In the 9th Ward, standing along the Mississippi River, Ana and Juan Gershanik helped to express the city’s gratitude in bronze.
Within the sculpture, Monument to the Immigrant Workers of the Katrina Reconstruction, three construction workers, two men and a woman, lean into their labor.
The Gershaniks, who emigrated from Argentina in the mid-1960s, came home to a flooded New Orleans after Katrina and witnessed the city’s miraculous comeback. “We were able to come back to our homes because Latino immigrants took the risks to rebuild them,” Ana Gershanik said. “Every family I know had immigrant construction workers who were Latino. We owe them so much.
With “Operation Catahoula Crunch” underway—in Jefferson Parish suburbs, St. Tammany Parish, and now in Baton Rouge— staff from The Lens drove through New Orleans, chronicling worries and preparations, and gathering an appreciation for our port city’s unique perspectives on immigration.
‘We’re going through a political storm’
At Unión Migrante—a grassroots group of immigrant workers and their families—organizer Rachel Taber uses hurricane language to describe present-day New Orleans, where at-risk workers must stay tucked to stay safe.
“We say we’re going through a political storm,” Taber said. “Everyone in Louisiana knows how traumatic a storm is. You get through it because neighbors help neighbors and because immigrants help rebuild after every storm.”
Those “storm kits” look like this: consult an immigration attorney; make sure everyone has passports; name someone who can pick up your children and sell your car if you’re detained; decide how to move savings out of the country if you have to leave in a hurry.
The fear isn’t abstract, Taber said. In the early days of the ICE occupation, she said, agents arrested two men at a construction site a block from Riverdale High School in Jefferson. Students, hearing rumors of raids, panicked. First, at-risk students called parents to come get them. Then, as they realized the bigger picture, students begged parents not to come after all, for fear they’d be picked up outside the school.
“We’re seeing what feels like psychological warfare against our children,” Taber said. “People are scared to go to the grocery store.”
She and other advocates also described other ongoing patterns, things they’ve seen for years: employers threatening to “call ICE” if workers complain about stolen wages or dangerous conditions or people picked up on their way to surgery for job-related injuries. For fear of bosses calling immigration on them, workers can’t safely report abuse or hazardous conditions, especially in agricultural and construction fields, they said.
“Immigration enforcement is the glove that covers the iron fist of labor exploitation,” Taber said.
People making contingency plans, in case they are taken
As the federal government implements Catahoula Crunch (formerly “Swamp Sweep”), many Latino families are staying indoors, pulling their kids from schools, stopping church and grocery runs — and making contingency plans in case a parent disappears.
The goal of ICE’s operation is to arrest 5,000 individuals in southeast Louisiana and part of Mississippi.
Aside from a raid at home-repair stores and a saunter through the French Quarter, ICE has mostly been focused on Jefferson Parish, which was also rebuilt post-Katrina by immigrants. But there in Jefferson, ICE agents have full cooperation from law enforcement.
ICE also may have more public support in Republican-heavy Jefferson Parish. Nearly 90% of Orleans Parish residents who identified as Democrats opposed immigration-enforcement efforts, while only 24% of Republican voters in Orleans opposed or strongly opposed it, according to a recent poll by JMC Analytics . Overall opposition, which stood at 79%, did not vary significantly by race, gender or council district, the poll found.
Last week, Liz Murrill, the state attorney general, sent a letter to the New Orleans Police Department, ordering them to cooperate with ICE and to quit following “sanctuary city” policies. In response, NOPD Superintendent Anne Kirkpatrick said that she is reviewing the letter and preparing to revise NOPD policies, if there are any that do not fall in line with federal law. But to date, there’s been no obvious visible sign of cooperation between ICE and NOPD officers.
When compared to Orleans, Jefferson has a larger proportion of Hispanic people. More than one-fifth of all residents there identify as Hispanic, according to a Data Center analysis of Census data.
