One morning last month, they crammed into a small job center in Pasadena, Calif., ready for more work. But on this day, the situation felt too dangerous.

It wasn’t the contaminants or toxic fumes. Outside the Winchell’s Donut House just blocks away, federal immigration agents had detained six people.

The day laborers went home instead of heading to their job sites.

“They’re living in fear,” said Jose Madera, the director of the Pasadena Community Job Center, which earlier this year helped train about 40 immigrant workers in fire cleanup. “They don’t know what can happen if they go to work — are they going to come back?”

Immigrant workers are playing a crucial role in the recovery of Pasadena, Altadena and Pacific Palisades after the devastating fires in January. They have hauled debris, cleaned smoke-affected homes and in some cases begun reconstruction in the months since the Eaton and Palisades fires burned more than 16,000 buildings in the region.

But raids by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents have plunged workers in various occupations into a state of panic, leading many of them — regardless of immigration status — to stay home. And residents worry that the raids have already hurt recovery efforts in fire-torn neighborhoods.

In two dozen interviews, residents, officials, real estate agents, contractors, community organizers and workers described ways in which the Trump administration’s raids have affected the rebuilding process in Southern California. Many of those involved agreed to speak only if they could remain anonymous because they feared retaliation from the federal government.

“At a time when our communities need help healing from a natural disaster, the Trump administration is manufacturing a man-made one,” said Lindsey Horvath, who serves on the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors.

Undocumented immigrants, who make up a sizable share of construction workers in California, have the most acute concerns about the potential for raids. But even Latino workers with legal residency or American citizenship are worried about confrontations with federal agents.

The reconstruction of fire-torn communities has been a priority for President Trump, and the threat of a slowdown has revealed a potential seam in his immigration crackdown. A Department of Homeland Security spokeswoman made a point of saying that agents had not targeted construction sites in Pacific Palisades or Altadena.

Still, there are growing signs of frustration in California over the raids across Southern California and their chilling effect on labor in the state. Videos that appear to show arrests at work sites have circulated across social media, giving the impression that federal agents have tried to detain anyone they think looks like an undocumented immigrant.

California Democrats have criticized President Trump for months. In late June, six Republican state lawmakers also pleaded with him to focus enforcement efforts on immigrants with criminal backgrounds.

“The recent ICE workplace raids on farms, at construction sites, and in restaurants and hotels have led to unintended consequences that are harming the communities we represent and the businesses that employ our constituents,” the Republicans wrote, noting that the resulting fear was making the state’s affordability crisis worse.

Though federal agencies were largely responsible for the initial stages of the cleanup, contractors play a significant role in rebuilding efforts. About 75 percent of construction laborers in Los Angeles County are immigrants, and nearly half of those are undocumented, according to a recent analysis conducted for the Bay Area Council, a California business group.

It is not clear how much cleanup and construction efforts in Southern California have been affected by fears of ICE enforcement. But as the raids have intensified, residents and community organizers say construction crews have thinned out. In one case, workers vanished when they were halfway through a job. Others have packed their tools into passenger cars instead of construction vehicles, as well as staggered their work shifts to avoid drawing attention.

Last month, at least 11 people were detained during three separate raids in Pasadena. The city borders Altadena, where the fire incinerated thousands of homes and left others uninhabitable. One video of the arrests outside the doughnut shop showed an agent detaining two men, who the Pasadena’s mayor said were on their way to work on fire recovery efforts.

In a separate episode, federal agents questioned workers at a construction site in the Altadena fire-rebuilding zone, said Brock Harris, a Los Angeles real estate agent who works with the developer involved in the project. No one was arrested, Mr. Harris said, but “the next day, half the workers didn’t come to work.”

Pablo Alvarado, the co-executive director of the National Day Laborer Organizing Network, said ICE agents showed up on a street in Altadena where construction crews were repairing two roofs damaged by the fire. The workers fled, Mr. Alvarado said, leaving their tools behind. “As long as they are around,” he added, referring to the federal agents, “workers are going to stay inside.”

But federal officials said that agents with ICE and U.S. Customs and Border Protection have not gone after workers in the fire recovery zones.

“ICE and CBP have NOT targeted any construction sites in Altadena and the Palisades,” Tricia McLaughlin, a spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security, wrote in an email, adding that “we will continue to work to get the worst of the worst criminal illegal aliens off of America’s streets.”

The dread is palpable among workers. On a recent afternoon, three men in white protective suits who were clearing weeds and other debris at a fire-damaged property in Altadena said that they had stayed home for a couple of weeks when raids intensified in Los Angeles in June.

Sergio, a traffic controller who immigrated from Mexico as a child and has been working in Altadena for months, said that the rebuilding process had already seemed to be “falling behind.”

He said that he was in the country lawfully, having arrived through the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, but he feared reprisal from immigration officials and asked to be identified only by first name. He has been afraid of being profiled on the street by federal agents, and his boss has told him he could miss work if he needed to. He said that he felt that anyone who looked like they were an immigrant laborer could be detained by ICE agents.

In the Pacific Palisades, a wealthy neighborhood on the west side of Los Angeles where thousands of buildings burned in January, there have not been any raids, according to the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights, which has been tracking enforcement efforts. But contractors there said that deportation anxiety was still shrinking the work force.

