"I thought the next four years were going to look a certain way. I'm not sure that they will now."
With less than seven weeks until President-Elect Donald Trump is sworn into the White House, residents in Pico Union are still feeling shaken.
"It felt like I was in a daze for a few days," Carla Vasquez, a Pico Union resident and the director of community programs at With Love Market & Cafe, said. "There was this first initial shock and then it felt like waves of shock afterwards."
Though Trump won the electoral college and thus, the presidency, people in Pico Union voted overwhelmingly for Hillary Clinton. In fact, an average of 86% of voters in the Pico Union area, more than 7,500 ballots altogether, were votes for Clinton, according to data from the Los Angeles County Registrar collected by the L.A. Times.
Trump, however, received just 8.8% of the vote in Pico Union.
Though the neighborhood is not necessarily the most liberal or most Clinton-supporting part of Los Angeles, it is more blue than LA County as a whole. As of Dec. 2, Clinton was winning more than 72% of the vote in LA County, with Trump trailing at 22.5%, according to the county's Recorder-Registrar/County Clerk.
The United States as a whole is split more evenly, but Clinton still leads the national popular vote by more than 2.6 million votes, according to CNN.
But despite the left's many calls for faithless electors and recounts, some of which are still underway, Donald Trump will still very likely become president on Jan. 20 next year. For Vasquez, that is still a thought that concerns her.
"I thought the next four years were going to look a certain way," Vasquez said. "I'm not sure that they will now."
Here's how Pico Union voted on Nov. 8, precinct by precinct
Data from LA County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk's Office and the L.A. Times
Chief among the concerns Vasquez has heard in her community are those surrounding immigration.
"We get high schoolers that cross the street [from West Adams Preparatory High School]," Vasquez said. "[After the election] one of them came in with her friends and I asked her 'how are you doing today?' She said, 'really honestly, I've been trying to keep it together and during sixth period I couldn't anymore. My best friend is undocumented and so is her family.'"
Trump, who kicked off his campaign last June with a series of racist comments about Mexicans, has stepped back slightly from his promise of mass deportations - however, his new promise is to deport millions of undocumented immigrants in his first 100 days in office.
Local governments across the country are fighting back against that promise. Los Angeles is one of several "sanctuary cities" across the country that have instituted policies that limit how much local entities can comply with federal requests that could lead to deportation, like prohibiting police officers from initiating contact with someone solely to determine their immigration status or turning over undocumented people arrested for low-level crimes to federal agents.
Trump's administration cannot force local governments to deport undocumented people, as it is a federal policy and the responsibility of the federal government to carry out.
In November, Los Angeles Police Chief Charlie Beck said the LAPD would not change their policies under a Trump presidency.
"I don't intend on doing anything different," he said. "We are not going to engage in law enforcement activities solely based on somebody's immigration status. We are not going to work in conjunction with Homeland Security on deportation efforts. That is not our job, nor will I make it our job."
LA County is home to more than 1 million of the estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants in the country, according to the Migration Policy Institute.
The Los Angeles Unified School District announced yesterday it would be opening six temporary "extended support sites," which offer emotional support, enrollment and attendance information and referrals to outside resources for students with concerns after the election.
In a public service announcement announcing the extended support sites, LAUSD Board President Steve Zimmer said he'd had many conversations with students and parents who were feeling anxious about the future. "We're going to do all that we can to make sure [students are] feeling safe and nurtured in [their] schools," Zimmer said in the announcement.
The sites, one of which is located at West Adams Preparatory High School in Pico Union, will be open from 8 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. on weekdays, including over the district's winter break.
The Los Angeles Red Shield Youth and Community Center, which serves children and parents in Pico Union, held a community forum on Dec. 2 to discuss the election results. They're planning more programming in collaboration with the LAPD's Rampart division starting in February. Otherwise, staff at the Center said they were avoiding discussions of the election with their patrons.
"We don't discuss political stuff with the children," Patty Gastelum of the LA Red Shield said. "We leave that to the parents. We're just trying to keep them busy here in a safe environment."
Vasquez said that With Love will continue to focus on being a community-oriented business that serves all its neighbors, regardless of political affiliation. But she's still concerned for her younger customers who've been shaken by the results.
"All I've been hearing [from the high school students] since the summer is 'my personal statement for this school, my personal statement for that school,'" Vasquez said. "But now it's like a dark cloud hanging over them. They have so much to look forward to... But now any energy or attention that they could've used for moving themselves and their families forward is now hung up on how to survive."
