Business
'Fear has been sown.' Street vendors and other workers in L.A.'s massive informal economy react to Trump
As Mario Ramos pushes his ice cream cart through the city, worries course through his mind.
A street vendor in Los Angeles for 20 years, Ramos now carries with him a small red card outlining his constitutional rights in case immigration officers approach him as part of President Trump’s vow to carry out mass deportations. He scours the news for information on enforcement operations and has even cut back the hours he spends on the streets to limit his exposure.
“The street vending community is shaking,” Ramos said. “This is the era of fear for us.”
Ramos, 52, who is in the U.S. illegally, is among the hundreds of thousands of immigrants in the region who lack official work authorization and instead find jobs in the vast informal economy. Often working for cash and well below the minimum wage, their labor has become an economic linchpin, encompassing work in vital industries and including jobs such as child care, caregiving for the elderly, construction and harvesting, preparing and selling food.
“People forget how significant the undocumented labor force is in our state’s economy,” said Manuel Pastor, director of the Equity Research Institute at USC, who has long researched immigrant labor.
“What part of your daily life doesn’t involve contact with someone who is undocumented, whether you know it or not?” Pastor asked. “Did you get food today? Did your house cleaner come?”
The labor and financial implications are particularly pronounced in L.A. County, where undocumented immigrants contributed close to $18 billion to the economy in local, state and federal taxes, as well as spending power in 2021, according to the most recent data from the California Immigrant Data Portal, a project of USC’s Equity Research Institute.
If Trump does carry out large-scale deportations, Pastor said, it would drastically rewire the social fabric of a region where nearly 1 in 5 people is either undocumented or living with a family member who is. It would also create significant disruptions in industries such as construction and food preparation and service, he said, and ultimately lead to higher costs for consumers.
A welder builds a cart at the Food Truck Group in Sylmar on Friday. The company rents out food trucks and carts and helps vendors get permits.
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
“It’s going to be a lot harder to rebuild from the Eaton Canyon and Palisades fires,” he said. “Your prices are going to rise at the grocery store. It’s going to be the opposite of cheaper eggs.”
And the broader economic ripple effects, Pastor said, would be far reaching.
“Behind every software engineer or entertainment industry lawyer is an army of nannies and food services workers and gardeners,” Pastor said. “They may not see their mutual dependence, but it is a fact of life in our economy.”
Although the true scale of deportations remains to be seen, particularly in so-called sanctuary cities such as L.A., which forbids city employees or resources from going toward federal immigration enforcement, the Trump administration has already taken an aggressive stance, including rescinding a policy that prohibited immigration agents from making arrests in hospitals, schools and churches.
And the chilling effect has already begun.
Rodrigo, a construction worker who asked to be identified only by his first name because he is in the country illegally, said fellow workers have started swapping messages of caution, including specific urges to look for ICE immigration agents outside Home Depot locations.
“The fear has been sown,” he said.
The 64-year-old, who arrived in the U.S. nearly four decades ago, runs a small construction company that does electrical, plumbing and carpentry work. In recent weeks, he said, his six employees, undocumented workers from Guatemala, Mexico and El Salvador, who all arrived in recent years, have told him they’re fearful of traveling to certain areas for jobs.
“We’re going to San Clemente today,” he recalled telling the workers recently.
“I’m not going there,” one worker told him. “There is too much immigration.”
He tries to calm their nerves but also reminds them to behave cautiously in public — if you’re going to drink, Rodrigo tells them, do it at home. He warns them that even if they’re doing nothing wrong, a drunk guy at the bar might throw punches, drawing the police to the location, and he worries that anyone detained for any reason could be swiftly deported.
For now, Rodrigo said, he isn’t personally too scared — he’s taking a wait-and-see approach. But to be cautious, he said, he will avoid traveling to either Texas or Arizona, states where he said he expects more harsh crackdowns.
“But with work, I don’t really have time to travel anyway,” he said, noting that he expects business to pick up soon with requests to rebuild after the wildfires.
