For a lot of people, the pandemic was an economic low point — for Fidel, a carwash worker in Los Angeles, the immigration raids are hitting him even harder.

“To me, this is uglier than before,” he said in Spanish. “If you leave the house, you have this fear that they’re going to detain you, they’re going to deport you.”

Fidel is in his 50s and came to the U.S. from Mexico about 30 years ago. Marketplace isn’t using his real name due to his concerns about immigration enforcement.

For years, Fidel made a living cleaning cars — working six days, 48 hours a week. Then, in June, Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids targeted carwash workers.

Now, Fidel said, it’s much harder to get work if you don’t have immigration papers. He’s lucky if he gets an hour a week.

When he thinks back, during the pandemic, he missed work for a total of about six weeks. This time, it’s been six months without a steady paycheck. He spends his days inside his home and is scraping by to pay his rent, medication, and food.

“I’m not eating three meals a day. I eat two times, and just a little bit,” he said. “Sometimes you have to pay [the bills] and go without eating.”

Acquaintances and friends are helping him find odd jobs here and there, or are loaning him money. But Fidel isn’t hopeful his economic situation will improve soon.

“It’s horrible,” he said. “You live with so much fear.”

Months after they began, ICE raids have continued, wreaking havoc on LA’s carwash workers.

In early December, the CLEAN Carwash Worker Center in LA, which aims to empower, organize, and advocate for carwashers, reported multiple raids in one day.

“We had two car washes be raided,” said Flor Melendrez, executive director of the worker center. “One where they took one person that was a U.S. citizen, and another one where they took six workers.”

Her group has tracked at least 350 LA car wash workers who have been detained by ICE. She sees pandemic parallels, since people are afraid to leave their homes, while others are disappearing from their community altogether. And as a labor organization, their worker center is pivoting, again.

“I think now through COVID and through the raids, we have definitely grown into an area that we weren't expecting to, which is direct services,” Melendrez said, “helping our communities to connect to food banks or provide emergency food, helping them connect with attorneys … helping our communities fundraise through creating GoFundMe or other stuff so that they are able to pay their legal fees.”

Food banks are pivoting, too.

In Chicago, Mitzi Baum, CEO of the social impact organization Nourishing Hope, has shifted operations to help families affected by recent raids.

“Many of our neighbors stopped going to work for fear of just being pulled over due to the color of their skin or the language that they speak,” Baum said. “They were afraid to either come to one of our food pantries [or] get in their vehicle and do our online market.”

Nourishing Hope expanded its food delivery to nearly 200 additional families that are sheltering in place because of immigration raids.

Baum said some of the people being helped today are a lot of the same kinds of workers who needed help during the pandemic.

“Now we see that those similar groups of individuals that provide services in restaurants, that are landscapers, that are house painters, that are roofers, Uber drivers … so much of the service industry has been impacted again by the [ICE] activities that have been taking place here in the city of Chicago,” Baum said.

And, in Houston, SEIU Texas president Elsa Flores said it’s not just that families are hurting — they’re also not spending.

“It's keeping their money saved. It's not spending, not purchasing a car, because why would they purchase a car that they may have to leave behind? Why would they purchase a home if they don't know if they're going to be able to sell it?” Flores said.

She said the immigration crackdown creates uncertainty, and uncertainty makes consumers cautious.