Life during wartime in New Orleans as feds terrorize Latinos who saved a city

KENNER, La. — When the day New Orleans had feared for weeks finally came on Wednesday, it began with a lie as wide as the meandering Mississippi River.

A port city somehow dubbed the Big Easy despite its centuries of big trouble woke up to a frigid blast of Arctic air and a claim from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security that local immigration raids it’s named the “Catahoula Crunch” would narrowly target “criminal illegal aliens roaming free thanks to sanctuary policies …”

Within a couple of hours — in raids that were, in fact, wildly untargeted — SUV caravans bearing masked, green-uniformed U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents stormed into parking lots and at suburban Home Depots and Lowe’s, blitzkrieged Latino restaurants and a car wash on a busy strip near the airport, and cruised neighborhoods looking for roofers to arrest.

On a hunch, I drove to a Home Depot here in Kenner at lunchtime and found them: a platoon of maybe 15 masked Border Patrol officers in olive-drab uniforms and dark baseball caps wrapping up a sweep of the parking lot, strutting past the piled-up orange shopping carts and ignoring a film crew shouting, “Why are you here?”

Ricardo Ramírez, a 50-year-old construction worker and a U.S. citizen, had just pulled into the Home Depot lot to return some items when, as he told me a few minutes later, one of the officers came up to him and barked, “Which country? Are you a citizen?” Ramírez carries his passport because “it’s so crazy what’s going on that I have to, just because I look Spanish” — and was surprised when the officers moved past without asking to see it.

But at that moment, just two miles away in a suburban subdivision in North Kenner, citizen volunteers raced to find another 12-agent Border Patrol team raiding a two-story home with white siding and green shutters. As an agent trained a sniper rifle on them, two Latino workers who’d been replacing a metal roof damaged in a recent hurricane stood atop the home, hands in the air.

Zoe Higgins, a 33-year-old social worker who volunteered with the group Unión Migrante to track the immigration raids and watched the tense drama, told me, “I could only imagine how they were feeling, and I was filled with anger.” But as more and more citizens and some journalists crowded the narrow, one-way Louisiana State Drive, they saw the agents leave — the rooftop workers spared, but two other crew members handcuffed and whisked away, destination unknown.

This is life during wartime in America in 2025, as an iconic U.S. city that celebrates itself as a boiling gumbo pot of Spanish-style architecture, Louisiana French, and spicy Creole culture suddenly finds itself under a terrorizing siege from the same federal government that promised billions so “New Orleans will rise again” after the devastation of Hurricane Katrina 20 years ago.

Heard about Los Angeles? Heard about Chicago? Heard about Charlotte, N.C.? The 10-month-old Donald Trump regime has stumbled into a playbook for the xenophobic mass deportation drive it promised voters in 2024 — an “American Counter-Revolutionary Guard” of around 250 masked Border Patrol officers, led by the arrogance and telegenic evil of their commander, Greg Bovino, rampaging the Lowe’s parking lots and back alleys of one U.S. city before caravanning in their black SUVs to terrorize the next.

I flew from Philadelphia into Greater New Orleans Tuesday afternoon, just in time for the launch of the so-called Catahoula Crunch, because I wanted to see what it looked and felt like when the U.S. government sends a commando squad to wage war on one of its own cities. That meant spurning the beignets and darkened French Quarter jazz clubs of my 10 prior visits here and instead embedding on Williams Boulevard in Kenner, where former Pizza Huts are now taquerias with twinkling white lights and mariachi-style music is pumped into the markets.

This is the New Orleans tourists only see speeding past in their airport Ubers, where in low-slung brick homes under the constant roar of jet engines, the Latino community has nearly tripled since 2000 — swelled by Mexican and Central American workers who labored around-the-clock on the massive post-Katrina reconstruction. That narrative of communal pride has been swamped by a palpable fear that this week pervades Kenner, where nearly a third of residents are Latino, yet the police chief is pro-immigration raids.

By the end of the day, observers tallied around 12 to 14 apparent arrests. There was no evidence that any of these people were on the list of 10 most-wanted actual criminals Homeland Security pictured along with Wednesday’s launch — catnip for the Fox News audience clinging to the delusional Big Lie that Team Bovino is only targeting bad guys.

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Instead, his secret police just swarmed wherever they could find the most brown-skinned people — the Home Depot lot, a white van filled with contractors, Mexican restaurants — and acted like the gun-toting officer in the recent movie Civil War who famously asked, “What kind of American are you?”