Kimberly Tapia, who along with her mother, Maria Ponce, started the Food Truck Group, an L.A. company that rents out food trucks and helps street vendors get permits, said fears about deportations have already begun to shift demands at the company.
This grill cart at the Food Truck Group in Sylmar has health permits for handling raw meat. The company is run by Maria Ponce and daughter Kimberly Tapia.
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
The business has recently seen an influx of new clients looking to get permits in hopes of avoiding attention from immigration agents, as well as more inquiries from current clients who want to trade in their food carts for trucks so there is a physical barrier in case agents approach them.
Those with permits “want the ability to lock the door, close up and not feel vulnerable to being taken away,” Tapia said. “They’re worried that because of the color of their skin, someone is going to swing by and say I don’t care if you’re permitted or not.”
Ramos, the ice cream vendor, said a creeping sense of unease has become a constant for him and fellow vendors. The start of Trump’s second term feels different than his first, Ramos said, especially with Republicans now in control of both the House and the Senate.
“There’s a lot of fear of not returning home and knowing that my children will ask, ‘Where is Dad? He never came back,’” he said. “I want people to know it will be four years of fear, four years of uncertainty, four years of sadness.”
It has put a painful damper on a job that has brought Ramos years of fulfillment.
He started selling ice cream years ago, seeing it as a way to bring the flavors of his first home in Puebla, Mexico, to his new one in L.A. And like many other vendors, he is proud to be an entrepreneur.
“We’re not waiting for jobs. We start our businesses and pay our taxes,” he said. “They don’t see how much we contribute to the economy or the taxes we pay.
“If we’re not acknowledged, at least our children who are citizens, they will always know that we were good for this country.”
Early in April, Ruben Hallali got an unusual alert on his phone: The evening temperature at Paris Charles de Gaulle International Airport had jumped about 6 degrees Fahrenheit in seconds.
Mr. Hallali, the chief executive of the weather risk company Sereno, had set up notifications for extreme weather swings. Then, nine days later, it happened again.
“It was an isolated jump, at one single station, early in the evening,” said Mr. Hallali, who added that he noticed another strange coincidence about the spikes: The timing was just right for somebody to reap a windfall on the betting site Polymarket.
He wasn’t the only one who sensed a problem. Météo-France, the country’s national meteorological service, filed a complaint last week with the police and local prosecutors, saying it had evidence that a weather sensor at Charles de Gaulle, the country’s largest airport, may have been tampered with.
The temperature swings, experts said, coincided with a period of unusual activity on Polymarket, one of the leading online prediction markets, which allow users to wager on the outcome of virtually anything.
One increasingly popular area is weather betting, where speculators can make real-time wagers on temperature readings, rainfall totals, the number of Atlantic hurricanes in a year and much more — with payouts in the thousands of dollars and higher.
As the stakes rise, so has the temptation to tamper with the instruments used to generate weather readings in hopes of engineering a lucrative outcome. Experts warn that this could have dangerous ripple effects, like degrading the information that underpins safe air travel.
Temperature data is used in a host of calculations at airports, helping determine correct takeoff distance, climb rate and whether crews need to apply frost treatment to planes. It’s crucial to airport safety, Mr. Hallali said.
“The Charles de Gaulle incident is not an isolated curiosity,” Mr. Hallali said. “It is what happens when financial incentives meet fragile data infrastructure.”
On April 6, the temperature reading at Charles de Gaulle jumped from 64 degrees Fahrenheit to 70 degrees at 7 p.m., before slowly falling over the next hour, according to data from Météo-France.
On April 15, the recorded temperature climbed even more sharply, from 61 degrees at 9 p.m. to 72 at 9:30 p.m., then dropping back to 61 a half-hour later.
In both instances, the spikes set the high temperature for the day, the metric on which some Polymarket wagers rest.
Laurent Becler, a spokesman for Météo-France, said the service contacted the police after noticing the discrepancies in temperature data. He declined to comment further on the case, saying it was under investigation.
