Editor’s note: Este artículo está traducido al español.

Coco Loco Produce stands as one of the beloved fixtures at the Broadacres Marketplace swap meet, where eager customers regularly form long lines for Coco Loco’s signature flavorful snow cones and micheladas, those refreshing drinks elevated with the tangy kick of chamoy and tajín spices.

But last week, Broadacres temporarily closed due to fears surrounding Immigration and Customs Enforcement activity targeting the swap meet’s largely Latino customer base.

Broadacres, with nearly a 50-year history, hosts more than 15,000 weekly shoppers at the 44-acre complex in North Las Vegas.

For vendors making their living there, it meant finding new ways to survive. A group of Coco Loco employees quickly adapted, taking their signature products to a nearby park where they set up shop that same day.

By Wednesday, the group’s setup had neon posters with bold black lettering hawking cold coconuts and Mexican-style ice pops at a park a couple of miles away from their old place of work. One employee, who wished to remain anonymous, said her husband lost his work at Broadacres as well.

“We have no other source of income besides Broadacres. So now both of us are unemployed and we have two kids,” she said, but the stand has done well so far. “Definitely, we’re going to get by these few weeks.”

The sudden closing with no set date to return left workers who filled Broadacres’ more than 1,000 vendor slots in limbo. While some can afford to wait until Broadacres reopens, others are scrambling to find new venues to make ends meet.

Since taking office in January, President Donald Trump has attempted to make good on his campaign promise for the largest deportation campaign in American history.

That’s led to new policies such as allowing immigration enforcement at previously sensitive locations such as schools and churches, an increased focus on undocumented immigrants in the interior of the country as well as a national quota of 3,000 arrests per day.

On June 14, dozens of “heavily armed, masked ICE agents” raided a smaller swap meet in Southern California with the same ownership as Broadacres, KTLA reported. Broadacres was just a few hours away and had double the number of vendors.

Coco Loco operations supervisor Gabby Ramirez said some employees she worked with stopped showing up out of fear after the Southern California raid.

Broadacres’ Latino customer base similarly slowed. With six locations in Broadacres, Coco Loco shut down two of its smaller stands. By the last Sunday the market was open, there were more vendors than customers, Ramirez said.

Adolfo Romero, part owner of local ice cream and snacks chain Tu Michoacana, also started to see a decrease in traffic after the raid at the California swap meet. He wasn’t surprised when he read about the market’s temporary closure.

“People don’t understand that behind every vendor, behind every booth, there’s a family. There are parents, there’s brothers, sisters,” Romero said. There are more than “1,000 vendors there, and now most of them are jobless.”

There’s also no guarantee that the already-dwindling crowds will come back once Broadacres reopens. Ramirez worries that the space could close again if traffic can’t cover the costs associated with running the operation.

The other stress around reopening is whether Coco Loco will have the staff necessary to operate. Ramirez said people have bills to pay and understandably can’t wait out the closure.

“We’re down to 15 employees that are still with us right now that haven’t mentioned anything to us,” she said, from 45 employees. “When we do reopen, it’s going to be a struggle if we don’t have any employees.”

A hat seller at Broadacres, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, told the Sun in Spanish that the week since the closure has been stressful, but that they must keep working to provide for their family.

In the meantime, they’re spending more time on their side business selling fruit as a street vendor.

Hearing about the closure felt like a reality check, they said, even if they understood and agreed with why Broadacres made the decision. The vendor said they believed most of their colleagues agreed it was the right call.

With other Tu Michoacana locations in the valley, Romero is one of the luckier ones. Yet fear over immigration raids could hurt his other shops, he said.

The possibility of ICE arrests extends to other venues, small and large, including Allegiant Stadium, which last week hosted a soccer match between Mexico and Costa Rica.

“This is what fear does,” state Sen. Fabian Doñate, D-Las Vegas, wrote online, citing a 30,000-person drop in attendance compared with Mexico’s last match at Allegiant, which was in 2023 against the U.S. “Las Vegas businesses are closing. Families are afraid to shop, to go out, to spend.”

Trump’s immigration policies are “crippling our economy,” Doñate continued.

Marina Hernandez — owner of photo studio Memori.ES702 at Broadacres — agreed, highlighting that the market is a significant employer in North Las Vegas. People making money at Broadacres spend it across the valley, she added.

Hernandez, who said she was part of a mixed-status family, closed her studio the Friday before the announcement.

She had a litany of reasons: concerns about federal agents arresting citizens, people impersonating ICE, the show of force in Santa Fe Springs and Broadacres posting online that it couldn’t stop ICE from coming onto the property.

“This isn’t just the Hispanic community, and this isn’t just about business. This is what is going on in America right now,” Hernandez said. “It’s scary as a woman to go out there, and I could possibly be taken by six masked men. What am I supposed to do? How am I supposed to protect myself?”

The Nevada Republican Party has been critical of Broadacres since its closure. In one social media post that drew the ire of Democratic colleagues, the GOP wrote that “if you can’t stay open without illegal aliens, you don’t deserve to be open at all.”

In another post, the Nevada Republican Party wrote that businesses that employ undocumented people lacked worker protections, dodged taxes and paid illegally low wages. They also accused Democrats of believing in a necessary “legal underclass” for cheap work.

Ramirez doesn’t doubt people take advantage of the system, but she’s never seen that at the swap meet as employees pick up work at different stands.

“There was a comment (on social media) that’s like, ‘She needs to go to jail because she’s exploiting all of her workers,’ ” Hernandez recalled. “It’s just me. I’m a one-woman show. Who am I exploiting? But people make all these assumptions but don’t go out there and see what it is.”