On Wednesday, the Department of Homeland Security announced it had made more than 5,000 arrests in Los Angeles since June, when federal agents arrived to carry out President Donald Trump’s mass deportation campaign. The agency claimed, without evidence, that it had arrested the “worst of the worst criminal illegal aliens,” when in fact most of the people arrested had no criminal history. Even U.S. citizens and people with legal authorization to be in the country have been detained in the sweeps.
A federal judge ruled last month that ICE agents were unconstitutionally arresting people based on their race, accent or line of work, and ordered government officials to stop arresting people without reasonable suspicion. Nonetheless, the indiscriminate immigration raids have continued.
Some of the most comprehensive coverage of these arrests comes from L.A. Taco, a local, independent media outlet that began as a food-centric publication. As other local media outlets in L.A. shut down, L.A. Taco continued its food coverage (including its annual TACO MADNESS competition) and expanded into city news and politics, covering everything from police brutality to racial disparities in weed arrest data to the aftermath of January’s devastating wildfires. Since June, L.A. Taco reporter Memo Torres has tirelessly documented immigration raids and related news in daily roundups published on the website, as well as YouTube and Instagram.
Torres spoke with HuffPost about the community effort behind documenting the ICE raids and how his years of covering the city’s food scene make him a better immigration reporter.
This interview has been lightly edited and condensed.
L.A. Taco was founded in 2006 with a focus on documenting things you love about the city, “mostly tacos, weed and graffiti at the time.” You relaunched in 2018 as a news-centric platform. Can you talk a bit about what prompted the decision to shift more into news?
Back in 2018, a lot of local media was shutting down. And not just small, independent media. We’re talking about big places like LA Weekly. It got bought by some rich Trump supporters and they ended up gutting the whole LA Weekly, which was an institution in Los Angeles. It was our source for alternative news. When that got gutted, the co-founder at L.A. Taco, Alex Blazdale — after talking with people, they were like, L.A. Taco had already kind of built up a following, so they were like, let’s relaunch it as a publication.
And that’s when he brought in Daniel Hernandez, who was the editor of VICE Latin America. And he brought him in to help him relaunch it as a publication. I knew Danny from college, so I started helping out, and yeah, one thing led to another. Eventually, Daniel left to the L.A. Times to be their food editor, and Javier [Cabral] took over, and that’s when things started to really take off.
I think what catches a lot of the media’s attention to us is “this taco publication is now covering ICE.” I think people need to understand that we’ve built up our chops covering regular news. We’ve been covering city politics and things that aren’t food or tacos for a long time. So covering this isn’t new to us. We were prepared for this moment already because we’ve been doing the work.
Can you tell me a little about yourself and your entryway into journalism?
Up until March of this year, I was a landscape contractor. So I was doing L.A. Taco and running my own landscape business for five years.
You’re a third-generation landscaper, right?
Yeah, I’m a third-generation landscaper. Both my grandparents, my dad and me.
I always believed in local journalism and I saw what Daniel and the co-founder, Alex, were trying to do with L.A. Taco and I believed in it. I was like, I get around the city a lot doing landscaping. I know a lot of places to eat, because that’s the one thing I look forward to in my day when I’m landscaping, so I can help out with the food. And I understand what it’s like to build a business. So I started helping build their membership model out and getting partners to give out free tacos to our members, taking photos of tacos, and just kind of helping cover the city, being out and about. It was a really small team back then.
When Daniel left to L.A. Times, Javier was like, “Hey fool, you went to college. You ain’t stupid. You know how to write.” So he’s like, “Why don’t you start writing about the food instead of just taking pictures?” I started writing about the food, and that led to a career in food journalism. And then I started learning how to write more journalistically about other things — started covering different things about the city, culturally or politically or even law enforcement. But that just kind of evolved from one thing to another. I just kind of grew with L.A. Taco. And it got to the point where I just preferred what I was doing, I found a lot of success and I just decided to sell my company. I couldn’t do both. So I made this career choice and I’m glad I did it, because I would have been a mess right now if I was still trying to run a landscape company and cover the ICE raids.
I’ve wondered, as you’ve been leading the ICE raids coverage, to what extent do you think knowing the taco scene so well informs your story ideas and your sourcing? Are people coming to you and letting you know what’s going on because they already know you?
Yeah, 100%. I think the years of us being out there in the community and covering — I mean, when we say “Covering L.A. from the street level up,” we mean it. We’ve been doing that for five, six years.
For a lot of people, being a street vendor — which is one of our biggest niches, covering street food — isn’t a choice. It’s a survival tactic. So with that comes understanding what political or economic forces happen to send them out on the street instead of finding a job.