Historically, New Orleans, as a port, was a polyglot city, known particularly for its connections to Latin America. But those patterns had withered, since immigration patterns generally follow stronger economies. So for years before Katrina, high-poverty New Orleans offered little opportunity and attracted few immigrants.
After the storm, as construction boomed, the Hispanic population nearly doubled. It now stands at roughly 31,000 people—8 to 9% of the population.
‘These people are not garbage’
On a recent Sunday, the Rev. Tony Rigoli looked from his pulpit to the now-empty pews where entire families used to sit.
“People are living in fear,” said Rigoli, who has long overseen Our Lady of Guadalupe Church & International Shrine of St. Jude on North Rampart Street.
According to a church spokesperson, attendance at his church’s Spanish-language Mass is down by more than half, he said.
During his interview with The Lens, Rigoli reflected on the scripture Matthew 25, where Jesus asks what we did for “the least of these”—the hungry, the sick, the imprisoned and the stranger.
“At the end of our life, that gospel is going to be our report card,” he said. “When I was a stranger, an immigrant, did you welcome me.”
Beyond his Biblical charge, Rigoli has an immediate empathy for his parishioners because his parents were Italian immigrants, from Sicily, who struggled when they arrived in the United States, he said.
He does not oppose reasonable border control, he said. But he is pained by the feared spectacle of mass arrests conducted under names like Swamp Sweep.
“When I hear those words, Swamp Sweep — a swamp is where garbage goes,” he said. “These people are not garbage. They are my brothers and sisters.”
A bakery half-empty
Jose says he has seen the negative effect of Catahoula Crunch on his sales for nearly a month now. (To protect him and his business, The Lens is not using his last name, store name, or location.)
Within his small New Orleans grocery and bakery, a produce department offers cactus and plantains. His kitchen cooks up big pots or ceviche and pans of meat pies. The air smells sweet from freshly baked sheet cakes, pan dulce, and churros.
“We’re a Latin-based store; 80% of our clientele is Hispanic,” Jose said. “I want to say at least half of them have stopped coming. People left. People are afraid. Nothing positive is coming out of this.”
There are rumors of bounty hunters and unmarked cars, though he hasn’t seen them yet. When The Lens visited earlier this week, an SUV with dark tint was parked down the block. Customers have also been telling him for the past few months about other New Orleanians who were picked up even though they had previously been given time by immigration to get paperwork in order.
To protect his customers and his staff, Jose gently told some at-risk families to stay home, that he would take time after-hours to personally deliver anything they needed.
Yes, the crackdown is putting immigrant families under financial strain. But it’s also affecting the local economy as a whole, he said. At restaurants with shrinking staff, chefs are washing dishes. Across town; landlords are likely to lose tenants. As the holiday season ramps up, hotels are scrambling for housekeepers.
“We live in a touristic city that depends on all of its workers,” he said.
‘Because of what your parents are doing, we have a place to live again’
A few years after Katrina, when Ana Gershanik and her husband first envisioned the immigrant workers monument, it was for the kids.
In local schools where the Gershaniks volunteered, Latino children talked excitedly about becoming doctors, lawyers and engineers, she said. But she also saw mixed feelings, as the children described parents who worked in demolition, carpentry, roofing or drywall.
“Some of them were ashamed,” Ana Gershanik recalled. “We told them, ‘Because of what your parents are doing, we have a place to live again.’ We wanted a place where they could go and say, ‘Those are my parents. I am proud of them.’”
The monument’s three figures were originally all men until she insisted the sculptor add a woman, to reflect the realities of what she’d seen after the storm.
In the early days after Katrina, she said, she drove through the city and heard “Latino radio everywhere,” she said, as men and women replaced blue tarps and turned flooded properties back into homes.
Today many of those workers have settled permanently. Some, like the owners of a construction firm on Earhart Boulevard, started as laborers and now run their own companies.
Others remained undocumented, priced out of the legal process.
