Shops empty in a Hispanic neighborhood as immigration crackdown comes to Louisiana

KENNER, La. (AP) — The doors of Carmela Diaz’s taco joint are locked, the tables are devoid of customers and no one is working in the kitchen. It’s one of many once-thriving Hispanic businesses, from Nicaraguan eateries to Honduran restaurants, emptied out in recent weeks in neighborhoods with lots of signs in Spanish but increasingly fewer people on the streets.

In the city of Kenner, which has the highest concentration of Hispanic residents in Louisiana, a federal immigration crackdown aiming for 5,000 arrests has devastated an economy already struggling from ramped-up enforcement efforts this year, some business owners say, and had far-reaching impacts on both immigrants and U.S. citizens alike.

“Fewer and fewer people came,” said a crying Diaz, whose Taqueria La Conquistadora has bee