We’ve made so many connections through local organizations that we’ve covered. A lot of the local organizations and local people that we’ve featured have become leaders in the community, in the rapid response teams. I think the reputation we’ve built as a reliable community source for L.A. has given a lot of people a lot of trust in us. They’re more likely to trust us versus, you know, a bigger publication, or Telemundo or Univision. I’ve seen them getting kicked out of the protest area in front of the federal detention center. Or when that family in San Bernardino got shot at, they were trying to get in there to interview people and people kicked them out. So yeah, people definitely have a lot of backlash toward larger media institutions. But when we come in, they welcome us in and they’ll send us information.
Is it about their coverage or general skepticism of big, institutional media?
They’ve been guilty of airing [Homeland Security Secretary] Kristy Noem’s self-deportation ads, calling Latinos “criminals.” We have a whole story about that. We’re just like, “Why would a Spanish-language news station air these ads?” So that’s also caused a lot of distress within the community.
You mentioned how you used to be a small team, but you’re still a really tiny team compared to a lot of other outlets, and you’re constantly breaking news and appear better sourced in a lot of ways than some bigger outlets with more resources. How do you pick your lane and figure out what to prioritize when there’s more going on than anyone can possibly cover in L.A. right now?
The million-dollar question. I mean there’s so many stories. So, I cover the DAILY MEMO every evening. So every day, I see every story — well, 90% of it. It’s hard to see everything. There’s always stories that slip through the cracks that didn’t get documented, or you won’t see til later. So I always tell the team, like, here’s a potential story, here’s another potential story. And it’s like, we don’t have enough writers! We just try to figure out which is a more, I guess, severe story or impactful story. It’s really hard to decide. Sometimes it’s just like, OK, can we find a writer to cover that story? Where can we get the sources quicker? It just depends, every situation is so different.
I wanted to ask you about the DAILY MEMO and the documentation you’ve been doing of the ICE raids. Can you walk me through the process of finding and documenting these incidents so quickly?
It takes all day, and I don’t get home until like midnight. As soon as I wake up, I start jumping online. I started reading my DMs, seeing the videos people send me, the information people send me. I start scouring — I mean, at this point, my algorithms know what I’m looking for. So I start looking at [the videos], analyzing them, matching them with other videos, verifying them. Sometimes people send videos that are old, from like a week ago and they wanna push it out as if it were today. Or sometimes people have the wrong dates, sometimes people have the wrong locations, sometimes they don’t have any information. It’s kind of a community effort. I’ll talk to rapid responders — I’m in constant chat with rapid responders and other people that are doing this work too. So we’re all trying to verify things together.
I’ll communicate through DMs with people and be like, “Hey, does anybody have any more information on this incident?” Or like, “Hey, does anybody know how many people were taken here?”
So it’s a big community effort. I may be the main leading voice at L.A. Taco, just projecting the work they’re doing, but I really gotta give credit to the whole community, all the people that are out there documenting and helping verify everything.
Yeah, seeing the network of rapid response groups and efforts that have popped up has been really incredible to watch.
As time goes on, people are finding their roles and their niches and how they can help. There’s this one person, Izzy Ramirez — he’s started doing what I do and it’s been a big help. He posts what he’s been able to verify and what’s been happening in real time.
Yesterday, I was like, “Thank you for your work.” And he’s like, “You know, thank you guys. You guys have inspired me to get into journalism.”
How are you holding up with all these? It’s a lot to just be mainlining these videos over and over again every day.
It’s emotionally challenging. I’m not gonna lie. There’s some days where there’s just some horrific stuff going on. A couple days ago, I looked at some videos of children crying for their dads. It’s one thing to see children cry for their parents. It hurts — but I didn’t think what would hurt as much was seeing fathers cry for their kids. When you’re hearing grown men scream and cry as they’re getting tackled, you’re just like — that gets to me on a whole different level.
You’re watching all these traumatic videos. You have to bear witness to all of this. You have to analyze them and kind of take it all in and digest it so you can put it out in an easier-to-consume format for people. So yeah, it’s a lot.
Well, I also imagine that because you have so many years of experience covering the community, this is probably more personal for you, in some ways. You probably know a lot of people who are either experiencing the raids or living under the constant threat of them.
Yeah, I mean, 100%. Look, I was a landscaper. I grew up working with a lot of these people who are getting targeted. These are folks that I worked alongside with, I grew up with. I see these in my family. I see this in people I cover in the food scene when they attack the street vendors. So, yeah, it’s very personal to me. L.A. is home. So you attack my home, you’re attacking my people. Yeah, it gets to you.