The owner of a contracting firm with rebuilding projects in the Palisades said many workers and subcontractors — regardless of their legal status — have opted to stay home on many days since the sweeps began. The owner, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of drawing the attention of immigration officials, said other contractors have experienced the same.

It has become increasingly complicated to make construction plans ever since the raids ramped up last month. Workers have texted on some mornings to say they don’t feel safe showing up. The owner has empathized with them but said that the missed days will eventually delay construction.

Oscar Mondragón, the director of a day labor center in Malibu, said that in the past couple of weeks, only about half of the 40 workers contracted each morning by the center were showing up. Some of those workers, he added, were removing smoke-related hazards in homes that were polluted in the Palisades fire.

“All they want is to work, not to do any harm to anybody else, just to work for their families and their own good,” Mr. Mondragón said.

Marco, an immigrant from Mexico who asked to be identified only by his first name because of deportation concerns, said that the raids had forced him to weigh economic survival against the fear of being arrested by immigration officials.

He worked on debris removal in Pacific Palisades shortly after the fire, and he said he has stayed home many days since the workplace raids began.

But doing so had become unsustainable. He had no choice, he said, but to risk an immigration raid in order to survive.

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When COVID-19 hit the nation’s meatpacking plants and infected thousands of workers in the spring of 2020, it was widely reported.

National stories described how workers, who are often first-generation immigrants, stood shoulder to shoulder for hours working on fast-paced lines. This is what made it so easy for the virus to spread through facilities quickly.

I watched how leaders in Iowa overwhelmingly expressed concern about keeping the supply chain running, leaving the implementation of many safety measures to the discretion of meatpacking companies. I wasn’t hearing a lot about the workers.

I’ve reported on immigrant and refugee communities over the years, and I knew there was a much bigger story on the workers affected by the outbreaks, a story that actually started decades ago with one of Iowa’s most important industries — meat processing — and involved a group of Iowans who often can seem invisible.

Immigrant communities experience health challenges such as diabetes and hypertension at higher rates than the general population — conditions that make them more vulnerable to getting COVID-19. They can also be very, very hard to reach to interview. Many work long hours and some come from counties where a free press and workers’ rights are nearly nonexistent. 

I anticipated reaching workers to be the most difficult aspect of this project, and it proved more difficult than I imagined in the beginning of this project.

I mainly worked through advocates and faith leaders, knowing that a trusted connection is vital, rather than trying to contact workers directly.

But I found many workers unwilling to speak, even those who had previously spoken to the media during the outbreaks and even with the guarantee of not being identified. I think because it was a year and a half after the outbreaks, many just wanted to get back to work and live their lives as normally as possible.

My experience wasn’t unique.

Many reporters who have worked on stories about meatpacking workers and COVID-19 outbreaks report how difficult it is to reach workers and get them to speak to the media. But I don’t often find this issue addressed head on in many media reports as part of this story, or why workers may feel like they can’t or don’t want to speak up about their working conditions.

I felt that this was an important part of the story, and I needed to report on it to reflect the power dynamics at play between meatpacking companies, political leaders and the workers at the plants.

It helped immensely when Iowa State University sociology professor David Peters conducted a survey of how the pandemic impacted Iowa’s small towns. Peters found meatpacking communities and the workers that live in them were much more heavily impacted than in other communities — mentally, physically and emotionally.

He also noted something else that supported what I was finding anecdotally in my reporting: that many workers reported on their surveys that they were concerned about speaking up for fear of losing their jobs.

My series was an accountability piece. It showed how it took a pandemic to expose how policymakers have failed to set up a safety network and adequately fund community health public resources for America’s vulnerable food workers — and why these workers continue to remain silent. 

This was even after occupational health and safety experts warned previous presidential administrations about how a pandemic could affect food supply workers.

But, in a way, this series of stories only felt like I was scratching the surface of a long running issue involving Midwest immigrant communities, large meatpacking corporations and local policy makers. The fact that I didn’t reach as many workers as I’d like to have only shows how much of a need there is to cover these communities. In particular, there’s a lot of opportunity for reporting on health in the Midwest’s immigrant communities, which are chronically under-covered. 

But this project also felt like it opened many doors for me to continue reporting on this issue. It strengthened my ties with leaders in these communities, enabling more reporting on the disparities and health challenges workers face, and how they could be addressed by policy changes. This includes the potential for more powerful firsthand accounts from Iowa’s growing immigrant communities.

There are a lot of health stories to explore in immigrant and minority communities, and reporters can start by learning about the work that community organizations and local public health agencies who have long running ties with these communities are doing. This is a good way to begin building trust and long-lasting relationships.

The concerns outlined in my story about worker health and safety aren’t limited to Iowa. Many other states have many food production workers who have been greatly affected by the pandemic and have made significant cuts to their public health funding. This means there is a lot of opportunity for reporters across the Midwest and elsewhere to start taking a closer look at food production workers, whether they work in meatpacking plants, fields or other production plants.

I plan to do more stories in the state’s meatpacking communities. With cuts to public health funding and ongoing concerns about worker safety, the issues outlined in my series will likely be ongoing issues. The Iowa state legislature doesn’t appear poised to increase worker protection regulations and minority health funding this year, with other pressing pandemic-related issues at stake. 

But in the meantime, the health challenges in these communities remain, especially as the COVID-19 pandemic rages on.

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