtown from looting, but if the curfew causes as much damage in terms of loss of sales to those businesses that are impacted by the curfew, we really gotta be intentional about trying to balance those two things,” Marshall said.

Mayor’s response to business impacts

The Mayor’s Office said more than 300 people have RSVP’d for the informational sessions.

Bass spoke with business owners in Little Tokyo on Wednesday.

“I talked to the business owners, including the restaurant that I go to frequently, when I talked to them, business is still slow, but it's getting back,” Bass said according to a transcript her office provided of her remarks. “One of the restaurants I was at, they had a very busy lunch hour, and so that's a good sign.”

Last week, the mayor’s office began hosting webinars for affected businesses in downtown L.A. that are looking for help with accessing legal services, “know-your-rights” information and staffing support.