I first learned about L.A. Taco from my taco-enthusiast brother, who I think came for the taco coverage, but has followed a lot of the immigration reporting. Do you think L.A. Taco has radicalized a lot of people who were just looking for some good el pastor?
I mean, radicalize is such a silly word, at times. I mean, how do you radicalize people with the truth, right? I feel like when you say “radicalize,” you’re construing the truth, you’re building a reality that makes people feel an extreme way about something that’s not exactly a correct viewpoint they have. So I don’t think it’s radicalizing. I just think it’s — just telling the truth. I do my best not to spin it. I do my best not to have commentary. Just, “This is what happened. This is where they were.”
If you’re radicalizing people, you’re telling them, “The proletariat needs to get together!” We’re not doing any of that shit. I’m just telling people, “This is where they were, this is what they did, this is what they’ve been doing.” And that’s it.
I don’t think “radicalize” is the right word. Just bring them to the center. This is the truth. This is what’s happening. If that’s radicalizing people, then I guess, let the truth radicalize.
Yeah, that’s kind of how I meant it. I hear what you’re saying about the connotation — but I think the truth is radicalizing. People who might think “Abolish ICE” sounds really extreme, and then they see what ICE is doing every day in the community, I could see how that would change their perspective.
It’s hard not to radicalize somebody when the people who call themselves law enforcement are disobeying the laws, mistreating people. Instead of going after real criminals, they’re going after grandmas selling tamales and people selling flowers on the street.
Last year, L.A. Taco announced that it had run out of money to make payroll and everyone was furloughed. Within 24 hours of the announcement, you got enough paying subscribers to rehire everyone. And earlier this month, L.A. Taco announced it had hit 5,000 members, making it a self-sustaining publication. Can you talk about the specific financial challenges L.A. Taco’s faced over the years and how you’ve pulled off the seemingly impossible task of getting people to pay for news?
Last year, around April — I wasn’t furloughed because I technically wasn’t a staff member. I was on a small stipend. I was basically volunteering a lot of my time to L.A. Taco. But the staff did get furloughed — everybody but Javier. We ran out of money. Our publisher, Alex Blazedale, had been pumping in his own personal money to keep it afloat for years, but it got to the point where he ran out of money. I think the furlough lasted one day. It was like we’re gonna sit out on Friday, and we kind of teased the news Thursday night. And by Monday, everybody was back to work, because people were like, “Nooo! We love L.A. Taco!” And people started donating, people started signing up. We went from having like 1,500 members to 3,500 members.
One of the things that happened that caused the furlough was that we depended on partnership deals and sponsorship deals and a lot of them fell through. It’s kind of hard to be a small publication and get sponsors when you’re covering real news that’s happening in Los Angeles. Sponsors just don’t wanna be associated with — they don’t wanna be next to coverage of police shootings or police abuse or city government corruption or the houseless crisis. People want sanitized coverage. And we’re like, “Yeah, sorry, we’re not gonna fold on our journalistic principles. We’re gonna keep covering the city, but we’re also gonna cover food and celebrate it.”
To what extent do you still rely on sponsorships vs. membership?
Our goal was always to get to 5,000 members to be self-sufficient. We got to 3,500 [last year] so we still depended on deals. Not as much — we got city government deals. Metro LA is one of our biggest partners. And small departments, we found a niche with them. People really responded well to us working together. Like the Department of Recreational Cannabis and promoting recreational cannabis facilities instead of going to illegal ones. The Department of Consumer Business Affairs — letting people know that they have tax help or that they can help get them refunds. Or the Department of Immigration Affairs. So stuff like that has really resonated well.
That’s cool you found partnerships where you’re not just holding your nose. I lived in DC for seven years and it was so wild, you’d open Politico and it’d be like “Brought to you by Raytheon.” So you’re at 5,000 members, you’re self-sustaining. What’s next?
Double it. Get to 10,000. I know internally we would always argue about putting things out there — like how much do we put behind the paywall? Try to test the methods. Do we put more things behind the paywall? Will that increase subscribers? Didn’t really work. Do we share more things? Didn’t really work. And then, when the ICE raids started, we were like, “Screw it. We’re just gonna put it out there first on social media and get to the website later.” And that really resonated well. People responded, we raised so much money. We’ve gotten so many new members.
It’s not until there’s a point of crisis that people understand the importance of having local journalists and local media for answers. I hope people remember this and support us in times of peace, when all we have to talk about is tacos.