The two-and-a-half mile stretch of University Avenue running through City Heights showcases the many cultures and nations represented by local residents in this San Diego community.

At the western end stands a Mexican bakery releasing the aroma of pan dulce throughout the day, a Salvadoran spot offering pupusas, and an older woman vending tamales from a cart with a small line forming on the sidewalk.

At the eastern end, men gather in plastic chairs outside a notary office while sipping Somali tea from foam cups, red paper lanterns sway at a Buddhist temple, and a young server in an Ethiopian eatery checks her phone ahead of the dinner crowd.

More than 30 languages and numerous dialects fill the space across fewer than seven square miles that comprise City Heights. Successive waves of immigrants from Southeast Asia, East Africa, and Latin America have made their homes among over 70,000 residents over the decades.

Some refer to it as the Ellis Island of San Diego.

Yet in recent months a quiet has settled over the neighborhood streets, according to some community members. With President Donald Trump's push for mass deportations reaching new intensity, many residents report that people simply stay indoors now.

In July, the most recent month with available figures, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detained nearly 2,000 individuals in San Diego and Imperial counties and almost 50,000 nationwide, marking the highest monthly total of Trump's second term. Most of those taken into custody had no criminal convictions or open cases.

Although the agency has not released neighborhood-specific information, several ICE encounters in City Heights during late summer have drawn fresh attention to this lower-income, densely populated zone.

Forceful detentions near schools, along busy roads, and in popular shopping spots, with videos circulating widely online, have heightened concerns.

This amounts to public terror, said Diana Ross, who has worked in the area for 16 years and directs a community organizing and advocacy nonprofit called Mid-City CAN.

Amid the colorful storefronts and signs in multiple languages, City Heights now faces a question that may arise in immigrant communities nationwide: what occurs when a locale praised for its diversity becomes a focus, at least in part, because of that very trait.

If an ideal version of this country exists, and I want to believe it does, then I believe it is right here, San Diego City Councilmember Sean Elo-Rivera said at a rally protesting ICE actions last month.

In the days before the rally, ICE detained a Haitian mother and father shortly after they dropped their two children at school and held two U.S. citizens following tense exchanges near a busy shopping center at Fairmount and University Avenue, the center of City Heights.

Speaking from that same intersection the following day, Elo-Rivera told the crowd of hundreds that his office had received several reports of federal agents stopping a high school girl on her way to class that week.

When they checked her bag and found her school ID, they let her continue and said she was fortunate, the councilmember stated at the rally.

Still, in this community where generations of newcomers have arrived with little and built lives through effort and determination, concern over the immigration measures forms only part of the picture.

The larger question is what follows, Elo-Rivera said.

In certain respects, City Heights residents are already responding to that question.

Volunteers pack diapers and canned goods at a nearby church for delivery to families too fearful to venture out. An immigrant mother detained by ICE earlier this year offers lodging to former detainees who have no other place to stay.

They are resilient, said Maria Gutierrez, 75, at a food pantry in City Heights last month. She spoke in Spanish.

Immigration authorities do not enter easily, she said.

The harmony and the anxiety

On an overcast and unusually warm September afternoon, Diana Ross gazed out the window of her fifth-floor office in City Heights.

Can you hear it, she asked.

The rumble and hiss of the city bus pulling into its stop at Fairmount and University avenues as passengers step onto the sidewalk.

The ringing bell of a paletero pushing an ice cream cart down the block. The Cuban salsa classic La Cartera playing from speakers at an auto shop, broken by occasional drilling sounds.

The talk of teenagers just out of class. Police sirens. Heavy construction equipment.

To Ross, this represents the daily soundtrack of lively City Heights, a mix of sounds as rich and varied as the immigrant community itself.

The way City Heights developed into an immigrant enclave mirrors the story of similar places across the country.

Once the separate city of East San Diego, the area joined San Diego in 1923 and became known as City Heights. Dense housing construction provided affordable homes to immigrants escaping conflict and war in their home nations.

In the 1970s, Vietnamese immigrants departing the war and later the Fall of Saigon were first brought to the U.S. Marine base at Camp Pendleton before settling in City Heights, later joined by Cambodians and Laotians. Refugee aid organizations assisted newcomers to the area.

Starting in the 1980s, East African refugees fleeing violence in Ethiopia, Eritrea, Somalia, and Sudan arrived in City Heights. Some Somali immigrants had first trained at Camp Pendleton before making the neighborhood their home.

Civil wars in Central America directed migration toward the U.S. while Mexicans joined existing communities. In more recent years, migrants from the Middle East and Haiti have become some of the newest arrivals.

By the late 1980s, Ross said City Heights had turned into a forgotten community.

