Illegal migrants fearing deportation are said to be in hiding, turning usually crowded factories, warehouses and grocery stores into ghost towns.
President Donald Trump has order federal agents to at least 1,200 to 1,500 illegal aliens each day as part of his sweeping immigration crackdown.
Scared undocumented migrants began hunkering down after Trump took office for the second time last week, with dozens failing to turn up to work.
Only 10 out of the usually 40 to 50 migrants workers attended their shifts at a factory in Joliet, Illinois last week, The Chicago Tribune reported, as six federal agencies swept the Greater Chicago area for ‘potentially dangerous criminal aliens’.
Locals claim a Home Depot parking lot that is normally packed with day laborers seeking work was ‘eerily quiet’ with just a men standing around.
Sunday mass at Chicago’s St. Agnes of Bohemia Catholic Church was also unusually empty, parishioners claim, likely because the Trump Administration relaxed rules governing enforcement actions at ‘sensitive’ locations such as schools, churches and workplaces.
Social media is flooding with reports of empty factory parking lots, doctor’s office waiting rooms, grocers and big box stores, such as Walmart, in wake of Trump’s mass deportation efforts.
Immigration officials arrested nearly 1,000 illegal migrants on Sunday alone as the White House praised the federal agents who are ‘working tirelessly to protect our communities’.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) reported making a total of 593 arrests on Friday and 286 arrests on Saturday. In the 2024 federal fiscal year, it averaged around 310 per day, according to agency data.
Undocumented migrants are taking ‘precautions’ and trying to ‘stay home’ as long as possible an the risk of deportation increases.
‘People are hiding,’ Dolores Castañeda, a community leader in the Little Village, one of Chicago’s largest Mexican immigrant communities, told the newspaper.
‘I don’t think anyone knows what to do.’
The manger of a popular bar in the city’s popular North Side claims that several of his employees were concerned about the raids and at least one requested time off.
He claimed to ‘understand their fear’ but warned that his business, along with others in the area, ‘will not be able to operate’ without their staff.
Similarly, business groups predict that if migrants continue to hide long-term it will cause ‘an effect similar to the pandemic’.
Fiesta Mart, a popular Mexican grocery chain in the south, was ’empty’ last week, according to social media users who claim that ‘absolutely no one’ was in the store during standard opening hours.
Others have described similar scenes at Walmart stores, with one sharing footage of barren aisleways at the big box retailer’s Kern County, California location.
Another X user shared footage captured at an apparent factory where everything was ‘dead quiet, except for the wind’. The facility was located in an undisclosed snowy location.
‘ICE has run all the migrant workers,’ the poster wrote.
ICE agents raided a factory in Springfield, Ohio – a rural area that made headlines over its Haitian migrant population in the run-up to the 2024 election – on Friday, according to social media reports.
One X user claims that following the raid at the Japanese Topre last week, staffing turn out has been low.
‘Supposedly they had no 1st shift that day,’ the user wrote. ‘Topre normally operates 3 shifts, 24/7. I’ve NEVER seen the parking lot this empty, even on a Sunday.’
Some of Springfield’s estimated 15,000 Haitians are seeking solace and divine intervention in their churches or at shops that sell spiritual products – a stark contrast to those in Chicago who failed to attend mass on Sunday.
Springfield community leaders say many are overwhelmed by fears Trump will end or let expire the Temporary Protected Status program that allows them to remain in the US legally.
‘The community is panicking.’ said Viles Dorsainvil, the leader of Springfield’s Haitian Community Help and Support Center. ‘They see the arrests on TV in other parts of the country and they don’t know what´s going to happen.’
