The September morning that immigration agents grabbed Mercedes' husband was like a tragic prophecy fulfilled.

The El Salvador native narrowly escaped when three coworkers were nabbed this summer during a raid at a car wash in Orange County. La migra stalked his dreams for weeks after. On the day they finally got him, Mercedes said her husband must have felt "a premonition" because he left his keys and phone in the family car.

We were driving up the 5 Freeway to a lawyer's appointment in Los Angeles County to try to bail out her husband from the Adelanto ICE Processing Center. She requested The Times not share his name or her last name for fear of retribution. But Mercedes wanted to share their story to highlight her husband's profession, one of the most dangerous for undocumented immigrants in Southern California right now.

Since President Donald Trump uncorked his deportation deluge this summer, immigration agents have hit more than 100 car washes across Southern California and detained more than 340 workers. Videos of those raids frequently go viral on social media because of their grotesque spectacle: armed, masked men chase middle-aged Latino men through car tunnels or vacuuming stations before piling on top of their target as if the worker were a fumbled football.

"Every time I open my Facebook, the video of my husband's capture seems to come up," the soft-spoken Mercedes said. She sat in the front passenger seat as Andrea Gutierrez drove. A wrinkled manila folder with her husband's birth certificate and tax returns was on Mercedes' lap.

"He says, 'If they deport me, will you go with me?'" Mercedes continued. 'And I tell him, 'No, you're going to fight.'"

Gutierrez, dressed like the Latina millennial she is with jeans and a streak of blond in her otherwise black hair, finally spoke: "Lo que necesiten."

Whatever your family needs.

She's the deputy director for CLEAN Carwash Worker Center, a nonprofit that has helped the men and women it calls carwasheros fight for better working conditions in Los Angeles for nearly 20 years. They've focused on pushing local and state governments to pass workplace protection laws, unionize car washes under the United Steel Workers and offer peer-to-peer training so members can trade tips on how to leave vehicles as immaculate as possible.

After Trump's victory last year, CLEAN began to hold immigrant know-your-rights workshops at their headquarters in an industrial part of L.A..

"We did role-playing all winter," CLEAN executive director Flor Melendrez told me. "We really thought we had prepared our community. But what we didn't anticipate is that [immigration agents] would go into car washes."

We sat on a comfy couch in the offices of CLEAN's headquarters. Posters on the walls from previous campaigns now intermixed with others demanding that ICE leave L.A. Before us were boxes of COVID-19 tests that CLEAN asks anyone who visits them to take — "We can't get sick right now," Melendrez said.

"In the early days, [immigration agents] would go in with four to five cars and get maybe five or six people. Now, they're going in with 10 and getting so many more," she continued. They now keep a running tab on places hit and workers detained by tracking social media accounts and communicating with the families of those affected. "The stories are just horrible."

Melendrez waved to a section of the office covered in black tarps — they're turning that section into a room so its volunteers and workers can speak with the families of detained carwasheros in privacy.

I asked Melendrez why she thought immigration agents continuously raid car washes. The one near my dad's house in Anaheim has been hit at least four times — during one in August, la migra tackled Isaac Dominguez, a U.S. citizen, after he pretended to throw a water bottle at them. They didn't charge him with anything despite a Homeland Security spokesperson telling The Times that Dominguez tried to assault agents.

"Car washes are designed for people to go in and out quickly," she responded. "They're in the open. A lot of carwasheros are older men. Where do they hide? How can they run away? We can do all sorts of training, but that fear — the body betrays you and you forget it. It's like an earthquake to your soul."

Fortunato, a 55-year-old car wash worker whom I spoke to via Zoom at CLEAN's offices, agreed.

"We're all scared — why not say it?" the native of Mexico said. A few weeks earlier, la migra got six coworkers on his day off. "Only luck saved me then. None of us are working comfortably. At any moment they could come."

CLEAN's garage, where the organization holds its car-detailing classes and membership meetings, now doubles as a warehouse for food donations. The meetings, which used to happen monthly, now occur weekly and usually include deported members who dial in from their native countries to maintain a sense of belonging with ex-colleagues.

"It's terrible right now, just terrible," said Luis, a permanent resident who stopped by CLEAN's garage after his shift ended. He was supposed to attend a worker's conference in Chicago this fall but chose not to because of the raids that hit the city. "But we can't be afraid. We have to keep pushing back."

The ICE raids are just the latest ignominy in a bad decade for carwasheros, whose numbers CLEAN estimates are at around 10,000 across L.A. County. The pandemic upended their industry — people still don't wash their cars as much as they used to. Jobs become scarcer every year as car wash owners invest in touchless technologies — "We've been way ahead on how automation destroys jobs," Melendrez said.

The air quality in the aftermath of the Palisades and Eaton fires discouraged car owners from taking their vehicles in for a wash since they would get filthy again so quickly.

Melendrez said "things were starting to get better, then boom: June 6" — the weekend mass raids hit Southern California and the Trump administration called in the National Guard to quell protests.

"We've never stopped working since."

The child of Mexican immigrants from the state of Durango, Melendrez originally wanted to become a nurse but entered organizing instead, fueled by memories of sleeping in industrial-sized baskets as a child while her parents sewed into the night at clothing factories in East L.A. "to make next to nothing." The 40-year-old acknowledged not knowing much about the car wash industry until she began to accompany workers home on bus rides in the mid-2000s as part of the campaign that led to the creation of CLEAN.

"They were coughing nonstop, their eyes were red and there were all these burn marks on their skin," she said. "If you didn't know they were carwasheros, you'd think they were people who had a problem with alcohol."

Her work ethic caught the attention of Victor Narro, one of CLEAN's founders. He recommended Melendrez replace him as executive director in 2016.

"I saw the way workers responded to her," said Narro, a UCLA labor studies professor who continues to sit on CLEAN's board of directors. "They became really loyal to her, and it's tough to do that as a woman organizer to lead male workers. You just want to be in the fight with her — and what she's dealing with right now is massive."

Longtime funders are telling CLEAN they "have to scale back" on donations, Melendrez said. She, Gutierrez and other volunteers do everything from creating GoFundMe campaigns for detained workers to shopping for groceries for affected families on top of their usual tasks. They're trying to find lawyers to take on cases pro bono or at a vastly reduced rate CLEAN tries to cover and are making connections with activists in areas where the group historically hasn't organized in, like Orange County.

"Every time a carwashero gets deported, it's like losing a family member," Melendrez said. "But every time that we think there's no light at the end of the tunnel, there's hope. The carwasheros — they show up. There's no other way."

As we talked, a man named Francisco passed us on his way out. The El Salvador native and U.S. citizen stopped in to discuss the case of his brother, a car wash worker whom ICE detained in September.

Holding a CVS bag that contained his brother's legal papers, Francisco stopped to tell us his family's story. How his brother always filed his taxes. How he took pride in making cars "shine like a mirror." How Francisco tried to hide his brother's detention from their 86-year-old mother. How the family made regular trips to Adelanto — but the drive was long and gas prices are expensive.

"It's an injustice what they did to him," Francisco said in Spanish, sitting across from Melendrez. He requested The Times not share his last name or that of his brother. "They should get people doing bad things, not those who are trying to earn their daily bread."

Melendrez told Francisco that CLEAN would accompany his brother through the entire journey, wherever it may lead.

"We're keeping on. If he wants to fight, we'll fight with him. There's no other way," she said.

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