Last Tuesday, Valerie Gordon made an Instagram video about new signs she had posted around her small Los Angeles restaurant reading “Private: Employees Only.” She explained that they marked all nonpublic areas of the restaurant that would be off limits to Immigration and Customs Enforcement in a raid.

The scale of the response to the post shocked her. Ms. Gordon estimated that it had already been viewed more than 500,000 times and shared widely across the Los Angeles restaurant industry.

“What that showed to me is there is a need for this information, there is a deep need, and people don’t really know what to do,” Ms. Gordon said.

But she had some help with the post. The guidance Ms. Gordon described came from the Independent Hospitality Coalition, a small, scrappy advocacy group which has emerged as an organizing hub for the Los Angeles restaurant industry.

Founded during the pandemic, the I.H.C. is one of a number organizations, local and national, which are trying to bring together isolated, competing restaurant businesses. The coalition’s main mission is to help business cut through red tape like liquor permitting processes and promote more restaurant-friendly legislation at the state level. But in Los Angeles in the last five years, a rolling series of major disruptions — from the pandemic itself, to the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020 to the 2023 Hollywood strikes to the wildfires in January — has made operating a restaurant an uncertain proposition.

And then came the ICE raids and the deployment of the National Guard.