A year after ICE raided L.A.’s Fashion District, a couple fight to save their dress shops

On a recent Saturday morning, Joel Galvez cracked open a spiral notebook and scribbled in the date and a prayer: “Dios bendiga este día. Amen.” God bless this day.

The prayer appears on every page, along with the daily log of dresses he’d sold at one of the clothing stores he owns in the Los Angeles Fashion District. In years past, Joel would note dozens sold.

But a year ago, the Trump administration targeted the shopping district, a retail hub driven mostly by immigrant business owners and Latino shoppers, as part of its mass immigration crackdown.

Federal immigration agents targeted at least one business here, arresting more than 40 immigrant workers and triggering civil unrest as they carried out sweeps across Southern California.

Joel Galvez reviews sales numbers in a spiral notebook at the top of which he wrote“Dios bendiga este dia Doming 22 de Marzo. Amen!!!” (God bless this day, Sunday March 22, 2026. Amen!!!)

The effect on Joel’s store, and others owned by members of the Galvez family, was immediate. The stores sell dresses for proms, special occasions and quinceañeras, a Latin American rite of passage celebrating a young girl’s 15th birthday and her transition to adulthood.

Joel, 41, owns two stores that cater to women. His wife, Leonor Torres, 56, has a shop that specializes in quinceañera dresses and, with Joel, she co-owns a second quinceañera shop.

After the raids, the quinceañera shops, normally packed with girls and doting mothers on weekends, often sat empty. Customers called to cancel ball gown orders.

Saturdays were once the busiest days, and Joel’s two shops would each sell 50 dresses or more. Now they might sell 10 each. Leonor went from selling 20 dresses a week to around three, maybe more on good days.

The raids also affected small businesses orbiting around quinceañeras: makers of embossed invitations, sellers of tiaras and crowns, choreographers, caterers, florists and more.

Leonor said her sister and brother, who co-own a banquet hall in the city of Commerce, soon lost a year’s worth of bookings. Along with his men’s store, her brother also owns a limousine business. That saw cancellations too.

It didn’t help that a month before the June raids, Joel and Leonor had opened the second quinceañera shop. The monthly rent hovers around $11,000.

‘It’s been a real struggle’

The Fashion District, frequented by nearly 2 million people a year, has deep ties to L.A.’s immigrant communities. It is a sprawling network of independent retail and wholesale businesses, including a cluster of 150 shops that make up its main attraction, Santee Alley.

Latinos account for more than 60% of the shoppers, according to the L.A. Fashion District Business Improvement District’s annual report. In all, the raids caused a nearly 13% decline in annual visits, the report found.

Fewer shoppers means the Galvezes now have a surplus of quinceañera ball gowns. Their debt, they say, has jumped from $20,000 to about $150,000.

“It’s been a real struggle,” Joel said.

So on the last week of prom one recent Saturday morning, the pair were praying for a good day.

“Hopefully, we’ll make some sales today.”

Leanor Torres, right, expresses her frustration and fear to her husband, Joel Galvez, left, in the midst of a very slow day as the couple try to keep their business afloat. Rent is soon due and they can afford to make only a partial payment. “I don’t want to stress too much,” Leonor said. “Six months without sales. It drains you.”

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1. Joel Galvez, right, heads to his warehouse with an assistant to collect dresses for delivery. 2. Leonor Torres hoists a dress as she closes shop after another slow day of sales.

Leonor hoped for the same. A few days before, thieves had broken into her store at night, stealing about $8,000 in cash that included the store’s monthly $5,500 rent.

“We’re in survival mode,” she said. “If we can sell enough to pay rent, I’ll be happy.”

The uncertainty unleashed by the immigration raids threatened more than weekly sales. It was trying to unravel years of sacrifice that the couple had made since immigrating to the United States from El Salvador.

It was also threatening to split them apart.

‘I don’t want to bury you’

Joel had no desire to come to the United States.

He was born into a middle-class family in El Salvador and attended a school that emphasized discipline. He planned to attend the University of El Salvador and study electrical engineering.

But in the 1990s, under the Clinton administration, the U.S. began deporting a record number of Salvadorans back to the country, which had not recovered from its bloody civil war that claimed an estimated 75,000 lives, if not more.

An untold number of those deportees were convicted criminals and members of Mara Salvatrucha, or MS-13. Salvadoran refugees had formed the gang in response to the violence they faced from street gangs in Los Angeles.

But the deportations backfired on the U.S. The street gang flourished and expanded throughout Central America, contributing to decades of violence, extortion and insecurity that triggered waves of migration to the U.S.

Joel said gang members use death threats to force young people to join. It wasn’t long before they came for him too.

“If you don’t join us, then you’re a rival, and we’ll have to kill you,” they told him.

Joel refused, putting his life at risk.

Joel Galvez scrambles to load a pile of mannequins into his truck he purchased from another business that recently closed. Despite the recent slowdown, he is looking to expand his businesses.

His mother, fearful for her youngest son, pleaded with him to flee the country.

“I don’t want to bury you,” he recalled her saying.

His sister already lived in the United States and, at her behest, he joined her in November 2005, entering the U.S. illegally and settling in Los Angeles. He got a job as a dishwasher at an Indian restaurant in Beverly Hills.

Almost immediately, he wanted to become a cook. He bought an Indian cuisine book in MacArthur Park and studied it. He’d force himself into the kitchen, cooking orders before he was shooed away. But he was undeterred.

“Little by little, they let me stay in the kitchen longer and longer,” Joel said. “It got to the point that they were calling me in to help cook on busy days.”

