The two-and-a-half mile stretch of University Avenue that runs through City Heights is a testament to the cultures and countries from which residents of the San Diego community hail.
On the west end: a Mexican bakery where the smell of pan dulce wafts from dawn to dusk, a Salvadorean eatery slinging pupusas; an older woman selling tamales from a pushcart, a small line gathered on the sidewalk.
On the east end: Men sit in plastic chairs outside of a notary and sip Somali tea from styrofoam cups; red paper lanterns at a Buddhist temple sway in the breeze; a young server in an Ethiopian restaurant peruses her phone, waiting for the evening rush to begin.
More than 30 languages and dozens of dialects are spoken across the fewer than seven square miles that make up City Heights. Over the decades, waves of immigrants from Southeast Asia, East Africa and Latin America have settled in among more than 70,000 residents.
Some call it the “Ellis Island of San Diego.”
But in recent months, a hush has fallen over the neighborhood’s streets, some community members said. As President Donald Trump’s push for mass deportations reaches its most intense escalation yet, many residents will tell you: People don’t go out anymore.
In July, the latest month for which data is available, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested almost 2,000 people in San Diego and Imperial counties and nearly 50,000 across the U.S., the highest monthly total of Trump’s second term. Most people arrested that month had no criminal convictions or pending charges.
While the agency has not provided neighborhood data, a string of ICE incidents in City Heights late this summer brought renewed attention to this lower-income, higher-density area.
Aggressive arrests near schools, along busy thoroughfares and in popular shopping areas — videos of which have gained thousands of views online — are sending fears soaring.
“This is public terror,” said Diana Ross, who has worked in the area for 16 years and leads a community organizing and advocacy nonprofit known by its acronym, Mid-City CAN.
There, amid the rainbow of storefronts and multilingual business signs, City Heights is confronting a question likely to play out in immigrant communities across the country: What happens when a place celebrated for its diversity is targeted, on some level, because of it?
“If there’s an ideal version of this country — and I want to believe that there is — I believe it exists right here,” San Diego City Councilmember Sean Elo-Rivera said during a rally protesting ICE arrests last month.
In the days leading up to the rally, ICE arrested a mother and father from Haiti just after the couple dropped off their two kids at school and detained two U.S. citizens after tense confrontations near a busy shopping center on Fairmount and University Avenue, the heart of City Heights.
Speaking from the same intersection the next day, Elo-Rivera told the hundreds gathered that his office received multiple reports of federal agents stopping a high school girl on her way to class that week.
“When they searched her bag and found her school ID, they sent her on her way and told her she was lucky,” the councilmember said at the rally.
But in this community, where generations of newcomers have arrived with little and built lives with hard work and grit, fear over the immigration crackdown is only part of the story.
“The bigger question is what comes after that,” Elo-Rivera said.
In some ways, City Heights residents are already answering that question.
Volunteers bag diapers and canned goods at a nearby church to deliver to families too afraid to leave their homes. An immigrant mom arrested by ICE this year lets former detainees with nowhere else to go stay with her.
“They’re tough” said Maria Gutierrez, 75, at a food pantry in City Heights last month. She spoke to inewsource in Spanish.
“Ahí no entra migración fácilmente.”
Immigration authorities don’t get in easily, she said.
The harmony and the anxiety
On an overcast and unseasonably warm September afternoon, Diana Ross stared outside the window of her fifth-floor office in City Heights
“Can you hear it?” she asked.
The rumble and hiss of the city bus arriving at its stop on Fairmount and University avenues as people spill onto the sidewalk.
The ringing bell of a paletero pushing an ice cream cart down the block. The Cuban salsa classic “La Cartera” playing over speakers at an auto mechanic, interrupted by occasional drilling.
The chatter of teenagers fresh out of class. Police sirens. Heavy construction equipment.
To Ross, this is the soundtrack of daily life in busy City Heights — a cacophony of sounds as layered and multidimensional as the immigrant community itself.
How City Heights became an immigrant enclave is a story that echoes that of similar communities across the country.
Once the independent city of East San Diego, the area was annexed by San Diego in 1923 and came to be called City Heights. Dense housing development offered affordable homes to immigrants fleeing conflict and war in their home countries.
In the ‘70s, Vietnamese immigrants leaving behind the war and, later, the Fall of Saigon were first brought to the U.S. Marine base at Camp Pendleton before moving into City Heights, joined by Cambodians and Laotians. Refugee aid groups helped newcomers to the area.
Beginning in the ‘80s, East African refugees escaping violence in Ethiopia, Eritrea, Somalia and Sudan arrived in City Heights. Some Somali immigrants had initially trained at Camp Pendleton before settling into the neighborhood.
Civil wars in Central America pushed migration toward the U.S. while Mexicans joined established communities. In recent years, migrants from the Middle East and Haiti have become some of the newest arrivals.