Mr. Hallali said that after the first instance, experts and commenters on the French weather forum Infoclimat began to search answers. Theories were floated, including user error. But after the second spike, commenters zeroed in on the unusual Polymarket wagers, which totaled nearly $1.4 million over the two days, according to the company’s data.
The sums bet on April 6 and 15 were hundreds of thousands of dollars higher than on typical days this month.
It is not the first time that strange bets on prediction markets have raised accusations of insider trading.
On Thursday, a U.S. Army special forces soldier who helped capture President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela in January was charged with using classified information to bet on outcomes related to Venezuela, making more than $400,000 on Polymarket. Late last year, another trader on the site made roughly $300,000 betting on last-minute pardons from President Joseph R. Biden Jr. before he left office.
Polymarket did not immediately respond to a request for comment. While the site used to tie some bets to temperature readings at Charles de Gaulle, this week, after Météo-France filed its complaint, the platform began using temperatures taken at another airport near the city, Paris-Le Bourget, according to recent bets on the site.
Representatives for Charles de Gaulle airport declined to comment beyond saying that the case was under investigation. The airport police also declined to comment. The Bobigny Public Prosecutor’s Office, which is handling the case, declined to answer questions about the investigation but said that no complaint had been filed against Polymarket.
As to how the instruments could have been tampered with, a number of theories have been offered online, including by use of a hair dryer or a lighter. Mr. Hallali said that the precision of the spike on April 15 suggested the use of a calibrated portable heating device, although he declined to speculate about what kind.
“Markets are expanding into every domain where an outcome can be observed, measured, and settled,” he said. “As these markets multiply, so does the surface area for manipulation.”
As the war in Iran strangles the flow of oil around the globe, California’s jet fuel reservoirs are running low.
The state — which refines much of its own fuel in El Segundo and elsewhere but still relies on crude oil imports — has seen its jet fuel stock decline by more than 25% from last year’s peak to a level not seen since 2023, according to data from the California Energy Commission.
The supply is shrinking as a global shortage is already affecting travelers’ summer plans with canceled flights and higher fares. It could even affect plans for people coming to Los Angeles for the 2026 World Cup, which starts in June, said Mike Duignan, a hospitality expert and professor at Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University.
“People don’t know exactly how this is going to escalate,” he said. “There’s a huge black cloud over the sea for the World Cup and the travel slump that we’re seeing is all linked to this oil shortage.”
As fuel supplies shrink, flight prices are rising. Airlines are adding baggage surcharges to cover fuel costs. Several routes leaving from smaller California hubs, including Sacramento and Burbank, have already been canceled.
Air Canada has suspended flights for this summer, cutting routes from JFK to Toronto and Montreal.
“Jet fuel prices have doubled since the start of the Iran conflict, affecting some lower profitability routes and flights which now are no longer economically feasible,” the airline said in a statement last week.
Europe had just more than a month’s supply of jet fuel left last week, the International Energy Agency said. In an effort to cut costs, the German airline Lufthansa slashed 20,000 flights from its summer schedule this week.
Without a fresh oil supply flowing through the Strait of Hormuz, the situation is unlikely to improve, experts said. The oil reserves countries and companies have in storage are helping fill shortfalls, but the squeezed supply chain could still wreak economic havoc.
“When there’s a shortage somewhere, everything is affected,” said Alan Fyall, an associate dean of the University of Central Florida Rosen College of Hospitality Management. “Airlines are being cautious, and I would say that is a very wise strategy at the moment.”
California’s jet fuel stock reached its lowest levels in two and a half years at 2.6 million barrels last week, down from a peak of more than 3.5 million barrels last year.
The California Energy Commission, which tracks fuel inventory, said the state’s current jet fuel stock is sill sufficient.
“Current production and inventory levels of jet fuel are within historical ranges,” a spokesperson said. “Although supply is tight, no structural deficit has emerged yet. The present tightness reflects short‑term global market stress. As long as refinery operations remain stable, California is positioned to meet regional jet fuel needs.”
Europe has been affected more directly because it relies on the Middle East for the vast majority of its crude oil and many refined products, experts said. California gets crude oil from the Middle East but also from Canada, Argentina and Guyana.
