How ICE arrests are creating 'economies of fear'

**Adrian Ma** (0:01)
NPR. Take a stroll through San Antonio's east side with James Norte, and what you'll find is a community with a lot of mom and pop businesses.

**James Norte** (0:13)
You will see everything from bike shops, antiques, to taquerias and lavendarios. But you'll also see this innovation happening, whether it be a small tech startup next to a bookstore.

**Wailin Wong** (0:24)
James heads up an economic development organization called San Antonio for Growth on the east side.

**James Norte** (0:29)
If you're looking for a community of opportunity, where you can live and work and play and pray, San Antonio, Texas is your town.

**Adrian Ma** (0:37)
Have you given that spiel before?

**James Norte** (0:39)
I've probably given a version of that spiel. See, you copied my element, right? So now I'm just like going off of vibes.

**Wailin Wong** (0:45)
You know what? It's working. Now I want to go antiquing while eating a taco and go to a bookstore in San Antonio.

**Adrian Ma** (0:51)
So do I. Let's make it happen.

**Wailin Wong** (0:52)
Yeah. Despite James' enthusiasm, he says one thing has cast a shadow over this mostly Latino community over the last year or so, and that is the growing presence of Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

**James Norte** (1:04)
For example, I have a friend who mows lawns, and so he is a US citizen. He does not speak Spanish, but he is Latino. And so he is actively afraid that because of how he looks, he might one day be mowing a lawn and could be picked up by ice.

**Wailin Wong** (1:23)
This is The Indicator from Planet Money. I'm Waylon Wong.

**Adrian Ma** (1:26)
And I'm Adrian Ma.
Stories like this are not just happening in San Antonio, of course. While ICE may not be making headlines like it was earlier this year, it has been quietly ramping up arrests. An analysis by UC Berkeley and UCLA's Deportation Data Project finds that ICE arrested nearly 50,000 people in July, making it the biggest month for ICE arrests since President Trump took office again.

**Wailin Wong** (1:49)
The White House says his deportation strategy will help the economy.
But new research suggests it's doing the opposite. Today on the show, how Trump's aggressive enforcement is creating what one academic researcher calls an economy of fear, and not just for immigrants.

**Adrian Ma** (2:10)
Before Trump 2.0, ICE used to operate in a much more limited way.

**Zeke Hernandez** (2:14)
If there was someone, a business that was suspected of hiring undocumented workers, they would go to raid that business, but it was kind of a one-off event.

**Wailin Wong** (2:22)
This is Zeke Hernandez, a business professor at the University of Pennsylvania. He's been studying how this new brand of ICE enforcement is affecting local businesses.

**Zeke Hernandez** (2:31)
Now what's different is that ICE is a permanent roving presence in a community. ICE goes and stays, and stays for weeks, months.

**Wailin Wong** (2:40)
That's happened in big cities like LA, Chicago, and Charlotte, as well as small and mid-sized ones like Minneapolis, Nashville, and New Orleans.

**Adrian Ma** (2:48)
And as a business professor, Zeke started wondering what was happening to commerce in places that saw this ramped up enforcement.

**Zeke Hernandez** (2:56)
And I thought, let me get the data.

**Wailin Wong** (2:59)
He started by scraping millions of news articles from early 2024 to early 2026 That allowed him to identify where ICE arrests had taken place, down to the level of an address.

**Adrian Ma** (3:10)
Then he got two more data sets, one for consumer credit and debit card purchases, and another showing foot traffic data collected from cell phones. And these data sets allowed him to see how much consumers were spending and which businesses they were visiting.

**Zeke Hernandez** (3:23)
What's remarkable about these data is I can track five million businesses every day. And it's very granular. You know, Molly's coffee shop in your neighborhood, the Starbucks in your neighborhood, the Walmart or Target, the car dealership, the construction sites.

**Wailin Wong** (3:39)
When Zeke put these data sources together, ICE activity, consumer spending, and foot traffic, what emerged was a clear pattern.

**Zeke Hernandez** (3:46)
When ICE shows up, businesses experience a significant decline in foot traffic and a significant decline in spending.

**Wailin Wong** (3:54)
Specifically, a 3% decline in foot traffic to workplaces and retailers, and a 7% decline in consumer spending between 2024 and Trump's first year in office.

**Adrian Ma** (4:05)
Now, a 7% decline in spending might not sound like a lot at first blush, but think about it this way. If consumer spending all over the US dropped by 7% over the course of a year, we might start throwing around the word recession.