Hernán was at the Latin American restaurant that he owns with his brother in the Northwest quadrant of Washington DC last week when his staff started getting phone calls and messages about Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) checkpoints in the neighborhood. The employees, scared that they might be targeted and racially profiled, asked if they could go home.
Within hours, Hernán had to close their doors, and the restaurant hasn’t been open since.
“Literally after President Trump brought the national guard on DC, everything stopped,” said Hernán, who requested his last name not be used due to fears of Ice retaliation. “Everything disappeared because the bike delivery guys, they’re scared. They’re not on the streets right now. My people, most of my cooks are Spanish[-speaking] and they don’t want to go to DC right now.”
Hernán, who also owns a restaurant in Maryland, said he was hoping to be able to reopen in a few weeks if and when the Trump administration’s takeover of the DC police ends and immigration enforcement arrests become less frequent. But the future is unclear for him and many restaurant owners in the US capital.
Already suffering from fewer customers due to the administration’s almost three-week-long crackdown, restaurants are also having to contend with staff shortages because many immigrants, both documented and undocumented, fear coming into DC and being on the streets, and some have been detained by Ice.
Trump has attempted to claim that the crackdown is benefiting restaurants. “Half the restaurants closed, because nobody could go, because they were afraid to go outside,” he told reporters on Monday about Washington before his intervention. “Now those restaurants are opening and new restaurants are opening up.”
Across the city, the opposite is true. Some restaurants, like Hernán’s, have had to close their doors. But more have had to make do with fewer workers, fewer delivery drivers and fewer customers.
“Restaurants will close because you have troops with guns and federal agents harassing people … making people afraid to go out,” José Andrés, the well-known Washington restaurateur, wrote on social media.
Immigrants account for 253,000 workers, or 36% of the workforce, in DC’s restaurants, hotels and related sectors, according to Migrant Insider, which cited data from FWD.us. Included in that total are 42,000 self-employed immigrant entrepreneurs running local food and service businesses.
Maketto, an Asian restaurant and marketplace in north-east DC, posted on social media on Monday that its immigrant workers had been affected.
“Last week, two of our beloved team members were detained while simply walking home from work,” the restaurant wrote. “They remain in custody, and our hearts are with them and their families.” The restaurant did not respond to a request for comment.
Hernán said the pause in business was incredibly hard on a small, family-owned business, especially after the slow summer months. He’s looking for people who live in DC, speak Spanish and English, and are willing to come into work so that they can reopen. “But I don’t know if we can find people,” he said.
About a mile away, near the Columbia Heights neighborhood, a sign in Spanish on the door of Elizabeth Pupusería & Deli hung up last week read: “We are closed temporarily during the terrible situation in our larger neighborhood. We hope to serve you again soon. Let’s take care of ourselves and stay safe in our homes.”
Elizabeth Rodriguez, a Salvadorian immigrant who owns the restaurant and has been in Washington for roughly 20 years, told the Guardian that the restaurant was fulfilling some orders that prior customers call in, but its doors were not open to the public.
“It’s a very ugly thing because the nerves, the nerves go up,” Rodriguez said in Spanish about the situation in DC. “The clients don’t come for the same reason. Our business relied on construction workers because they are the big groups that came to bring various orders for all their colleagues. And they haven’t worked all month.”
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She said she paid her workers collectively about $500 a day, and after Trump’s crackdown on 11 August, she was only bringing in $300 a day. She hasn’t been able to pay any of her staff these last two weeks – only she and her daughter-in-law are coming in.
“We are seeing what we can do so as not to close definitively,” she said. “I know that it is only supposed to be one month, but suddenly it is very complicated because the rent, the bills, you have to pay them the same.
“We are asking God for this to change because if we don’t, we can’t pay many months of rent,” she added.
The restaurant doesn’t typically allow delivery, but Rodriguez is thinking about changing that if it reopens because so many people don’t want to leave their homes. But even that is difficult, she said.
“Today I said, ‘Today is the right time to add delivery,’ so I called DoorDash and he told me that he doesn’t have workers because most of them have been taken and others are afraid to leave.”
Ice has reportedly been targeting delivery drivers on mopeds, worsening the crisis for restaurants.
Several videos of Ice detaining delivery drivers have spread across social media, and the Washington Post reported, citing anonymous police sources, that Ice is accompanying officers with DC’s Metropolitan police department to conduct traffic stops of moped drivers to check their immigration status.
“You don’t want to go outside,” Yonatan Colmenarez, an asylum seeker who came from Venezuela two years ago and has driven a moped around DC, told the Post. “It gives you a kind of emotional damage; you’re not sure who they might be.”