The state has the capacity to refine around 200,000 barrels of jet fuel per day, most of it from refineries in El Segundo and Richmond.
The amount of crude oil originating in the state has been declining since the early 2000s, as state regulations and drilling costs have led to more imports.
California has become particularly vulnerable to supply-chain shocks like the war in Iran, says Chevron, one of the companies that provides jet fuel in the state.
“The conflict in the Mideast Gulf has exposed the danger of California’s decision to offshore energy production,” said Ross Allen, a Chevron spokesperson. “Taxes, red tape and burdensome regulations cost the state nearly 18% of its refinery capacity in just the past year, and we urge policymakers to protect the remaining manufacturing capacity.”
In 2025, 61% of crude oil supply to California’s refineries came from foreign sources, according to the California Energy Commission. Around 23% came from inside the state, down from 35% five years ago.
The state’s refining capacity has also been declining, said Jesus David, senior vice president of Energy at IIR Energy. The West Coast region’s refining capacity has decreased from 2.9 million to 2.3 million barrels a day since 2019, he said.
“California’s had issues prior to the war,” David said. “Nothing new has been built over the past 30 years, and California has closed a lot of capacity.”
The result is higher prices for both gasoline and jet fuel in the state. Jet fuel at LAX costs close to $15 per gallon this week, compared with almost $10 at Denver International Airport and $11 at Newark International Airport.
Gasoline prices have also been hit hard by the global conflict. Average gas prices in California are close to $6 a gallon, around $2 higher than the national average.
The West Coast is a “fuel island” because it’s not connected by pipelines to the rest of the country, United Airlines chief executive Scott Kirby said in an interview last month. That means oil and refined products have to be brought in by ships.
“Fuel price is more susceptible to supply weakness on the West Coast than anywhere else in the country,” Kirby said.
Some airlines might not survive the turmoil if oil prices don’t level out soon, he said. Spirit Airlines, a budget carrier based in Florida, is reportedly facing imminent liquidation if it isn’t bailed out by the Trump administration.
Nike is cutting about 1,400 jobs in its operations division, mostly from its technology department, the company said Thursday.
In a note to employees, Venkatesh Alagirisamy, the chief operating officer of Nike, said that management was nearly done reorganizing the business for its turnaround plan, and that the goal was to operate with “more speed, simplicity and precision.”
“This is not a new direction,” Mr. Alagirisamy told employees. “It is the next phase of the work already underway.”
Nike, the world’s largest sportswear company, is trying to recover after missteps led to a prolonged sales slump, in which the brand leaned into lifestyle products and away from performance shoes and apparel. Elliott Hill, the chief executive, has worked to realign the company around sports and speed up product development to create more breakthrough innovations.
In March, Nike told investors that it expected sales to fall this year, with growth in North America offset by poor performance in Asia, where the brand is struggling to rejuvenate sales in China. Executives said at the time that more volatility brought on by the war in the Middle East and rising oil prices might continue to affect its business.
The reorganization has involved cuts across many parts of the organization, including at its headquarters in Beaverton, Ore. Nike slashed some corporate staff last year and eliminated nearly 800 jobs at distribution centers in January.
“You never want to have to go through any sort of layoffs, but to re-center the company, we’re doing some of that,” Mr. Hill said in an interview earlier this year.
Mr. Alagirisamy told employees that Nike was reshaping its technology team and centering employees at its headquarters and a tech center in Bengaluru, India. The layoffs will affect workers across North America, Europe and Asia.
The cuts will also affect staffing in Nike’s factories for Air, the company’s proprietary cushioning system. Employees who work on the supply chain for raw materials will also experience changes as staff is integrated into footwear and apparel teams.
Nike’s Converse brand, which has struggled for years to revive sales, will move some of its engineering resources closer to the factories they support, the company said.
Mr. Alagirisamy said the moves were necessary to optimize Nike’s supply chain, deploy technology faster and bolster relationships with suppliers.
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