White flight sped up in City Heights, fueled by rising crime, reduced investment in urban areas, and suburban growth.

A city planning document from 1984 summarized some of the community's key problems directly: This growth has worsened the shortage of public facilities. Schools are now overcrowded. With the exception of a few canyons, open space does not exist, in addition to the area lacking parks and recreation facilities.

When development occurred, it sometimes came at a price for residents.

In the 1990s, more than 1,100 businesses and homes across eight blocks in City Heights were cleared to make room for Interstate 15.

The following decade, prominent philanthropist Sol Price invested tens of millions of dollars in revitalizing the community, providing loans to the school district, the city, and a private developer. Yet the development was not without debate.

A new commercial area planned at the time nearly left out a medical clinic serving low-income immigrants and residents in favor of a Trader Joe's, according to the documentary The Price of Renewal released in 2006 by director Paul Espinoza.

Today, the community receives praise from local leaders for its rich and varied cultures, but City Heights continues to face ongoing challenges.

Gentrification risks displacing lower-income residents as newcomers arrive seeking lower rents. At the same time, a recent report from the San Diego Fair Housing Lab found that the neighborhood received the lowest opportunity tier score, a state system based on school performance, employment, poverty rate, and environmental quality.

The report also found that 15 percent of homes had more occupants than designed for, nearly triple the rate for the city of San Diego overall.

A rising immigration crackdown may represent just the latest challenge the community confronts.

Inside a dimly lit restaurant on University Avenue, a woman known by her nickname Dulce has sold Mexican candies, bracelets with Catholic images, and bagged peanuts for six years. With black and gray curly hair and pink lipstick, she brightens her corner of the room, smiling at customers passing by.

Her eyes brighten as she describes the harmony she observes in City Heights. Its residents, by purchasing her goods, have helped her raise funds for sick family members and grandchildren.

But that has shifted recently.

There are not as many people as before, she said.

She is not alone in noticing emptier streets.

At the El Super, one of the area's main grocery stores, rows of freshly misted produce carry Spanish labels first then English, and seashell-shaped pastries glow under fluorescent lights behind clear plastic doors. A security supervisor noted fewer customers shopping lately.

I do not really know how El Super will stay open, the supervisor said.

Noelia Martinez, owner of Noelia's, a pinata and party store on University Avenue, has spent about 40 years in City Heights. With more ICE agents visible in recent months, the situation has changed drastically, she said, speaking in Spanish.

She notices it most on her drive home, when pedestrians once filled the sidewalks after work hours. Now, residents she describes as people who strive every day to get ahead choose not to go out. Celebrations that once required a pinata are delayed.

It is affecting us a lot as business owners, she said.

We come and we feel safe

By early afternoon, the sunlight falls just right to light up the yellow and green stained glass windows of a Haitian church in City Heights. One recent Sunday, the light covered the back of the room, resting on rows of mostly empty cream-colored leather chairs.

Once, Pastor Johny Oxeda said, the church would regularly fill with 400 to 600 worshippers for Sunday service. Last month, only dozens attended.

For some immigrants, even those with legal status, the fear of an immigration arrest has turned even small choices like attending church into major decisions. Haitians have become the latest, most visible group targeted.

In July, the U.S. Supreme Court permitted the Trump administration to end a temporary protection program, known as TPS, for Haitian immigrants. The program had allowed almost 350,000 Haitians to live and work in the U.S. since 2010, when a devastating earthquake struck the Caribbean nation.

Today, Haiti remains gripped by widespread gang violence, but the Trump administration argued that conditions in the country no longer qualify for TPS and that the program was intended to be temporary. His administration made the same case for the 12 other countries, including Afghanistan, Syria, Honduras, and Venezuela, when ending their TPS designations.

Soon after the Supreme Court decision, word and videos of ICE arrests of Haitians began appearing in social media feeds.

In August, an Instagram influencer posted a video showing a San Diego police officer holding a 1-year-old girl who had been left in a car after an apparent immigration operation involving a Haitian man. A spokesperson for the San Diego Police Department said federal officials requested them to take the child.

The next month, another video showed an ICE officer detaining one of the two Haitian parents arrested after dropping off their 2- and 5-year-old children at John Marshall Elementary School.

In the video, the officer is on top of the woman's body, holding her to the ground in an open doorway of a home under construction. The woman ran there after ICE stopped her and her husband in their car. Later in the video, the woman, who is barefoot, is seen struggling with an officer before falling to the ground.

ABC 10 reported that the school district had to arrange for the children to stay with another guardian after the parents' arrest. The parents' Toyota Prius remained on the side of the road, with photos of their children attached to the dashboard.