O’Leary’s War Zone Warning Caught Up With L.A. Shops

Kevin O’Leary said in June 2025 that Los Angeles small shops would lose customers even if nobody smashed their windows. In July 2026, UCLA researchers found 95 percent of Latino owners they surveyed were still under financial stress, and more than half no longer covered costs.

He called the city a war zone. The glass got the cameras. The empty sidewalks did the lasting damage.

O’Leary Called It a War Zone in June 2025

Immigration raids began on June 6, 2025, in the Fashion District, at a clothing wholesaler, and at a Home Depot in Westlake. Protests followed. President Donald Trump sent 4,000 National Guard troops and 700 Marines. Bryn MacDonnell, then the Pentagon’s acting comptroller, told a House panel on June 10 that the 60-day deployment would cost $134 million from operations and maintenance accounts, mostly travel, housing, and food.

O’Leary, chairman of O’Leary Ventures, spoke the next day, the same taping in which he also discussed a China trade deal and TikTok. He did not linger on who was winning between Trump and Gov. Gavin Newsom. He named who was losing.

If you’re a small business and you see these images of windows being smashed, cars burnt, baseball bats on someone’s property, this is not good management of a state, obviously. I’m not going down there to buy anything, nobody is. So your business is massively disrupted, even if they haven’t smashed your windows. And that may take a long time to recover from if you’re a dry cleaner, if you are a restaurant, if you are an auto repair company. It’s a war zone.

Kevin O’Leary, chairman of O’Leary Ventures, on Varney & Co., June 11, 2025

He posted a cut of the same remarks himself.

This place is a war zone. That's what it is. You see these images of windows being smashed, cars burnt, baseball bats on someone's property, this is not good management of a state. The repercussions are both political, and for small business this is horrific. No one is going down… pic.twitter.com/oOZ5stsQ9S

— Kevin O'Leary aka Mr. Wonderful (@kevinolearytv) June 11, 2025

White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson put the harm on the street fighting, saying Democratic riots, not federal immigration law, were hurting small businesses. Shop owners in Latino corridors described a quieter problem: workers and customers stayed home after the raids, including on blocks that never saw a bat.

Customers Never Came Back

UCLA’s Latino Policy & Politics Institute published its Cost of Fear study on July 22, 2026. Amada Armenta and colleagues paired Advan Research phone-location data around nine June 2025 enforcement sites with focus groups and surveys of 75 Latino owners, held in April and May 2026.

Foot traffic fell in eight of the nine rings. In the first week, visits dropped 1.91 percent within a quarter mile of a site and 0.93 percent between a quarter and a half mile. In week two those declines deepened to 3.23 percent and 1.63 percent. The shock spread outward and got worse after the cameras left.

UCLA FINDINGS AT NINE RAID SITES

The $3.16 million covers only storefronts in the mobility data. Street vendors, home kitchens, and food trucks sit outside it. Every owner in the focus groups reported fewer customers after the raids. About 52 percent said revenue no longer covered operating costs; another 43 percent were breaking even with little or no profit. Owners laid off staff, worked longer hours, and took on new debt to stay open. Seventy-six percent said enforcement had hit their health, including insomnia, panic attacks, and stress-related illness.

A county-commissioned Los Angeles County Economic Development Corporation survey found 82 percent of responding businesses were negatively affected, and 44 percent of those with revenue losses reported declines of more than 50 percent, a different sample from UCLA’s 75 Latino owners.

LAEDC Puts the Curfew Hit at $840 Million

Mayor Karen Bass imposed a downtown night curfew from June 10 to June 16, 2025. The Los Angeles County Economic Development Corporation later modeled what that week did to output, and its baseline recovery path shows $840 million in output losses, 3,920 job-years, and $312 million in lost labor income. Direct losses inside the curfew zone account for about $484 million of that baseline, from reduced foot traffic and shorter hours.

County officials, citing earlier LAEDC work, said the unrest and curfews potentially disrupted more than 19,000 downtown businesses, including over 3,700 retailers, in a zone whose firms generate about $72.6 billion in output and support more than 284,000 jobs. During the curfew window, foot traffic in that downtown area fell 10.3 percent.

THREE LAEDC CURFEW PATHS

Those figures are modeled countywide effects, not a stack of insurance checks. They still dwarf the Pentagon’s $134 million troop bill, which paid for housing and meals, not for a dry cleaner’s lost week.

A July 23, 2025, Department of Economic Opportunity report back to the Board of Supervisors counted at least 20 confirmed ICE raids since June 6 and nearly 2,800 people detained in the L.A. area. Some shops reported drops of up to 90 percent. A Mexican restaurant owner in a predominantly Hispanic neighborhood logged weekly revenue declines of $7,000. In the Fashion District, shops that once took in $1,200 a day were struggling to bring in $50. Preliminary census-based analysis in that report put California private-sector employment down 3.1 percent in the week after the raids escalated, and Latino workers down 5.6 percent.

