Soon after Donald Trump was sworn in as president, attendance at Priscilla’s beauty salon in Des Moines began to fall.

“Quite a bit,” said owner Eva Ortiz, who offers haircuts, perms, highlights and facial waxing at the place she has owned six years in Iowa’s capital city. “Sometimes when it’s that low, I think, ‘What am I doing here?’”

Most of Priscilla’s customers are Latinas and many of them are not going out much these days. Some who are undocumented are too afraid of being rounded up by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents and deported.

Ortiz’s isn’t the only Latino-owned business suffering in Des Moines. At Los Laureles, a long-running restaurant popular both with state Capitol workers and the Latino community, customers are down by about half over the past two months, according to owner Cynthia Mayorga. Business is down by a fifth to a quarter at the sprawling La Tapatia Grocery, Manager Sergio Marquis said.

The fears are not unwarranted. Trump got elected pledging to build a wall along the Mexican border and has taken aim at Mexican immigrants, saying famously, “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. ... They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”

He seems to be making good on his January pledge to step up immigration enforcement as such apprehensions rose nationally by about a third in the first weeks of this administration, compared with this time last year. By mid-March, 5,441 immigrants with no criminal records had been detained, according to The Washington Post. That’s out of 21,362 detentions, compared with 16,104 by mid-March last year.

Neither was as high as that time frame in 2014, under President Barack Obama, when 29,238 immigrants, including 7,483 noncriminal ones, were arrested. The harshest enforcement action doesn’t necessarily follow the toughest political rhetoric.

But earlier this month it was reported that the Trump administration even deported a 23-year-old California farm worker who had permission to stay under Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA. That granted a reprieve from deportation to people brought here as children by their parents. They got two-year renewable work permits, a policy that Trump has not officially rescinded. Lawyers for Juan Manuel Montes have said he was picked up by ICE agents Feb. 17 and escorted across the border, although his work permit was valid until 2018. But Homeland Security says he left on his own and wasn’t allowed back in when he tried to return two days later.

Jeff Norris, a Des Moines immigration attorney, said enforcement activity has picked up substantially under Trump. Under Obama, ICE targeted criminal convicts as they were discharged from probation, he said. But now agents can go after anyone without papers. He said Homeland Security has taken prosecutorial discretion away from immigration courts. So the best that lawyers like him can do is look for extenuating circumstances that could keep a client in the U.S.

The Washington Post reports that in memos it obtained, the Homeland Security secretary ordered aggressive new enforcement guidelines for detentions and deportations. They call for immediately sending back border-crossers instead of detaining them until they can have hearings. And they would increase ICE agents by 10,000 and Border Patrol agents by 5,000.

Shawn Neudauer, an ICE spokesman, confirmed that the new policies are based on the Homeland Security directives and a Trump executive order. White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer told CNN that deportations are aimed at people who pose a public safety threat, but U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions told Fox News anyone here illegally is subject to deportation, and he didn’t exclude those covered by DACA.

What’s happening in Des Moines is probably a microcosm of what is happening in cities and towns across America. One of the sad paradoxes for the small, independent businesses built to serve Latino communities is that customers who fear deportation avoid those places the most, thinking they would be magnets for ICE agents, said Mayorga, Los Laureles’ owner. Marquis of La Tapatia said fearful shoppers prefer shopping at night at chain stores where they won’t be as visible as a group.

He believes some fears are overblown, touched off by rumors of ICE stings that spread on social media.

But Wil Melgar, the editor of Conexion Latina, billed as Iowa’s largest Latino newspaper, says enforcement activities have stepped up locally since January. “Before, it would happen, but people wouldn’t pay attention because they were just targeting people with felonies,” he said. “Now they’re taking anyone without papers, whether they have a criminal record or not.”

These detentions are never going to return all 11 million undocumented immigrants to their homelands. Too many employers, landlords, businesses, communities and schools depend on their presence. But the federal government can cause a lot of fear and hardship in the meantime, as large Obama-era deportations showed. We need comprehensive immigration reform.

Rekha Basu is a columnist with the Des Moines (Iowa) Register.