In March 2016, when the owners closed the restaurant, Joel decided to turn a setback into an opportunity.

Working in Beverly Hills had shaped the future he envisioned for himself, and he dreamed of becoming as successful as the homeowners on Hillcrest Road. He resolved to open a business, to be his own boss.

Joel Galvez pays a temporary employee after tallying the week’s receipts at the store.

One day he wandered into the Fashion District and bumped into a childhood friend who told him there was money to be made selling dresses. Using $25,000 he had saved as a cook, he opened Galvez Fashion.

Joel said he was mostly breaking even and barely had enough money for food. At lunch, he could afford only corn on a stick. He chuckled at the thought.

“I would devour them,” he said.

From across the street, Leonor watched with amusement.

“He was eating it like, ‘Wow, this is the best corn I ever had,’” she said, laughing. “Little did I know that this dude was hungry.”

Leonor learned from others that the man she always saw eating corn was also from El Salvador. One day, he crossed the street and they began talking. She and her staff offered to help him. If someone bought a quinceañera dress at her store, they would tell the mothers to shop for their gowns at his store.

Leonor had not seen herself owning a quinceañera business but was thrust into it. She was serving as a case manager for disabled students for the Montebello Unified School District when she was let go due to budget cuts. She was 25 at the time.

Leonor Torres, right, assists Kailey Gutierrez of Riverside with a prom dress in her store.

Her brother opened a quinceañera shop in East Los Angeles and told her it was hers to operate. She moved the store to downtown Los Angeles, then the Fashion District, where she’s been for 11 years.

It would years before Leonor and Joel would marry, but as their relationship grew, so did their businesses. Then came COVID-19.

Thanks to rent forgiveness and government help, their businesses survived, and when the pandemic abated, business began to pick up. Then came President Trump.

‘I can’t give up’

The Galvezes were unfazed by Trump’s promise to carry out mass deportations. They figured he would target only immigrants with criminal convictions.

Then came the June 6 raids. One unfolded a few blocks from the couple’s stores. Customers stopped coming.

“It was dead here,” Joel recalled. “That’s when our struggle began.”

For months, federal immigration agents had carried out rolling patrols, targeting mostly Latinos, regardless of their immigration status. Immigrants and U.S.-born Latinos were detained on the street, at work sites, swap meets and parking lots of Home Depot.

Shoppers stroll past Mimi’s Fashion, a dress shop recently open for business in the Fashion District on a Sunday in March. A store that Joel and Leonor opened together has a monthly rent of around $11,000.

Joel feared he would be detained and deported even though he had a pending immigration case as he sought to obtain a green card.

“I didn’t want to go out,” he said. “The fear was that if they stop me, they’ll ask if I’m a U.S. citizen and my answer is going to be no and they’re going to take me, rather than listen to me about my pending case.”

The Galvezes said they stopped eating out and ended their monthly trips to the Morongo Casino. If Joel needed to run to Home Depot or fill his car up with gas, he’d go at night, when it seemed raids weren’t going on.

Leonor debated whether to carry documentation, even though she is a U.S. citizen.

As sales slumped, the couple fell behind on rent and had to cut staff by half, from four to two in some cases.

The financial stress created additional pressure on their relationship. They got into small arguments about how to improve sales. Sometimes, Leonor said, she went to her mother’s house to avoid arguing with her husband, especially when he sat in silence, thinking.

“Sometimes when I’m alone, I cry,” Joel said. “But you have to keep faith.”

He tries to remind himself that the raids will someday end.

“Everything is going to be OK, these moments don’t last forever,” he said.

Leonor agreed.

“We’ve been through a lot, but we survived,” she said. “I can’t give up.”

Mimi’s Fashion is busy with customers seeking prom dresses after many slow months.

‘I know I’m going to make it’

The couple said the raids eased after federal immigration agents killed Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minnesota. Their deaths set off nationwide protests and led to the removal of Kristi Noem as secretary of Homeland Security, as well as Greg Bovino, then-commander at large of U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

Facing an uncertain future, Joel Galvez drives along Maple Avenue in Los Angeles’ Fashion District, where his once-thriving businesses are fighting economic and social headwinds.

But not long after, federal immigration agents returned to the Fashion District. No one appeared to have been taken, but the presence of federal agents drove off customers again.

The couple said they were recovering from that scare when, a few weeks ago, Trump’’s border advisor, Tom Homan, announced that there would be another wave of mass deportations. They were also dismayed and confused by the news that green card applicants would possibly have to leave the country.

His announcement came as prom season was underway. Business hasn’t bounced to pre-raid levels, but on that recent Saturday, Joel hoped for the best.

And the customers came, with Joel ringing up purchases as cumbia music played in the background. Next door, his wife also took down orders, some for quinceañeras for next year, or as Leonor saw it, hope.

Leonor Torres rolls the front store gate shut after a slow day. Weeks after the ICE raids in Minneapolis resulting in the shooting death of Renee Good, people stopped coming to the Fashion District. “There’s a glimpse of hope,” said Leonor. “Then that happens. Now people are scared again.”

By 2 p.m. she had sold five quinceañera dresses and her husband had 10 dress orders. One order was for six dresses for a quinceañera and the rest for prom and a wedding. By the end of the day, he would sell 10 more orders and about 15 at his second store.

Standing inside her store, surrounded by pastel ballgowns decorated with lace and rhinestones, Leonor felt optimistic.

“I know I’m going to make it,” she said. “I know I’m going to survive and at the end of the month, I’ll have money for bread.” Dios bendiga este día.