Insurance Pays for Glass, Not Empty Tables

Robert M. Horkovich, managing shareholder at Anderson Kill, wrote on June 16, 2025, that physical damage from the unrest might be dwarfed by lost revenue, and that business-interruption forms can reach loss caused by customers avoiding unsafe areas. He also warned carriers often fight those claims.

WHERE THE POLICY USUALLY STOPS

• Broken glass: Most business owner policies treat riot or civil commotion as a covered peril for physical damage and stolen stock.
• Forced shutdown: Civil-authority coverage can pay when an order blocks access, but many forms still require nearby physical damage and a true prohibition, not a scary sidewalk.
• Mere avoidance: A dry cleaner with intact windows and no curfew at the door is the shop O’Leary described, and that loss is the one carriers are most likely to call uncovered.
• Wider effects: Insurers may try to cut payouts because the whole city was slow, a defense Horkovich said policyholders should reject unless the contract grants it.

The shops that never took a brick are the ones least likely to have a file. They also match the mobility maps: the deepest, lasting hit was fewer people walking in, not a claim for plywood.

What 1992 Did to the Dry Cleaner

O’Leary’s list was dry cleaners, restaurants, and auto shops. Los Angeles has run that experiment. After the April 1992 unrest, Bung Ik Lee reopened Flaire One Hour Cleaners in the Crenshaw District within a day. Customers had already switched. Clothes had been stolen from the racks, and loyal patrons had fewer garments to bring in.

Dun & Bradstreet later surveyed 560 damaged or looted firms in South-Central and Koreatown. About 40 percent, 229 businesses, had shut for good, and 196 of those were retailers, double the failure rate the firm had expected. Neighbors drove farther for groceries and cleaning. Rebuild L.A. still listed hundreds of vacant properties when it wound down in 1997.

The 2025 shock was smaller in flames and larger in fear. Workers skipped shifts. Street vendors hid. Reservations vanished at downtown restaurants during the curfew week. The 1992 lesson still holds: once a block feels unsafe, the register stays quiet after the plywood comes down.

A $5,000 Grant Against a Year of Lost Sales

Supervisors Hilda L. Solis and Janice Hahn moved on June 17, 2025, for a business-interruption grant. The county opened the Small Business Resiliency Fund on September 29, 2025, with an initial $1.8 million from the Care First Community Investment program, offering up to $5,000 in relief. Applications closed October 31, 2025. At the full amount, that pool covers 360 shops.

Five thousand dollars is less than one week of the $7,000 weekly drop logged by that one Mexican restaurant in the July 2025 county report. Grants could go to rent, wages, inventory, repairs, debt, and marketing, for firms that could show hardship beginning June 6, 2025, from closures, detained workers, curfews, or protests. Kelly LoBianco, director of the Department of Economic Opportunity, said the money was meant to keep immigrant- and family-owned firms open. The waitlist language in the release already assumed demand would exceed the checkbook.

The Congressional Budget Office later recorded that the president announced on December 31, 2025, that deployments in Los Angeles, Portland, and Chicago would not continue. The troops left. UCLA’s owners, interviewed in spring 2026, were still staring at tills that did not cover the lease.

O’Leary said it might take a long time if you ran a dry cleaner, a restaurant, or an auto shop. The mobility pings, the curfew model, and the year-later surveys are the invoice. The windows were the easy part to photograph.

Frequently Asked Questions

What Did Kevin O’Leary Say About Los Angeles Small Businesses?

Beyond the war-zone line, he said he would not walk more than 20 yards from his hotel, and that this was not the Los Angeles he knew 20 years earlier. He refused to pick a political winner between Trump and Newsom and said Californians should look in the mirror.

How Large Is the Latino Small-Business Base UCLA Studied?

Los Angeles County is home to 4.76 million Latinos, nearly half the county, and they own 374,000 businesses, 28 percent of all firms. The Cost of Fear interviews ran mostly in Spanish and included informal vendors, food trucks, home cooks, restaurants, stores, and service shops from East Los Angeles, the San Fernando Valley, the Harbor, and nearby areas.

Does Insurance Cover Lost Customers After Unrest?

Property forms often pay for riot damage to the building and stock. Business-interruption and civil-authority coverage can extend further, but many policies still need physical damage nearby or an order that actually blocks access. A shop that simply sits empty because people are afraid is the claim carriers most often contest, and Horkovich advised owners to give prompt notice on every possibly responsive policy, including excess layers.

When Did Federal Troops Leave Los Angeles?

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told the House the mission would last 60 days from June 2025. The Congressional Budget Office later noted that on December 31, 2025, the president announced the administration would no longer continue the Los Angeles, Portland, and Chicago deployments, months after the original 60-day window.