By the late ‘80s, Ross said City Heights had become a “forgotten community.”
“White flight” accelerated in City Heights, driven by growing crime, falling investment in urban communities and suburbanization.
A city planning document from 1984 put some of the community’s most pressing issues succinctly: “This growth has exacerbated the lack of public facilities. Schools are now crowded. With the exception of a few canyons, open space is non-existent, in addition to the area being deficient in parks and recreation facilities.”
When development did happen, it sometimes came at a cost to residents.
In the ‘90s, more than 1,100 businesses and homes across eight blocks in City Heights were bulldozed to make way for Interstate 15.
The next decade, prominent philanthropist Sol Price poured tens of millions of dollars into revitalizing the community, loaning money to the school district, the city and a private developer. But the development didn’t come without controversy.
A new commercial area being planned at the time nearly excluded a medical clinic used by low-income immigrants and residents in favor of a Trader Joe’s, according to the documentary “The Price of Renewal” released in 2006 by the director Paul Espinoza.
Today, the community is celebrated by local leaders for its rich and diverse array of cultures, but City Heights still has continued challenges.
Gentrification threatens to displace lower-income residents as outsiders move in looking for cheaper rent. Meanwhile, a recent report from the San Diego Fair Housing Lab found that the neighborhood had the lowest “opportunity tier” score, a state classification system based on school performance, employment, poverty rate and environmental quality.
The report also found that 15% of homes had more people living in them than they were designed for, almost triple the city of San Diego’s rate.
A surging immigration crackdown may just be the latest challenge the community takes on.
Inside of a dimly-lit restaurant on University Avenue, a woman going by her nickname Dulce has been selling Mexican candies, bracelets with Catholic iconography and bagged peanuts for six years. With black and gray curly hair and pink lipstick, she brightens the corner of the room where she sits, smiling at passing patrons.
Her eyes light up as she describes the “harmony” she sees in City Heights. Its residents, in buying her wares, have helped her raise money for sick family members and grandchildren.
But that has changed recently.
“There aren’t people like before,” she said.
She’s not the only one noticing emptier streets.
At the El Super, one of the area’s main grocery stores, rows of freshly misted produce are labeled in Spanish first, then English, and seashell-shaped pastries glow in the fluorescent lighting behind clear plastic doors. A security supervisor said fewer customers are shopping lately.
“I don’t really know how El Super is gonna stay open,” the supervisor said.
Noelia Martinez, the namesake of Noelia’s, a piñata and party store on University Avenue, has spent some 40 years in City Heights. With more ICE agents visible in the last few months, it has “changed drastically,” she said, speaking to inewsource in Spanish.
She sees it most on her drive home, when pedestrians would fill the sidewalks after work hours. Now, residents she describes as “people who strive everyday to get ahead” prefer not to go out. Celebrations that would be incomplete without a piñata are postponed.
“It’s affecting us a lot as business owners,” she said.
‘We come and we feel safe’
By early afternoon, the sunlight lands just right to illuminate the yellow and green stained glass windows of a Haitian church in City Heights. One recent Sunday, the light enveloped the back of the room, falling on rows of mostly empty cream-colored leather chairs.
Once, Pastor Johny Oxeda said, the church would regularly fill with 400 to 600 congregants for Sunday service. Last month, only dozens showed up.
For some immigrants, even those with legal status, the fear of an immigration arrest has transformed even small decisions like going to church into critical ones. Haitians have become the latest, most visible group to be targeted.
In July, the U.S. Supreme Court allowed the Trump administration to end a temporary protection program, known as TPS, for Haitian immigrants. The program had allowed almost 350,000 Haitians to live and work in the U.S. since 2010, when a devastating earthquake ravaged the Caribbean nation.
Today, Haiti is still gripped by rampant gang violence, but the Trump administration argued that conditions in the country no longer qualify for TPS and that the program was meant to be temporary. His administration said the same for the 12 other countries, including Afghanistan, Syria, Honduras and Venezuela, in ending their TPS designations.
Soon after the Supreme Court decision, word — and videos — of ICE arrests of Haitians began to fill social media feeds.
In August, an Instagram influencer posted a video showing a San Diego police officer holding a 1-year-old girl who had been left behind in a car after an apparent immigration operation involving a Haitian man. A spokesperson for the San Diego Police Department said federal officials called them to take the child.
The next month, another video captured an ICE officer detaining one of the two Haitian parents who were arrested after dropping off their 2- and 5-year-old kids at John Marshall Elementary School.
In the video, the officer is on top of the woman’s body, holding her to the ground in an open doorway of a home under construction. The woman ran there after ICE stopped her and her husband in their car. Later in the video, the woman, who is barefoot, is seen struggling with an officer before falling to the ground.
