The taco joint just around the corner from Corona Plaza, the beating heart of one of New York City’s largest Latin American neighborhoods, fell quiet in the days after President Trump was inaugurated.
The restaurant’s Mexican waitress, who is undocumented, witnessed federal immigration authorities arrest someone a few blocks from the plaza, and now limits her time outside, afraid that being on the street leaves her more vulnerable to immigration agents. She dwells on the incident as she stares at empty tables once packed with immigrant families and construction workers.
Across the street, sales have plummeted at a Colombian bakery. The shop used to take in about $1,600 most mornings selling soups and pastries, but now makes about $900. Workers at the bakery scour WhatsApp groups for news of immigration raids in the neighborhood, even as the messaging app swirls with misinformation.
And at the Guatemalan restaurant at the edge of the plaza, fewer customers are dining in, with sales declining by about half. But takeout orders have picked up.
“Everyone calls for food now,” Linda Hernandez, 44, said as she served a baked tamal to one of four customers in the 20-seat restaurant in early February, next to a sign warning people not to open their doors to immigration authorities. “No one wants to sit down to eat.”
From New York to California, Mr. Trump’s campaign to arrest and deport millions of undocumented immigrants has spread fear and consternation, instantly subduing once-lively neighborhoods across the United States.
The administration began with a media blitz, publicizing raids in big cities and deportation flights to Latin America. The showmanship was supported by some early numbers that showed an increase in immigration arrests, even as the authorities appear to be struggling to round up enough people to meet Mr. Trump’s mass deportation goals. The shock-and-awe tactic, however, has profoundly rattled immigrant communities.
Few neighborhoods in New York were paralyzed like Corona, a working-class enclave that is about 75 percent Hispanic, home to generations of immigrants from Mexico, Colombia, Ecuador, the Dominican Republic and elsewhere.
But Corona was also one of the neighborhoods that swung most sharply toward Mr. Trump in last year’s election. Mr. Trump’s inroads, in Corona and elsewhere, exposed simmering tension between established immigrants and more recent arrivals who crossed the border during an era of more lenient Democratic policies.
Immigration, legal and otherwise, has long shaped this stretch of northern Queens. Waves of migration transformed Corona from an Italian stronghold at the turn of the 20th century into a magnet for African American families after World War II, and then a bustling hub for Central and South Americans in recent decades.
That diversity has been most palpable in Corona Plaza, once a forlorn lot. The city paved it into a modest pedestrian plaza that quickly pulsated with life as vendors moved in to sell chorizos and cafe de olla, filling the air with a mix of Spanish dialects. Nearby, on Roosevelt Avenue, the aroma of Colombian coffee melded with the scent of lomo saltado from Peru, the blaring rhythms of cumbia and reggaeton and the roar of the elevated No. 7 train.
Many residents here crowd into cheap apartments with strangers. Most work the service jobs that form the backbone of the city’s economy: cleaning, cooking, building.
Many are undocumented.
So it was perhaps no surprise that the once-bustling plaza, and the streets around it, cleared out the day Mr. Trump was inaugurated. Immigrants stayed indoors. Food vendors retreated. And many people continued to stay off the streets as U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents fanned out across the city a week later, an absence that hurt local businesses.
The combination of deportation fears, frigid temperatures and a recent police crackdown on illegal vending all helped mute the neighborhood — and created an eerily familiar scene in what was once the epicenter of the coronavirus pandemic. The virus killed hundreds in Corona and hobbled the area’s economic recovery.
“It reminds me of Covid, but this is new,” said Fernando Cando, 48, who moved to Queens from Ecuador with his family in 1982, when he was a young boy. “If I were to sum it up with one word, it’s panic. We’ve never seen this.”
Mr. Cando owns Leticias, an Ecuadorean restaurant with dishes based on his mother’s recipes. He said he recently began brushing up on his workers’ rights in case ICE shows up at the restaurant. He has instructed the workers not to run from agents, and has wondered whether they could take refuge in the restaurant’s basement. Despite the fear, his cooks and dishwashers continue to show up, even if diners aren’t always there with the same frequency.
ICE sightings — whether real, imagined or distorted on social media and text threads — dominate conversations. Some parents have stopped sending their children to school. And some families are talking about moving back to their home countries: the “self-deportation” that the Trump administration is actively encouraging.
Liliana Sanchez, who migrated from Mexico two decades ago, said she spotted ICE officers almost daily in the neighborhood after Mr. Trump took office, usually knocking on people’s doors. The sightings have been less frequent recently. But her two children, who are U.S. citizens, still call her after school to make sure she has not been detained in Corona Plaza while selling atole, a hot masa-based Mexican drink.
“They’re afraid for me every time I come sell,” Ms. Sanchez, 38, said in Spanish. “But if I stay home, who’s going to bring home the money for rent?”
Immigration lawyers are being inundated with calls from immigrants seeking answers to basic questions: Can they go to work, seek care at hospitals and call the police to report a crime without being deported?
