Weather 
On the outskirts of Altadena, where one of the most destructive firestorms in Los Angeles history had just receded, a group of volunteers worked last week to gather fallen tree branches and leaves removing fuel for potential future fires, bagging them up and taking them away.
One of those people, Cesar, a Mexican immigrant in his early 60s, works as a day laborer in construction, picking up jobs helping to build and remodel homes around LA.
Though Cesar, who asked only to be identified by his first name, told he has worked in California for more than 30 years, he is undocumented.
But now, the prospect of mass deportations under President Donald Trump’s second term could lead to the loss of construction workers like Cesar and stands to seriously hinder efforts to rebuild the more than 12,000 structures estimated to be destroyed by the fires.
Homebuilders across LA told they anticipate that rebuilding the city after the destruction caused by the Palisades and Eaton fires will be a slow and challenging process.
Key to that endeavor are the mostly undocumented day laborers who often do the physically taxing and dangerous work of clearing the rubble after a natural disaster recedes.
Cesar and the rest of his cleanup crew are “second responders,” said Victor Narro, the project director for the UCLA Labor Center. In the shadows, these workers have helped build America’s second-largest city and, after the destruction is cleared, they will help to restore burned homes and businesses, Narro said.
“If there are deportations, who is going to do the work of this large immigrant workforce?” Narro said.
Building in Los Angeles is already notoriously tough due to a maze of permits and red tape. Waiting on full payouts from insurance companies may hold up the reconstruction process, as well. In addition, LA is one of America’s most expensive housing markets. Now, with thousands of people displaced from their homes, some experts anticipate the city’s housing market will grow even tighter and building costs may rise.
“If Trump does crack down on illegal immigration, it would likely affect lower-end homes,” said Dougal Murray, CEO of Racing Green Group, a builder of custom homes in Hollywood and Malibu. “People who have a lower budget will be more likely to work with unlicensed subcontractors or those who employ undocumented immigrants” because of the lower cost to hire them.
Bob Kleiman, owner of a homebuilding company in Woodland Hills, just outside LA, said he was hopeful that the Trump administration would come to the realization that mass deportations could hurt a city reeling from two of the most destructive fires in its history.
“I’m an optimist that they won’t pull the rug out from underneath an already aggravated situation,” Kleiman said. “I hope they won’t move forward with something that will further add salt to this wound.”
But Trump rose to the presidency for the second time on promises to intensify border security and deport record numbers of migrants and he and his allies have said that undocumented immigrants share the blame for America’s home affordability crisis.
Just weeks after Trump was reelected, the Los Angeles City Council unanimously voted to adopt a “sanctuary city” ordinance, barring city employees from aiding Immigration and Customs Enforcement unless required by federal law.
But on Monday, Trump began his term by taking a series of sweeping executive actions on immigration, including declaring a national emergency at the US southern border and directing federal officials to take actions “to ensure that so-called sanctuary jurisdictions… do not receive access to Federal funds.”
Trump has also signaled he will coordinate immigration sweeps in major cities with ICE.
More than one-third of construction workers in the US labor force are foreign-born, according to the US Census Bureau’s 2023 American Community Survey. California is tied with New Jersey as having the highest share of foreign-born workers in the construction trade of any US state, at 52%.
While the Census Bureau does not directly ask about immigration status, the National Immigration Forum, an organization that advocates for immigration reform, estimated that undocumented workers make up nearly a quarter of the construction workforce in America.
Simply replacing those workers with legal American workers may not be a viable solution. Even with millions of undocumented people estimated to be in the country, there were 276,000 open construction jobs as of November, the latest data available, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That’s down from more than 400,000 open jobs last year, but still a significant shortfall.
Cameron Irwin, the owner of Cambuild Constructions, a homebuilder in the Altadena area, said he has noticed a shortage of skilled construction laborers in Los Angeles.
“Building a house is strenuous. It’s hard work that requires a lot of physical labor,” Irwin said. “People are finding that they can do something that’s paying similar, and they don’t have to put that effort in. That’s where the undocumented workers come in.”
Irwin’s own home in Altadena was destroyed by the fires earlier this month.
Cesar, the man who works as a day laborer in Los Angeles, told he believes mass deportations would hurt more than just individuals like him.
“California is the fifth largest economy in the world. Part of that is due to the economic contributions of the immigrant community,” he said in an interview translated from Spanish. “If these deportation threats are carried out, it would have an enormous impact not only on a state level. It would be destructive.”