In Bovino’s past operations, only a fraction of those arrested and facing deportation had criminal records — just 44 out of 370 in last month’s Charlotte op — and there was no evidence that Louisiana’s “Catahoula Crunch” would be any different.

Yet, the real terror in Kenner is what you don’t see — a vibrant community that overnight has vanished underground.

Shoppers who enter the Latino-oriented Ideal Market on the Williams strip are greeted with a sign: “STOP: NO ICE ACCESS IN THIS BUSINESS.” Yet, at midmorning Wednesday, there was just one shopper in the entire supermarket, outnumbered by workers stocking bins of green and yellow plantains and glistening produce that looked utterly untouched.

“A lot of people are staying home, not going out,” Ramírez, the worker questioned by Border Patrol, told me. “We work in construction, and we are shorthanded. We know people don’t want to go to work. They are afraid.”

Several local volunteers shared the same thought: that these “papers, please” random raids and the families hiding behind closed blinds and locked doors remind them of the stories they’ve read about Jews who lived in constant fear of Nazi raids in the 1930s and ‘40s.

“I keep thinking about Anne Frank, who was kept alive with her family by a good friend named Miep,” said the Rev. Jane Mauldin, a Unitarian minister who was one of the volunteers who raced to the North Kenner raid on the roofers, referring to the Jewish teen who eventually died in a German concentration camp in 1945, and her Dutch protector. “I keep in my head saying, ‘What would Miep do?’”

School attendance is down, and church pews are empty. Volunteers are collecting food for families that have suddenly gone into a COVID-level lockdown, and almost everyone who is out and about has a friend or coworker who abruptly went into hiding when they heard Border Patrol had targeted New Orleans.

“There is a good friend of mine who hasn’t left her house in a week,” Mauldin said. “Her children are not going to school because of the fear … And she has all the right papers, but she’s not a citizen, so there is a possibility that she could be kidnapped and taken away and never see her children again.”

The Rev. Luis Duarte, the 33-year-old Colombian-born priest at St. Jerome Roman Catholic Church in Kenner, told me that attendance at weekend Masses offered in Spanish has plunged, and a family that for weeks had been planning a joyous quinceañera for their daughter’s 15th birthday called it off. “They are fearful,” he told me, adding, “Not fearful because they are criminal, but because they are Hispanics.”

Duarte was one of many who spoke of the unbelievable irony that the very people who came to the United States with hammers and 16-hours-a-day energy to rescue New Orleans in its darkest hour, after flooding from 2005’s Hurricane Katrina swamped thousands of homes and killed 1,833 people, are now seeing their new world turned upside down by the same U.S. government that vowed to rebuild the Crescent City.

Duarte said his parishioners have told him of yard signs that welcomed the 2005 influx in Spanish — the same language government agents are now using to profile those they seek to handcuff and whisk away. “So when I see what’s going on now …” the priest said, then paused. “Yeah, why?”

Yeah, why? This feels like a domestic Vietnam in reverse: We saved the town in order to destroy it. You can glean clues from the way Bovino and his cosplay tin soldiers preened for the prearranged cameras on Canal Street Wednesday afternoon, or the twisted name for his operation. The Catahoula leopard dog is the official state canine, revered by Louisiana’s early settlers for their ability to herd cattle and hunt down wild boars. The “crunch” is the sound of jaws ripping flesh. It’s a terrible echo for a place that once sicced bloodhounds on its enslaved people.

The cruelty was the point in 1825. The cruelty is the point in 2025. The day laborers outside Lowe’s, just wanting to hammer shingles onto your roof, are the modern-day Christians thrown to Bovino’s cowardly lions in a Roman circus for Fox News couch potatoes. Same as the Somali Americans in Minneapolis, whom Trump was slandering on Wednesday as “garbage.” The worst Americans can revel in the latest model of white supremacy while their Dear Leader is robbing them blind and stashing the profits in crypto or the Trump Plaza Kazakhstan or whatever.

But every day, more and more people are catching onto the scam and asking what Miep would do. “This hits very deep and very personal for many of us — in my neighborhood, almost every roof had to be replaced,” Mauldin said. “The men who were willing to go on the roof in 100-degree heat in September 2005 were not white, not Black — mostly, they were the Latino men who rebuilt this city.”

Hours later, I stood at the busy corner of Elysian Fields and St. Claude with a dozen protesters amid a nonstop cacophony of cars responding to one of their signs: “Honk If Your Ancestors Were Immigrants.”