MAD Shirts is a promotional and screen-printing shop in Montebello. They make the shirts, banners and signs for local schools, most of them Title I campuses in working-class, immigrant communities across East L.A., Montebello, Pico Rivera and Whittier. The owner, Alfonso Velazquez, describes the work as telling a community's story through the things it wears and displays.

"The school year is usually our busiest time, but because of enforcement actions, my sales tanked from one day to the next. Boom, 40 percent of our business is gone."

Almost overnight, cash sales dropped about 40 percent. The owner did not lose an employee or a contract. What changed was the community. As enforcement activity spread through the area, the parents and families who buy shirts in cash at the schools stopped showing up. The vendors he works with were the ones who pointed out the number: down 40 percent from one day to the next, in the middle of the school year, his busiest season.

"My immigrant employees are the reason this shop keeps running. They do the extra work, they stay the extra hour, they take on more responsibility. The only questions they ask are 'when can I start, and how long can I work?' That drive to provide for a family is what keeps a small business like mine alive."

The fear reached almost his entire team. Of 12 employees, 11 had family members affected by the current enforcement climate. To keep everyone working and avoid layoffs, the owner drained roughly $40,000 in personal savings and rebuilt how the business operates. He moved staff to remote shifts, switched to paper order forms and home delivery, added security cameras and set up a system so no one traveled alone.

"I had about $40,000 saved, and I used all of it to keep my employees. The work wasn't there, but I wasn't going to let them go. I spent everything I had to keep my people on."

Some of that improvised response turned into new capability. One printer, sent home with a computer so he would not have to commute, learned to run a new banner-and-wrap machine the shop bought during the slowdown, adding a service line it did not have before. What the owner says he needs now is simple and practical: clear, accurate guidance on what an employer can and cannot legally do to protect workers, from real legal experts rather than bits and pieces from the news or the internet.