ABC 10 reported that the school district had to arrange for the children to stay with another guardian after the parents’ arrest. The parents’ Toyota Prius was left on the side of the road, photos of their children stuck to the dashboard.
A statement attributed to an unnamed spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security said both parents entered the U.S. legally in 2022 but “overstayed their welcome,” without providing specifics.
Homeland Security claimed the woman “bit an officer’s hand while continuing to violently resist arrest,” but federal court records do not show that she has been charged with a crime.
In court, the woman said she ran from officers not knowing they were ICE, because they didn’t identify themselves, and she was scared. A judge later ordered her released from immigration detention after finding she had no criminal record.
Homeland Security did not provide details on the incident involving the one-year-old girl, but said that ICE does not separate families or target schools for immigration enforcement. “ICE is not going to schools to arrest children—we are protecting children,” the agency said.
Some local officials disagree.
More than a week after the parents’ arrest, a Democratic group of U.S. representatives from San Diego and the state’s two U.S. senators issued a statement calling on Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin to “end all ICE activity in the immediate vicinity of schools and college campuses, particularly during school arrival and dismissal times.”
Mullin has yet to respond, according to an aide for Rep. Juan Vargas.
At the Haitian church, pastor Rony Gilot said the congregation will have to find new ways to spread God’s message to the community with fewer people coming to church.
One recent morning in September, Gilot said he gave rides to a handful of people who were too afraid to take the bus to Sunday service.
Among the congregants that day was Witchy Jean Philippe. He arrived in the U.S. as a teenager 10 years ago and came to San Diego after enlisting in the military. He has legal status, but he knows others who are “going through the crisis.”
He still makes it to church on Sundays.
“It’s like the only place we don’t let the world take away from us,” Philippe said. “That’s the only place that we come and we feel safe.”
That Sunday service was the last that Philippe would attend for a while.
The week after, he would be deployed with the U.S. Navy.
A rallying point
Iris Contreras has lived in City Heights for nearly 30 years.
She crossed into the U.S. from Mexico alone at 17. Now she has a pending visa application, is a single mother to three U.S. citizen children, one of whom has special needs, and has volunteered with multiple schools in her neighborhood for decades.
Lanyards bearing her volunteer IDs hang proudly next to keys and trinkets in her dining room.
“It’s something that really motivates me, taking care of children, especially the little ones,” Contreras said in Spanish. “Especially now that my own grandchild is in school.”
She never imagined being targeted for deportation, until ICE officers arrested her steps from her front door in February and she endured what she described as a traumatic weeklong detention.
When she was granted bond and just before getting released, she gave her contact information to several women she befriended inside. She told them to call her if they needed help.
Soon, two of them did.
Contreras picked them up one night at 11 from the detention center and brought them home to help arrange flights back to their homes in the U.S.
The calls didn’t stop there.
“Two weeks later, another sister called me: ‘I’m getting out tomorrow,’” Contreras recalled.
“I said, ‘Don’t worry, dear. Just tell me what time.’”
As much as the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown is sending fear into communities, it may also be activating them. In City Heights and elsewhere across the country, networks of everyday residents have formed to bring aid to immigrants, alert about ICE arrests and push for greater protection from government officials.
Last summer, as masked federal agents with battle fatigues and long guns carried out dramatic operations across the U.S., a community patrol group formed in City Heights and volunteers began driving around looking for sleek government vehicles and alerting those in the area about ICE officers nearby.
Abdi Ali of Discount Grocery Market on University and Estrella avenues, said while most Somali immigrants in City Heights have lived here a long time and have legal status, those who are not U.S. citizens fear ICE officers could come for them.
Ali said one man asked him to come along as he drove his two kids, a kindergartener and a fifth grader, to school. Ali sat in the passenger seat and the father stayed behind the wheel.
“I brought them inside,” Ali said. “He didn’t want to walk outside.”
One recent Saturday morning, dozens of families with small children, couples and friends trickled into a parking lot where the Employee Rights Center, a nonprofit for immigrants and low-wage workers, was holding its monthly food pantry and legal clinic.
By 9 a.m., most of the folding chairs set up for the occasion under a shady tent were filled.
Alor Calderon, the director of the Employee Rights Center, said attendance at the event hasn’t dropped significantly despite heightened fears that hit close to home.
“We have been confronting this for so long,” Calderon said. “It’s not something we see in other families and other places. It’s us.”
For many immigrants without legal status, even those who have lived in the U.S. for decades and have no criminal record, immigration law provides few options to legalize their status.
These immigrants build lives in the U.S. amid everpresent uncertainty and changing priorities, at the whim of each new presidential administration, sometimes facing increased enforcement.
That push and pull builds resilience in places like City Heights, pushing some people past fear and into resistance, Calderon said.
“Over the years you start to challenge what you see. Like, ‘I feel that fear and I’m not satisfied,’” Calderon said.
“So you start thinking about what to do about it.”
