Spending fell further than footfall in the neighborhoods ICE raided

The spending drop runs more than twice the size of the footfall drop ^[20]. Average spend per visit in raided areas works out about 3.5% lower ^[19]. The customers who still came in bought less than before. Measured against 2024 levels rather than week to week, the declines were 2.9% in visits and 6.9% in spending ^[5].

The shock arrives on both sides of the same store. Hernandez found fewer workers showing up for shifts as well as fewer shoppers coming through the door ^[7]. Scheduling is the first lever most operators reach for when weekly sales fall by that much, and at a site already short of staff it cuts into the capacity that is left. The alternative is to carry the labour and absorb the margin.

Hernandez's data does not sort the exposure into immigrant-heavy commercial districts, the kind any siting team can identify from census data. "Nobody is immune from the punch, which is another way in which this is completely unprecedented," he said ^[9]. He said he expected a decline, given how aggressive the crackdown has been, and was surprised by its depth and breadth ^[22].

The figure in circulation is the top of a range. Hernandez's estimate runs from $3 billion to $14 billion for the first year ^[2], the top end is 4.7 times the bottom ^[21], and the $14 billion end is the one being quoted ^[1].

Local tallies point the same way in units that do not compare with each other. Los Angeles County reported more than $3 million in losses over a two-week period of raids ^[12], and Little Village, a commercial district in Chicago, reported yearly revenue declines of 50% ^[13].

Hernandez also coded more than 46,000 news articles for language in six categories, among them fear and hiding, work absenteeism and business closure ^[14]. A story out of Charlotte, North Carolina, that he cites reported that "Weeks later, the sidewalks of Central Avenue are still uncharacteristically quiet" ^[15].

For the quarter, this is a variance problem. Over a longer horizon it is a baseline problem: the raid schedule is not forecastable from outside, and because the declines did not dissipate across the study window, a site in a raided area is better modelled at a lower run rate than as a one-week dip ^[6]. Wharton describes the paper, "ICE-ing the Economy: Immigration Enforcement Under Trump 2.0 and Local Economic Activity," as believed to be the first of its kind ^[17]. Hernandez said his research is neither partisan nor an argument for zero immigration enforcement ^[16].