Huntington Park High School Principal Carlos Garibaldi was preparing to host a graduation on his campus when frantic colleagues radioed him: Immigration is coming. A fleet of trucks and vans was speeding up Miles Avenue in front of the school's main building. School staffers followed the emergency plan that Garibaldi had discussed with them a day earlier. Secure the gates. Calmly urge parents streaming into the auditorium to hurry up. Let them know what's going on. Prepare for the worst. But the fleet didn’t swoop in. They made a quick right toward a Home Depot next to the high school's baseball field. Armed federal agents swarmed out to chase after day laborers and food vendors. Eyewitnesses said at least four people were detained. The crowd was smaller than usual that morning, though. That’s because Huntington Park City Councilmember Jonathan Sanabria had arrived minutes earlier, after receiving a tip, to yell out that la migra was coming. “Some people didn’t believe me,” the first-term councilmember told me, his voice catching. The June 9 Home Depot raid kicked off a month of chaos in a city synonymous with Latino immigration in the Southern California imagination. Once a hub for blue-collar white families, Huntington Park is now 97% Latino, with 89% of households speaking a language other than English and 47% of residents foreign-born, according to the Census. The city's transformation has long drawn national attention, little of it positive. Some have blamed the corruption scandals that seem to spring up every few years on the makeup of the City Council, which has been majority Latino for the past generation. Then-Mayor Tom Jackson stepped down in 2000 after he was caught on tape saying, "We have to come to the realization that the entire country of Mexico cannot come to California, and if we make it tough for them to come here, they won’t come." By 2015, however, Huntington Park had become so hospitable to immigrants that a city councilmember appointed two of them living in the country illegally to serve on city commissions — a first in California. Sanabria feels this reputation has led the Trump administration to punish Huntington Park with high-profile actions, using force better suited to a battlefield: "They know our demographics. They know exactly who we are." On June 12, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem accompanied ICE agents to Huntington Park, with a film crew tailing her. Two weeks later, federal agents blew out the front door of the home of a U.S. citizen who had accidentally crashed into a government vehicle. At least four raids have hit the city's Home Depot. Sightings of migra are broadcast on social media almost daily. A senior DHS official did not respond to Sanabria’s allegation or say how many people have been detained in immigration sweeps in the city, noting only the total number of "illegal aliens" detained across Southern California in recent weeks. Whatever the exact number, the federal show of force has driven many in the city — one of the densest in California — underground. Businesses aren’t open or display signs stating that walk-ins aren’t welcome. Popular restaurants like El Gallo Giro and Tam's are mostly empty. The weekly farmer's market at Salt Lake Park is a proverbial ghost town. Traffic flows faster. Events and classes are canceled. Once-buzzing neighborhoods are quiet. At a resource fair organized by local nonprofits a few weeks ago, Isabel Rangel and some friends picked up free fruit cups and toiletries. It was the first time the women had left their homes in weeks — and only because the giveaway was on their street. “I haven’t even gone to work,” Rangel said in Spanish as her friends nodded. A DJ spun cumbias whose melancholy words clashed against happy rhythms. “The kids don’t even want to go outside, even though they’re from here. They just say, ‘La migra, la migra,'" added Rangel, a Mexican immigrant who works in a factory and has lived in Huntington Park for 24 years. Pacific Boulevard, where mid-century buildings evoke a bygone era, is desolate. Even a victory by Mexico's men’s soccer team over the U.S. in the July 6 Gold Cup final, which would usually inspire fans to spill onto the sidewalks and streets, drew only a few cars waving the Mexican flag. On a recent day, Juan Perez stood outside a quinceañera shop that houses his photography business. He leaned on a plastic display with postcards highlighting his work and red business cards educating people about their rights if ICE detained them. “It’s been so dead that business owners now get to park right in front of our stores,” the 37-year-old said with a weak laugh, as if he needed to find a silver lining. “We’ll be lucky if we can get to the end of the year this way.” A few blocks down, Paola Martinez sat in front of her mother’s massive clothing depot, which has stood on Pacific for 35 years. It was 1 p.m., and I was the first person she had greeted all day. “There’s a sadness here, but what are we going to do?” the native of El Salvador said. “We can’t do anything.” Yet the longer ICE agents sweep through town, the more residents are doing something about it. Iris Delgado, 33, has strolled the Home Depot parking lot nearly every day with a cart of water bottles for day laborers and a cellphone to occasionally livestream. The L.A. County Department of Health epidemiologist is a co-founder of the Huntington Park Run Club, which regularly met up for jogs until the raids. “We would go on runs and realize, ‘Hey, ICE picked up someone there. Oh, God, there’s another place,’” she said shortly after helping to lead a morning protest calling for a boycott of Home Depot for repeatedly allowing