How Trump's immigration crackdown is reshaping Long Island's families, schools and economy

A Long Island homecare agency is struggling to find health aides to care for patients. Attendance in Hempstead public schools plunges on ICE raid days because children of immigrant families stay away. A storied Glen Cove restaurant, one of the first on Long Island to serve Salvadoran cuisine, now does almost all its business in takeout because customers have stopped dining out.

The immigration crackdown President Donald Trump promised on his first day in office has taken hold on Long Island. Federal immigration agents have arrested roughly 3,000 Long Islanders, but the campaign’s effects extend far beyond those detained. Across the region, employers are losing workers, businesses are losing customers and families are retreating from public life. Immigrants make up nearly a fifth of Long Island’s population, and as many withdraw from daily routines or vanish from the communities where they live and work, the region itself is beginning to change.

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Newsday will examine how with a series of stories about the crackdown’s impacts on Long Island’s economy, schools, workplaces, neighborhoods and families.

The changes have been fitful and uneven — obvious in some communities, slight in others. But broadly, many thousands of immigrants, documented or otherwise, cannot be "pristinely" removed from jobs, neighborhoods and families on Long Island because their lives are socially and economically enmeshed with Long Islanders who remain, said David Dyssegaard Kallick, director of Immigration Research Initiative, a nonpartisan think tank. "You can expect ripple effects to the economy and also ripple effects to our sense of who we are."

Changing landscape

More than 2.5 million people were deported under President Barack Obama, but the current campaign is different, Kallick said. Enforcement under Obama "was largely focused on turning people back who had been the newest arrivals," he said. "This is raids on communities, raids on workplaces, picking people up in courthouses when they're coming to do what they're supposed to do in registering. ... It's much more disruptive, more indiscriminate, violent."

The demographic landscape is different too. Trump’s immigration campaign came at a time when Long Island's immigrant population neared 550,000 and the portion of population that is foreign-born neared levels not seen for a century or more: close to 15% nationwide, 21% on the Island.

But since the stepped-up enforcement began, immigration rates have fallen into a "historic decline," according to the Census Bureau, which does not distinguish between unlawful and lawful immigration. In New York State from 2024 to 2025, net migration from immigrants dropped from 290,500 people to 95,600 people. Nationally, the rate of immigration also more than halved over that period, from 2.7 million to 1.3 million, with further slowdowns projected for 2026. Immigration contracted so much it helped slow the nation’s growth rate.

Kallick and others, including the Brookings Institution, have warned that low or zero immigration could negatively impact areas like Long Island, which face the prospect of declining labor productivity as their populations age.

On Long Island, where immigrants already play a critical role in the labor market, "many service sectors will be adversely affected by the departure of immigrant workers," Stony Brook University economist John A. Rizzo said. He said services will become less available and more expensive as departing immigrants will be replaced by "workers who will require higher pay. ... Mass deportation is a terrible economic policy for Long Island."

The Trump administration and its supporters assess the impacts of immigration overhaul much differently. They describe it as a law-and-order campaign to remove violent "criminal aliens" from the country that is paying social and economic dividends.

The U.S Department of Homeland Security,  whose official Instagram account late last year suggested the nation was "besieged by the Third World," maintains that its work on Long Island and elsewhere is necessary and beneficial.

Nassau County Executive Bruce Blakeman told Newsday earlier this year: "There is absolutely no data to support the fake proposition that removing criminals from Nassau County is hurting the economy. ... In fact, it’s quite the opposite."

The logic is simple supply and demand, then-Homeland Security spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin suggested in an August news release. "As illegal aliens continue to exit the labor force, more Americans are finding steady and gainful employment."

A Department of Homeland Security representative gave a similar explanation in May . "If there was any correlation between rampant illegal immigration and a good economy, Biden would have had a booming economy," the representative wrote in an email. "Removing these criminals from the streets makes communities safer for business owners and customers." The email included mug shots of five people described as "public safety threats arrested by ICE in Long Island." All were from Central America and had been convicted of a weapons or sexual abuse charge, according to the representative.

A Newsday analysis of ICE arrest data this spring found that, of thousands of immigrants held in Nassau County jail through Blakeman’s partnership with federal immigration authorities, 59% had no conviction or charge at all.

Those swept up in the dragnet included a Suffolk County Community College honor student, 20, whose temporary protection status had been revoked; a Port Washington bagel store manager, 42, who had been in the country for more than 20 years but had an expired visa; a young mother, 30, applying for asylum at a Bethpage immigration office; and a man with mental health issues who came to the country without legal authorization in 2022. Also arrested were two brothers from El Salvador, Josue, 19, and Jose Trejo Lopez, 20, who had been in the United States since they were children on temporary protected status, who were taken by ICE when they went to check in with immigration.

None of them had any criminal history before federal immigration agents arrested them.  

Watch: Deported brother consoles sibling over missed graduation

The crackdown has contributed to the departure of both documented and undocumented workers on Long Island. Economists say that, on Long Island and across the nation, those departures will create job openings that American-born workers don't necessarily want to fill.

Since last July, Dana Arnone, a registered nurse and owner of Reliance Home Senior Services, has terminated 142 of her roughly 700 workers because the Trump administration ordered the revocation of temporary protections that allowed them to live and work in the United States legally. The Supreme Court supported the order in a 6-3 decision Thursday that Gov. Kathy Hochul said will "cripple" the health care industry.

