How Ice cancelled summer season: lots of of Latino festivals face inconceivable choice over concern of raids | US immigration

For Orlando Gutierrez in Kansas City, the considered cancelling his community’s summer Colombian Independence Day festival first surfaced “the week after the inauguration” in January, “when the raids started happening”. The choice was rooted in “trying to be safe”, Gutierrez stated. “We’re not talking about folks that are irregular in terms of their immigration status. You only have to look a certain way and speak a certain language and then you’re in danger.”

For a long time previous to 2025, the occasion had gone on interrupted – “in rain, in extreme heat” – and hosted hundreds of Colombians and non-Colombians alike, Gutierrez stated. “Our mission is to share our culture with people that don’t know it,” he added. “To not have the opportunity – that’s where it hurts the most.”

In Donald Trump’s second time period as president, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) has been traditionally expansionist: it now goals for an unprecedented 3,000 minimum arrests a day. Its brokers have thrown undocumented individuals, residents with protected authorized standing, and even American citizens right into a deportation system that more and more does not respect due process.

Out of concern of being focused indiscriminately, cultural and musical occasions from coast to coast – block events and summer season concert events in California; Mexican heritage celebrations in Chicago; soccer fan watch events in Massachusetts – have been postponed or canceled altogether. Even spiritual gatherings are now not perceived as secure from Ice. In San Bernardino, California, Bishop Alberto Rojas has dispensed his congregation from the duty to attend mass out of concern of deportation raids.

Every choice to cancel is heartbreaking. In Philadelphia, Carnaval de Puebla, which was scheduled for April, made the call to cancel in February, stated organizer Olga Rentería. “We believe this is not a time to celebrate,” Rentería defined, “but a time to remain united, informed, and strong.” In Los Angeles, organizers of Festival Chapín, a celebration of Guatemalan tradition, have postponed the occasion from this August to October. “It was really hard to take that decision,” Walter Rosales, a restaurateur and one of many occasion’s organizers, advised the Guardian. “We have a lot of attendees; more than 50,000 people every year. People have hotels, they have flights. We hire people to be there. But I think it was the best [choice.] The first thing we want is the security of the people.”

Rosales stated he hopes that by ready just a few months, Festival Chapín can happen amid a distinct political local weather, one wherein Ice sticks to promises made by Trump to focus on primarily undocumented individuals with prison information.

But mass raids are more likely to get extra frequent: the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, laws pressured by Congress by Republicans and signed into legislation by Trump on the Fourth of July, will slash social packages whereas funding Ice at ranges comparable to the budget of the US army.

It signifies that even big stars are questioning whether or not concert events are secure for his or her followers. When the Puerto Rican famous person Bad Bunny introduced a current tour that skips the continental US altogether, social media hypothesis centered on the notion that the artist didn’t wish to put his followers in Ice’s crosshairs. That theorizing was partly fueled by Bad Bunny’s personal dips into the broader political dialog: he’s known as Ice brokers “sons of bitches” on social media and his “NUEVAYoL” video – wherein the Statue of Liberty is garlanded with the Puerto Rican flag – is a beautiful and grand ode to New York’s immigrants.

Of avoiding the US on his upcoming tour, the artist himself has solely stated that, after touring recurrently within the US lately, extra dates presently had been “unnecessary”. (A consultant for Bad Bunny didn’t reply to a request for remark.)

Gabriel Gonzales, the bandleader of the Los Angeles Latin music ensembleLa Verdad, stated a few of their gigs have needed to be cancelled this summer season. “A lot of people are very scared to go out,” he stated. “It’s kind of like the pandemic all over again.”

But as La Verdad proceed to carry out round Los Angeles and elsewhere, Gonzales is discovering new that means in enjoying stay amid the Trump administration’s insurance policies.

“It’s not like a rebellion,” he stated. “It’s more like a resistance. As musicians, we are there to take people away for a few moments. I see communities pulling together and I feel like everything is going to be OK.”

For Joyas Mestizas, a Seattle-based Mexican people dance youth group, which cancelled their annual competition this 12 months, the plan is to be “more creative” going ahead. “But we’re not going anywhere,” stated the group’s co-director, Luna Garcia. “If I have to teach kids out of my basement, I’ll do it. The kids are going to dance.”

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For some organizers of cultural occasions for Latino communities, pushing by and executing their plans regardless of fears of raids has develop into its personal type of campaign.

In July, federal brokers had been noticed on the premises of Chicago’s National Museum of Puerto Rican Arts & Culture simply days earlier than the establishment was scheduled to carry its annual Barrio Arts Festival. The museum stated the brokers entered the property, “refused multiple requests to present a warrant, badge, or identification”, and “informed museum staff that they were assessing entry and exit points for upcoming events that may draw undocumented attendees”.