ICE onto its properties. “I don’t identify as an activist. But are we going to let this happen? The basic guideline of a good community is to take care of each other, so we’re here.” She checked in on Susana Moreno, who has sold burritos and tortas from the back of her SUV at the Home Depot for two years. The Mexican immigrant witnessed the June 9 raid. “There used to be five of us vendors here,” Moreno said in Spanish. “Now, I’m it. I’m a citizen. But believe me, I’m scared.” Huntington Park Mayor Arturo Flores, a former Marine, has appeared at news conferences with other Southern California mayors, including L.A. Mayor Karen Bass, demanding that ICE stop its campaign. In media interviews, he has denounced the deployment of his fellow Marines across Southern California — despite his concern that his appearances will put an even bigger bull's eye on his city. “At this point, there’s no point in trying to tone down our voices,” said Flores, whose parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles became U.S. citizens through President Reagan's 1986 amnesty. “Now, we have to be as loud as possible." In the 1970s, when Rosario Marin was a teenager recently arrived from Mexico City, deportations were a part of daily life in Huntington Park. "My mom would come home from work and say ‘Mija, la migra came,’” said Marin, who served on the Huntington Park City Council from 1994 until she was appointed U.S. treasurer in 2001. “They’d come in, and people would just run. They'd be caught, and you'd see them within a week.” Her family was part of a stream of Mexican migrants who moved into Southeast L.A. County as the region’s factories shut down and white residents left. Nearby cities, including Cudahy, Maywood and South Gate, also saw dramatic demographic shifts. But nothing matched what happened in Huntington Park, the region's oldest city. The percentage of Latino residents went from 36% in 1970 to 97% just 20 years later. The local and national media were transfixed. A 1990 Times story reported, "Nowhere in Southern California has the dramatic influx of Latin American immigrants been more acutely felt than in Huntington Park." A New York Times article that same year called the city a “testing ground” for whether California could successfully acclimate Latinos into its fabric; a 2000 follow-up deemed it "a citizenship incubator." Frequent clashes between Mexican soccer fans and police on Pacific — especially a 1998 free-for-all that led to 31 arrests — prompted dispatches painting the place as an out-of-control Mexican colony. Sanabria, the city councilmember, grew up during this era in unincorporated Walnut Park, on the south side of Florence Avenue from Huntington Park. His parents were Salvadorans who entered the U.S. without papers after fleeing their country's civil war. But deportation wasn't a fear for his family and friends. The 37-year-old remembers the city he affectionately calls “HP” as a cultural oasis, where he played soccer in parks and spent weekends walking up and down la Pacific. “It was such a safe bubble for me that I didn’t realize what we were until I went to school at UCLA,” he said. “Everywhere else as a Latino, you’re the ‘other.’ In HP, you’re the ‘normal.’” Marin also came back after her time in D.C., drawn by the area's Latino essence. “I have seen who we were, and am very proud of who we are,” she said. “No matter where I go, I say I’m from Huntington Park, and there’ll be someone who says, ‘Mi tía llego allí [My aunt first arrived to this country there].’ Everyone knows Huntington Park because we’ve [Latinos] been there for a very long time.” That’s why Marin, who now lives in Walnut Park, thinks the mass deportations hitting Southern California are “heartless” and that Homeland Security's claim of focusing on violent criminals is “nonsense.” As a councilmember and mayor, she pushed for police to crack down on gangs and people selling fake green cards. "They [criminals] threatened me and followed me around, so I know how difficult it is. Let’s take them out," Marin said. "But el paletero? Give me a break.” “I’m the former treasurer of the U.S., and I now feel like I have to carry my passport with me at all times,” she concluded. “That shows you the level of fear this community feels toward its government.” On July 7, the city council unanimously declared Huntington Park a sanctuary city. The council has set aside $150,000 to fund food distributions and connect residents with legal aid, also approving a requirement that federal agents identify themselves to police when asked. Flores knows that the federal government has sued Los Angeles over its sanctuary policy and that Noem published a list of similar municipalities in May, stating that they were "endangering Americans and our law enforcement in order to protect violent criminal illegal aliens." But he's willing to take the chance of angering the feds even more. "You know how in school, we talk about moments in history that are blemishes?" Flores said. "We are in the middle of one of those historical blemishes — we're literally at the heart of it. That doesn’t mean that we stay home with our arms crossed. That means we need to show up." Garibaldi, the Huntington Park High principal, is preparing for a school year of uncertainty. Meanwhile, band and cheer camps are happening on campus. The football team is holding summer practices. The staff has been trained in case la migra shows up. And he's already counseling nervous students. “I don’t want them to accept this as the new normal,” Garibaldi said. “It’s not. It can’t be. Because it would mean brown communities are being attacked and that's OK. No way. It can never be accepted.”