They hang drywall in new hotels, mop floors after conventions, cook in French Quarter kitchens and pour concrete for luxury condos. Make no mistake – they are New Orleanians, Gershanik said.
‘We are not disposable’
The injustices of the “Catahoula Crunch” are impossible to separate from the city’s long-running inequities in labor, policing and incarceration, says Jordan Bridges, organizing director of the New Orleans Workers’ Center for Racial Justice (NOWCRJ).
Bridges recently launched a campaign called “We Are Not Disposable” that stems from his work following Mardi Gras cleanup workers from parade routes into their homes and neighborhoods, to document the risks they face on the job and off. “Who lives on top of the trash? Who moves the trash? Who enjoys the culture, and who owns it?” he asks.
What Bridges saw as he followed Carnival workers still disturbs him: Workers with Stage 4 cancer sweeping up beads and broken glass in toxic dust, while others are living in precarious housing or relying on temporary gigs.
Federal immigration enforcement is layering a new danger onto the same communities, he said, as he and others at the Workers’ Center worked with Union Migrante and others to help at-risk residents stay at home during the ICE immigration crackdown.
As Border Patrol Commander Gregory Bovino and his ICE troops moved into town and made a run through all the Lowe’s and Home Depot day-labor spots, Bridges envisioned that New Orleans would continue to see “opportunistic raids” around the city–individual arrests at barber shops, grocery stores and day-laborer corners.
“This is stop-and-frisk by another name,” Bridges said. “As a Black man, I know exactly what that means.”
There’s another obvious parallel. “It’s mass incarceration by another name,” said Bridges, describing how the urban ICE crackdowns dovetailed with the rapid expansion of immigration detention in Louisiana, including the new immigration housing within the Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola’s Camp J, which was once closed for deplorable conditions.
Whistles and zines: tools of resistance
At a modest house at a not-to-be-identified spot in the city, software engineer, Cade Roux has turned his 3D printer into a small, whirring factory.
He’s been churning out plastic whistles by the hundreds, attaching them to lanyards and tucking them into small packets alongside folded “Know Your Rights” zines. The idea came after he read about similar kits being distributed in Chicago and Charlotte.
The whistles are simple: blow if you see what looks like an unlawful arrest or someone in distress; draw attention; get phones recording.
But preparing for alerts in every neighborhood requires a lot of whistles. “People were ordering whistles by the hundreds from Amazon,” he said. “I figured, we can print them here.”
Roux experiments with designs that use as little plastic as possible so that they print quickly and can be produced in volume—two to six grams each. He hands off whistles to organizers who distribute them quietly in areas with high immigrant populations and drops batches into Little Free Libraries around town.
‘We have a duty’
New Orleans is waiting cautiously, knowing that ICE is likely to eventually shift its suburban focus and slam full force into the city. In the meantime, faith communities—Catholic, Methodist, Unitarian, Jewish, and Muslim—have been hosting Know Your Rights sessions and discussing sanctuary practices. Legal groups are ready for a flood of calls. Community organizations have been coordinating volunteer drivers, emergency childcare and accompaniment to court.
If we can rely on each while we shelter in place through other storms, organizers say, we can also withstand this.
Bridges believes Black New Orleanians in particular have a role to play, in standing up for those who could – because of one short trip to the grocery – be taken away from the city. “As descendants of people who resisted all over the world, we have a duty to stand with a community that’s on the front line now,” Bridges said.
Rigoli comes at it from a pastoral aspect. “Lord, enlighten all of us to see that our brothers and sisters are part of who we are,” he prayed at the end of his interview with The Lens. “We say ‘Our Father’, that means we have the same Father. So we must be brothers and sisters.”
For Ana Gershanik, it comes back to the symbolism of the bronze at Crescent Park.
“I want people who come from out of town to look at that sculpture and understand who built this city back,” she said. “If we forget that, we forget who we are as New Orleans.”
A list of resources is available at Free the Swamp, which also staffs a hotline that anyone can call if they witness suspected immigration enforcement: (504) 221-1499.
