'We are a target': ICE raids turn city into 'ghost town' as shops lock their doors

The city of Huntington Park, California, has been reduced to a "ghost town" as people resort to desperate measures to protect themselves from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids by the Trump administration, CBS News reported on Monday.

Huntington Park is a prime target for the president's war on migrants — 95.6 percent of the town identifies as Hispanic, and 45 percent don't have legal status.

"We are a target for them because we know that they are stereotyping and they're racially profiling us. And they're targeting folks that look like me," city council member Jonathan Sanabria told a CBS crew, taking them to Pacific Boulevard, which has almost no foot traffic these days despite being the commercial center of the city.

"I remember Pacific Boulevard was always packed, but since the raids have been going on, it's a ghost town. I don't even know how these places are surviving," Sanabria said. He added that to protect customers, businesses shut their doors and admit people one at a time, requiring a warrant for law enforcement.

"There's people inside conducting business, but they now have their doors locked. They're saying, 'Hey, knock, let us know that you're here so we can open the door, provide the service for you,'" he continued. "We see stores that are open, but they remain with the gates locked. So this is another way of the stores protecting themselves and their customers from unwanted interactions with ICE."

Even with that in place, business owners report massive losses as people are too frightened to go about in public.

Since Trump took office, ICE agents have reportedly been set aggressive quotas for arrests, forcing them to abandon complex investigations and arrests of gang members or drug cartels that would take time and planning, and instead go to round up day laborers at Home Depots. The quotas are reportedly demolishing morale even at the agency itself.

ICE has frantically sought to offer lucrative sign-on and performance benefits just to get enough staffing to carry out the mass arrests. The agency had to walk back a planned policy of $200 cash bonuses for every immigrant deported within a week of arrest, after reporting triggered widespread outrage.