Most of the affected employees of Arnone's licensed home care company are Haitian immigrants, she said, adding her staff provides personal care services to the elderly.

About two-thirds of home care aides are immigrants, and on Long Island the industry is expected to have about 9,500 openings per year through 2033, according to the state Labor Department.

"It is a crisis," Arnone said. Her company has an office in Wantagh.

Enrollment at one of the trade schools that trains those workers, West Hempstead's Global School of Health, plunged early last year after ICE appeared at the Hempstead Village transit center, a downtown bus and train hub, said Nathalie Delbrun, the school’s director.

North Fork farmers said fewer immigrant workers showed up to do spring planting this year; as many as half of New York's farm workers are undocumented, state officials have estimated.

Some national research suggests that rather than creating jobs, "mass deportations are hurting the labor market overall and lead to fewer job opportunities, particularly in sectors generally reliant on immigrant workers," said Chloe East, a University of Colorado-Boulder economist and co-author  of an April paper that analyzed the deportation campaign's labor market impacts using census and ICE arrest data.

The researchers found that in areas with a marked increase in ICE arrests, employment among undocumented immigrants dropped 4% — not because of deportations but because of a "chilling effect" as those who remain reduce work because they fear going to and being at work could increase the likelihood of interactions with the agency.

The researchers also found that enforcement had no effect on employment of working-age U.S.-born people in the aggregate and a "negative and significant impact" on U.S.-born male workers with a high school education or less.

American-born workers haven’t, by and large, slid in to fill these job vacancies, East said. That is because the jobs tend to be "lower-paid, dangerous or seasonal." What tends to occur is contraction, she said. In construction, for example, she said, companies will respond to a shortage of laborers by reducing the number of new buildings under construction. "That reduces jobs for everybody — electricians, roofers or architects," she said.

Some analysts say such conclusions about the job market effects of Trump's immigration overhaul are premature. Jason Richwine, a resident scholar at the Center for Immigration Studies, which backs tougher immigration policies, argued in a May essay in American Affairs that while 2025 was a "great start," a "sustained policy of low immigration will be necessary over the long term" to force employers to meaningfully raise wages and politicians to address more of their social problems.

"Right now, employers constantly claim that there are not enough native workers, but what they actually mean is not enough natives will work at the [low] wage they would like to pay," Richwine wrote. "Out of necessity, if low immigration becomes a permanent, enforceable, economic reality, employers will put more effort into recruiting and retaining workers."

Island impacts 

Across Long Island this year, recreational soccer leagues limped through the season without Latino players and far fewer fans. Attendance at some church events declined, according to the Catholic Diocese of Rockville Centre, because immigrant parishioners were too anxious to attend.

In Glen Cove, the restaurateur Edward Villatoro, owner of El Tazumal, said he was considering moving away from the Salvadoran cuisine his parents started serving almost 40 years ago. Business is down by about 30%, and the remaining customers mostly order for delivery, instead of dining in, because of what he called the "fear factor." Three of his employees have self-deported, he said, because "they just didn't want to live with this craziness."

In Hempstead Village, Nelson Hernandez, a Latino leader with ties to the village business community, said the village’s working-class and middle-class residents were "cutting down on everything" that they spend money on, some because they anticipate returning to their home countries and want to save dollars while they can. The village's microeconomy, he said, is "going to take time to get back on track, or it may never get back on track."

On days when ICE has been spotted operating, said Hempstead schools Superintendent Gary Rush, as many as 20% of students stay out of classes, "and it’s continuing to snowball." Rush said he believed ICE's presence at a Home Depot parking lot in the village downtown frequented by day laborers looking for work contributed to chronic absenteeism at a nearby elementary school. Participation in after-school sports and clubs districtwide has fallen, Rush said, because some older students are working part time to make up for wages no longer earned by parents who have lost their jobs or are scared to go to them. Fewer parents show up for parent-teacher conferences.

Looking ahead

Advocates say the deportation campaign is illegal and have filed dozens of legal challenges that include Long Islanders. The litigation will make its way through local federal courts in coming years and will ultimately determine the number of immigrants on Long Island, their role in the future and the legality of ICE tactics as the campaign goes on.

Already judicial decisions, including some from Long Island judges, have questioned and even stopped some of the policies that advocates said violate civil rights and have led to fear and confusion. Just last week, a federal judge ordered the administration to restart asylum proceedings and applications related to a travel ban that had been frozen.

In one case in which a Hempstead man was seized but ultimately released, U.S. District Court Judge Gary R. Brown said ICE's actions were "incompatible with Constitutional norms" and "a reprehensible act of unimaginable cruelty. ... This isn’t how things are supposed to work in America."

A class-action lawsuit, filed in April on behalf of roughly 15,000 people arrested by federal immigration agents in New York State since January 2025, alleges that the agents targeted Hispanic communities and that race-based stops of Latinos surged in Hempstead and Brentwood. In an email, a Department of Homeland Security representative said the allegations were "disgusting, reckless, and categorically FALSE."

Looking ahead to the economic impact, experts like Kallick warn that the mass removal of immigrants and the ban of many of those seeking to travel to the United States could ultimately hurt the country's place in the world.

"What happens if America is no longer the place future superstars from around the world want to come?" he said. "We would be facing an economic and social future that is less attractive for all of us."