Jimmy Ozaeta stuffs his Jeep Wrangler with 340 frozen meals: beef kabobs, spaghetti and meatballs, canned soup. He’s about to drive this food from the Ketchum-Downtown YMCA to Bell Gardens, where seven immigrant families too frightened to leave home are waiting for him.
“It really has been an Underground Railroad kind of deal,” says Ozaeta, senior vice president of mission advancement at the YMCA of Metropolitan Los Angeles. “The word is spreading amongst the community.”
On June 9, days after federal immigration agents began daily arrests in public places in LA, the local YMCA posted on Instagram that they had a new hotline for immigrant families to call if they needed free food. They also requested community donations — and got them. The very next day, Ozaeta and his colleagues started bringing people supplies. They’ve received dozens of calls, and every day connect with more families through word of mouth.
To protect the families’ identities, only a few senior leaders are responsible for deliveries.
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Mario Valenzuela, the senior vice president of social impact, came up with the meal delivery idea — a first for the YMCA of Metropolitan LA. Valenzuela’s heard from people who are no longer going to work, or running quick errands for things like water or cooking oil.
“The fact that they're just so afraid that they won't even walk down to the corner to get that stuff just really shows the level of fear that we're experiencing,” he says.
Valenzuela begins each day of deliveries with phone calls to families to let them know food is on the way. The calls are never short, he says, and people often share their stories. One undocumented woman named Maria tells him how her own housing insecurity inspired her to start a nonprofit to help unhoused people in the Whittier Narrows. Now she’s the one who needs assistance. “It’s tough,” says Valenzuela as he hangs up. “My hand was shaking during the call, just hearing everything that she's gone through, but this is why we do what we do.”
On this day, the Valenzuela and Ozaeta will make deliveries to Bell Gardens, a city that’s 96% Latino. Even as they make the half-hour drive from Downtown, news breaks that Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents detained a man at a church in nearby Downey.
They pull up to their first stop on a narrow residential street packed with small apartments and accessory dwelling units. A woman exits an apartment wearing a blue Dodgers t-shirt. She greets Valenzuela and Ozaeta with a warm smile and thanks the men profusely for the bag of ten frozen meals they hand her.
At another stop, a child quickly peeks out from behind window blinds, but the adults inside wait until the car pulls away to bring the food inside. They are too afraid to be seen.
This effort is personal to Ozaeta. His parents are immigrants, and he’s a first-generation Mexican American.
On the first day of deliveries, he took 350 frozen meals to 20 addresses in Southgate, Huntington Park, and Bell Gardens. When he arrived at the final address at 9:30 p.m., he says, 10 people poured out of the tiny apartment they used as a shelter. The gratitude and fear he saw in their eyes still sits with him.
“When you're out there delivering, it is very emotional because you see the grief and the pain,” says Ozaeta. “It's real.”
You can reach out to the YMCA of Metropolitan LA at 323-244-9077 or socialimpact@ymcala.org to sign up for deliveries.