“The phones are ringing off the hook,” said Anibal Romero, an immigration lawyer whose office overlooking Corona Plaza has received as many as 700 calls a day since Mr. Trump’s inauguration, up from just under 100 a day. “We’ve frankly become an emergency room for mental health.”
Even so, the heightened anxiety, described by nearly two dozen Corona residents in interviews with The New York Times, belies a complicated reality.
In New York City, and across the country, Mr. Trump made significant gains in many working-class immigrant neighborhoods like Corona. He captured 46 percent of the national Latino vote on his way to victory and bucked conventional wisdom about Hispanics’ support of the Democratic Party.
Kamala Harris still won Corona with about 57 percent of the vote, but underperformed compared with Joseph R. Biden Jr. in 2020, who won the area with 77 percent of the vote. Mr. Trump garnered about 3,000 more votes in Corona in 2024 than in 2020, winning entire precincts and nearly doubling his vote share to 42 percent, up from 23 percent four years before.
Mr. Trump won over Hispanics who were upset about the economy, but also tapped into resentment among established immigrants over what they regarded as preferential treatment — including temporary legal status, work permits and free shelter — given to migrants who arrived during the Biden administration.
In New York City, that pent-up frustration led to intense friction amid a three-year influx of 230,000 migrants who spilled into Corona and other neighborhoods. Longtime residents — even undocumented immigrants who can’t vote — raised quality-of-life concerns that many attributed to the recent arrivals.
Business owners in Corona Plaza complained about an increase in homelessness and street vendors without licenses in recent years. Local officials and residents lamented excessive trash and flashes of violence among intoxicated men who they said created visible disorder that scared off customers. And a prostitution problem long plaguing parts of Roosevelt Avenue grew worse.
That all led Mayor Eric Adams, a Democrat, to deploy more police officers to the area and crack down on brothels and illegal vending last year, leading to a noticeable decline in both.
For some Corona residents, it was too little, too late.
Altagracia Fernandez, from the Dominican Republic, said the deteriorating conditions had nearly caused her to shutter the beauty salon she opened 35 years ago. Things got so bad, she said, that hosing down human excrement outside her shop became a regular morning chore.
“I always voted Democratic, but I couldn’t take it anymore,” said Ms. Fernandez, 63, who voted for Mr. Trump. “The situation got too severe. I’m fighting for what is mine,” she said, referring to her salon.
Pastor Victor Tiburcio, the spiritual leader of Aliento de Vida, a Pentecostal church on Corona Plaza with more than 2,500 congregants from 30 countries, has been grappling with those contradictions since Mr. Trump’s election.
On a recent Sunday, Mr. Tiburcio leaned on a message of hope. He urged worried churchgoers to be mindful of misinformation and not to fear calling 911 or going to the hospital.
“Don’t abstain from doing what you have to do out of fear for ICE,” he said in a crowded theater-turned-church, a glimmer of the vibrancy that has not been fully extinguished in the neighborhood. “Finding God is an SOS during these times.”
In an interview after the service, Mr. Tiburcio, who migrated from the Dominican Republic 27 years ago, reflected on what he said was the silver lining of Mr. Trump’s crackdown. Almost overnight, he said, the president’s tough talk had scared off unruly migrants whom the pastor blamed for “fetid” conditions in Corona and for tarnishing the working-class values that defined immigrants.
“Those people that arrived here in the past few years — and I can’t say all of them, because I’m an immigrant, too — but we noticed something weird,” said Mr. Tiburcio, referring to instances of loitering and public drinking.
“Once Trump came in, they disappeared,” he continued. “Immigrants should be welcomed, helped. The Bible says that. But the Bible does not say that an immigrant has a right to delinquency.”
Other immigrants, though uneasy about the high-profile crimes committed by some recent arrivals, were more wary of stoking rifts between recent immigrants and those who have been here longer.
“It’s not resentment,” said Faviana Linares, who migrated from Mexico nearly three decades ago. “You have to be very brave to leave everything behind and bring your family here. I admire those people.”
Ms. Linares, 47, left everything behind when she departed Puebla — so many people have migrated from the Mexican region that New York has become known as “Puebla York” — and settled in Corona. She has made a living cleaning apartments, initially for well below the minimum wage, while her husband works at restaurants. They are both undocumented, but their three children are U.S. citizens.
Like many mixed-status families, they have made emergency plans in case the parents are deported: Their 24-year-old daughter would become the guardian of the two other children.
Despite the ever-present possibility that the family will be separated — Ms. Linares has cousins who were deported — she said she has concentrated on transmitting hope to her children and neighbors amid the doom-and-gloom headlines.
Recently, that has meant channeling her energy into the immigrant advocacy group she belongs to, Make the Road New York, which opened a new office across from Corona Plaza in February, just as the neighborhood fell quiet.
“Our only crime was to cross that border,” Ms. Linares said. “It’s not fair to feel persecuted. All we came to do was to work with dignity.”
Alex Lemonides and Keith Collins contributed reporting.
Audio produced by Patricia Sulbarán.