While the Trump administration rolls out its changes in the immigration system, fear in the food service industry is increasing because it is scrapping for a promised action against unauthorized employees.
Immigrant Labor, both authorized and unauthorized, is an integral part of the staff and running restaurants in the United States. In a data letter in 2024, the National Restaurant Association reported that 21 percent of restaurant employees in the United States were immigrants. However, that figure does not include unauthorized employees; The Center for Migration Studies has estimated that they have another million employees.
Under the new government, owners and employees are preparing for the worst.
An immigration and customs enforcement exhaust in the Ocean Seafood Depot in Newark on Thursday deepened the fear (although it was unclear whether the action, which resulted in three arrests, was part of the Trump government plan). And many restaurant owners throughout the country were reluctant to be interviewed and said they are worried that their companies and employees would be the target. Various refused to comment at all.
Chicago and the restaurant industry anticipate ICE actions, because plans for immigration actions were leaked to the news media in the scheme last week, planned with Chicago to be the first location.
Even well-known Chicago chefs and restaurantors who have been vocal about political issues in the past, including immigration, hesitated to publicly speak of the threat of immigration arrests, not to give their companies and employees as numerous owners told the New York Times .
A photo of the Times shows a handwritten plate in the kitchen of a prominent restaurant in Chicago that reads: “Don't leave ice in the building! And no snitching! “(The person who provided the photo asked that the restaurant would not be mentioned because it is aimed that it is the target.) And scripts have been passed on to employees in the restaurant, with recommended sentences to use in the event that They are confronted by ice officers.
A veteran Chicago chef and restaurant owner, who asked not to be mentioned for fear that his restaurant would be directed by ICE, said that since Monday he had held a binder in the position of the host who advises employees what to do in the case From an ice cream visit.
The chef said that employees who speak openly are the fear of ice that he knows are not at risk of actually being deported. “If you are one of the people who are legitimate about your immigration status,” he said, “You will be pretty quiet about where you work.”
Andres Reyes said that the threat of an immigration performance was a subject of conversation between employees and customers in both locations of his restaurant in Chicago, Birrierias Ocotlan. His father, Ramon, opened the original restaurant in South Chicago in 1973, one of the oldest Mexican immigrant neighbors in the city.
“We have people who have been here for 40 years who are still busy getting their papers – and they are not criminals,” he said, referring to members of the community, not his employees. “They work and contribute to members of society. It is a pity that they can be caught in the middle. '
According to the Migration Policy Institute, 53 percent of unauthorized immigrants in Illinois have lived in the United States for more than 15 years and 37 percent have at least one child that is an American citizen.
Mr. Reyes wrote reduced business and slower than normal street traffic in the neighborhood in part for fear of the sweeps. “Many of the unauthorized immigrants now don't spend money because they are afraid of deportation or a setback,” he said.
Another of the well-known Mexican American chefs of Chicago, who asked for anonymity, said that wrong information made an already stressful situation worse. The restaurant of the chef recently went alert three times, after employees had been notified that restaurants were attacked by immigration agents in the neighborhood – only to hear that the rumors were false.
In Los Angeles, where the long-term fears for immigration enforcement had disappeared in recent years, the fears ran high among professionals in the field of food service.
California is the state with the largest number of unauthorized immigrants – 1.8 million, according to the Pew Research Center. The Migration Policy Institute estimates that 950,000 of those people live in Los Angeles County. (More than half of them have been living in the United States for more than 15 years and 17 percent are homeowners.)
A chef and restaurant owner of Los Angeles, an American citizen who grew up in Mexico, was preparing for a meeting on Friday to tackle the fear of ice visits with his entire staff and go through their plan, including instructions about where they Being able to safely protect in the building. Ice agents can legally visit public areas of a company, such as a dining room, but need an order or permission from the staff to enter private spaces.
“The tensions are high, and this is something we have to prepare for, like any emergency situation,” said the chef chef, who spoke about the state of anonymity. “We should have a plan.”
A chef in San Francisco, who asked for anonymity, said he hoped that the preparation would temper the fear among restaurant employees.
The chef, an unauthorized immigrant himself, asked questions from a jumpy staff. “If you are afraid, you are afraid of someone in a uniform,” he said. “You see agents and wondering if they come in – you don't know what kind of power they have.”
He handed all his employees and maps made by an immigration lawyer with basic information about their rights. The chef is planning to attend a seminar with local restaurant owners and lawyers next week to collect more information and legal advice.
He also had a conversation with his family about what to do if he was held – who he had to call first and where he had to go. “The only thing we can do now is prepared, instead of feeling scared, which is easier said than done.”
In Washington, DC, Erik Bruner-Yang, the chef and owner of Maketto, is waiting for guidance from the Restaurant Association Metropolitan Washington.
“I think everyone is now waiting to see what will really happen to immigration,” he said. “RAMW has been really good at providing resources, and they were during the first Trump administration. To be honest, the Obama and the Biden government were not so great when it came to deportations. '
Téa Ivanovic, a founder and the chief operating officer of immigrant food, which has a location on a block of the White House, said that the unintended consequences of massive deportations can reach much further than the fate of individual employees.
“I think every company owner, especially in the food industry, where we are completely dependent on immigrant work and it is an industry of trillion dollars,” she said. “I think it is very worrying when they talk about raids in the workplace.”
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