(In a statement, homeland security stated brokers “staged and held a quick briefing in the Museum’s parking lot in advance of an enforcement action related to a narcotics investigation”.)

In response to the presence of the federal brokers, the museum determined to not cancel the competition – however, relatively, to make sure it will go ahead with out endangering its attendees. Veronica Ocasio, the museum’s director of training and programming, stated that within the days earlier than Barrio Arts, she and her crew “met non-stop” with the intention to create “as tight a security plan as we could”. The museum is situated inside Chicago’s Humboldt Park; with the intention to cowl the park’s 200 acres, Ocasio and her co-organizers assembled a gaggle of volunteer immigration advocates who created a set off warning and stood guard on rotation for the whole lot of the two-day competition. If Ice brokers had been noticed, the museum was able to shut down the occasion, shut the gates, and bunker in place – holding attendees inside till the brokers left. The plan then known as for Ocasio and different museum workers to face out entrance with immigration attorneys, holding the fort.

Delia Ramirez, an Illinois congresswoman, was additionally a key a part of the museum’s plan. In order to go off potential Ice raids, Ramirez in addition to different elected officers had been on the premises “around the clock”, she stated. “State representatives, city council folks, the mayor. All to protect constituents from homeland security.”

“The president has taken away people’s healthcare so he can hire more Ice agents to terrorize communities,” added Ramirez, however that doesn’t imply “there’s no oversight or accountability. At a time where the federal government wants to harm you, we will keep each other safe”. For Ramirez, Barrio Arts Festival was “a beautiful showing of people saying to Ice, ‘not here, not now, not ever’.”

Beyond her assist for native cultural occasions, Ramirez is making an attempt to push again on Ice motion extra broadly: she’s a co-sponsor of the No Anonymity in Immigration Enforcement Act which might prohibit Ice from the now-common apply of finishing up their deportation actions whereas masked. “People are freaking the hell out,” she stated. “They don’t know whether it’s an Ice agent who is going to criminalize them with no due process or it’s someone who wants to rob them. No other law enforcement agency does this.”

Ultimately, not solely did the Puerto Rican occasion in Chicago go on with out interruption, however it was “our largest, most well attended Barrio Fest in our twenty-five year history”, Ocasio stated. “We stood against intimidation and we created a blueprint for festivals in the city of Chicago.” The museum has already shared the protection plan it developed on the fly with organizers of upcoming occasions representing the native Colombian and Mexican communities.

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Ahead of New York’s Colombia Independence Day competition – held in July in Corona, a working class neighborhood in Queens – organizers had been equally involved about the potential of Ice raids. They took precautions by bordering off the occasion, marking it as personal, and making a single entrance level the place they might have stopped Ice brokers working with out a warrant, organizers advised the Guardian. Like Chicago’s Barrio Arts Festival, they’d legal professionals available from a neighborhood authorized companies group. Ultimately, like Barrio Arts, they too set a brand new attendance file, with round 20,000 competition goers.

Catalina Cruz, a New York state meeting member who helped plan the Colombian competition, stated that each one the precautions she and her fellow organizers took “doesn’t explain why so many people came out – from all over the city and beyond”. She credited attendees with a sure type of psychological fortitude: “I’m not in their minds, but I don’t think they were giving a fuck about the president.”

Of course, that fuzzy feeling of getting placed on a profitable mass occasion for the Latino neighborhood within the period of all-pervading concern of Ice isn’t a panacea. As Cruz put it: “What would have really stopped [Ice] if they wanted to get in? As we have seen in the case of California” – the place federal brokers have forcefully and en masse raided parks and working farms – “not a goddam thing.”

Newly flush with money due to the Big Beautiful Bill, Ice is now actively recruiting waves of recent brokers – to, of their phrases, “defend the homeland” – by providing $50,000 signing bonuses and scholar mortgage forgiveness. Tom Homans, the Trump administration’s border czar, has promised to “flood the zone” with Ice brokers in New York and different sanctuary cities.

But on that Sunday in Queens, the Colombian competition ticked alongside fantastically with no sight or sound of the federal authorities’s aggressive deportation machine. Vendors pushed street-cart ceviche and plastic pouches filled with high-octane primary-color drinks: “Coctelitos, coctelitos!” Seemingly each different individual wore the highly effective yellow jersey of the Colombian nationwide soccer crew. Twentysomethings salsa’d subsequent to older relations grooving of their wheelchairs.

When a performer with severe pipes sang the Star Spangled Banner, all people perked up. When she adopted it up with the nationwide anthem of Colombia, throat-bursting singalongs broke out. After she wrapped up, the DJ smashed the ehh-ehh-EHH horns and, all collectively, of us chanted: “Viva Colombia! Viva Colombia!”