Immigrants revived rust belt cities. Now they’re in hiding.

More than 150 years later, immigrants from Guatemala are remaking East Price Hill, replacing empty storefronts on Warsaw Avenue, the main thoroughfare, with barbershops, taquerias and supermercados.

“We wouldn’t have a local economy if not for them holding it up," said Ashley Feist, commercial-real-estate director at Price Hill Will, a local nonprofit.

The public clash over the Trump administration’s sweeping deportations has centered on the economic and social fallout in big, Democratic-run cities such as Los Angeles and Chicago, where President Trump has promised to focus his enforcement efforts. Yet deportations are also hitting less prominent places: smaller cities and neighborhoods across the Rust Belt, where economists say recent immigration has helped boost faltering economies and offset long-running population declines.

Over the past decade, immigrants, largely from Latin America, have moved into depressed, working-class urban neighborhoods in cities across the U.S., drawn by low rents and proximity to jobs. In recent weeks, cities including St. Louis, Pittsburgh and Buffalo, N.Y., were hit by immigration raids.

In Cincinnati, federal agents on May 31 showed up in the neighborhood and arrested four people, Department of Homeland Security Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement. She said all four were in the U.S. illegally, including two who had public-intoxication and driving under the influence charges on their records. At least two people were arrested outside the Kroger supermarket on Warsaw Avenue, eyewitnesses said.

The arrests cast a shadow over the local economy. Restaurant tables emptied. Kitchen workers stayed home. Fruit vendors disappeared from the streets. The number of shoppers at stores shrank, and those who still went didn’t linger for long.

Federico Ventura, whose Guatemalan immigrant family runs a small grocery store in East Price Hill, said shoppers were slow to return. “They think any truck with tinted windows is ICE," he said.

When Ventura’s parents opened the store in the early 2000s, the neighborhood had few Latino residents, and its population was shrinking as middle-class families moved to the suburbs.

The foreclosure crisis that began in 2006 hit particularly hard. Many of the neighborhood’s stately old homes fell into disrepair and some were torn down, leaving the area pockmarked with empty lots. The remaining residents complained about rising crime. Out-of-state investors bought up hundreds of foreclosed houses and turned them into rentals.

Over the past decade, Latin American immigrants, many from Guatemala, helped temper East Price Hill’s economic decline. They came because of cheap housing, the neighborhood’s location near jobs in downtown Cincinnati and because some Guatemalans already lived in the area.

Between 2010 and 2020, East Price Hill added close to 2,000 Hispanic residents, which helped keep the population nearly steady at around 15,000 as others departed, according to Census Bureau figures. That influx has accelerated since 2020, locals say. As older shops and restaurants closed, immigrants opened new ones, keeping Warsaw Avenue lively. The newcomers also filled crumbling apartment complexes, propping up the local real-estate market.

Tensions have flared along the way. The newcomers drove down apartment vacancies, contributing to rising rents that are a sore spot for longtime residents. In the 2024 presidential election, Ohio voted to elect Trump, who promised to close borders and deport immigrants. But Hamilton County, which includes Cincinnati, voted for Kamala Harris.

Barbara Rich, who works at an East Price Hill hardware store, said she feels like some immigrants haven’t become enmeshed enough in the community, including learning English. When locals staged a protest against the recent ICE arrests in early June, people driving by in a car stuck their middle fingers at the protesters, said Walter Vasquez, a neighborhood resident and missionary for a local religious organization, who witnessed the arrests at the supermarket.

Some immigrants, meanwhile, complain about crime. They also say nonimmigrant residents target them in robberies because immigrants tend to carry cash and are reluctant to approach police.

Around the Midwest, Pittsburgh’s Hispanic population roughly doubled between 2010 and 2023, according to census estimates. The number grew by 92% in Cincinnati and by 75% in Columbus, Ohio. This far outpaces Hispanic population growth throughout the U.S.

“The types of changes that have taken place in Price Hill have taken place in at least hundreds of neighborhoods in dozens of cities," said A.K. Sandoval-Strausz, a professor of history at Pennsylvania State University.

Many of these places are now sites of immigration raids. Authorities also arrested and deported a recent high-school graduate from Honduras in a different part of Cincinnati this month.

The East Price Hill arrests rattled a neighborhood where many newcomers are in the U.S. illegally but have managed to work. Immigration agents grabbed one man from Guatemala as he stopped at the supermarket on the way to a birthday party, said Vasquez, the neighborhood resident, who witnessed the arrest.

Locals are worried because immigration agents often use unmarked cars, making them hard to spot. “They might show up in a Prius," he said.

A neighborhood fruit vendor, an immigrant from Guatemala, said she used to sell 10 to 12 fruit cups a day. After the arrests that fell to one to three, and she worries about being able to pay her apartment rent.

At the Valle Verde restaurant, business declined around 50% after the arrests, and servers only make a fraction of what they used to in tips, said the owner, another Guatemalan immigrant. When customers call for pickup for dishes such as tacos and enchiladas, they sometimes ask if immigration agents are nearby, she said.

A mattress-shop owner said he recently asked his brother in his native Mauritania for $500 to cover a utility bill because business has plummeted.

Shaundale Green, who cuts hair at an East Price Hill barbershop, said the majority of his customers are Hispanic immigrants. Business had been good, he said on a recent weekday, pointing at the sign listing prices of $30 to $40 for a cut.

But fear was keeping many clients home, eating into his income. “They ain’t going out any more," Green said.

Write to Konrad Putzier at konrad.putzier@wsj.com