An estimated 350,000 have been deported or detained in the first seven months of the Trump Administration. | Photo courtesy of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Earlier this year, a former worker came to Toni Torres, co-owner of the bakery and café La Usuluteca in Los Angeles, with a difficult question.
The former staffer, a young single mother, was originally from El Salvador and had been brought to the U.S. years ago as a teenager with her family. Now, with immigration agents arresting people across the city, she was terrified of being taken, and of being forced to leave her U.S.-born children behind.
“She asked if we could find a notary to sign a letter, if something were to happen to her, if they take her,” said Torres. “She said, ‘I need someone to send my kids to my mom in El Salvador because I don’t want them in the foster system in the U.S.’”
Fear.
That has been an underlying theme within the industry through much of 2025, since the Trump Administration ramped up an aggressive crackdown on illegal immigration.
Trump pledged to rid the streets of the “worst of the worst” criminals who were in the U.S. illegally. But the push has cast a far wider net, ensnaring hard-working, long-time community members without any criminal record.
In August, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, said about 200,000 people had been removed during the first seven months of Trump’s second term, according to CNN. Including removals by other agencies and those who chose to self-deport, however, the number is closer to 350,000.
It’s hard to know how many of those arrested or detained may have been working in restaurants. ICE did not respond to requests for information. But it’s likely to be quite a few.
Immigrants make up an estimated 22% of the food industry workforce. And an estimated 36% of restaurant owners are immigrants, nearly twice the share found in the broader private sector, according to the National Restaurant Association.
Among those detained, according to media reports, is a landscaper, and father of three Marines, who was grabbed while weeding at an IHOP in Southern California.
The manager of an award-winning West African restaurant near Boston, who was reportedly on his way to church when he was stopped by ICE agents. (He was later granted asylum after about 100 days in custody.)
Eleven workers at a Mexican restaurant in Liberty, Missouri, in a raid that resulted in the business closing down. (A federal judge this month ruled the arrests were unlawful.)
But restaurant operators across the country—many of whom were reluctant to be identified when discussing this subject—said it’s not about the numbers of arrests.
It’s about the fear.
That climate of fear is having a deep impact on the industry, particularly in some of America’s largest cities where Trump has employed the National Guard—including Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., Chicago and Portland, Oregon. But that impact is also being felt elsewhere, in cities like Austin, Texas; Ann Arbor, Michigan; and Raleigh, North Carolina.
ICE arrests have occurred in both red and blue states. | Photo courtesy of ICE.
Operators say they have been forced to manage around staff members being afraid to come in to work, even those with legal status.
And immigrants are also consumers.
Sales have slowed dramatically for restaurants in immigrant communities, because their customers are staying home.
Restaurant chains are feeling it, like Jack in the Box, El Pollo Loco and Wingstop.
Far more vulnerable, however, are small businesses like La Usuluteca. Torres estimates her sales are down 15% to 20% since the deportation push began in Los Angeles in the spring.
The bakery is known for pan dulce, pupusas, tamales and other Latin treats. Torres said she also supplies other Latin markets across Southern California, so all of her points of sales have been impacted.
“They do not care if you are legal, if you have papers or if your immigration situation is in order. Just by your appearance, they go after you,” she said. “If you look Latin, you’re afraid to go out.”
The fear also ripples through the food chain, from the workers who pick fresh produce, to truck drivers who bring that produce to every restaurant’s back door. The Independent Restaurant Coalition estimates that immigration constraints are adding 14.5% to food-and-beverage costs to consumers.
Cheetie Kumar, for example, chef and owner of the restaurant Ajja in Raleigh, North Carolina, said two of the eight or nine local farmers that supply her restaurant stopped deliveries for the year because they didn’t have enough help.
“That creates a tighter market, and the prices are just going up,” she said. “I’ve had to raise menu prices. But at some point, we’ll hit a ceiling that we can’t really come back from.”
And then there are operators who said their staff headcount has been decimated because people are choosing to leave before ICE comes knocking.
“What we are hearing a lot, anecdotally, is that many workers are choosing to self-deport because they are afraid,” said Anne McBride, vice president of impact for the James Beard Foundation.
Seeking a solution
Despite the government shutdown, restaurant and other industry leaders are headed to Capitol Hill in Washington this week to meet with lawmakers about finding a solution.
The deportation push is hitting at a time when restaurant labor is already deeply challenged.
Nearly one in three restaurant operators say they lack staff to meet customer demand, according to the National Restaurant Association, which estimates that more than 1 million jobs in restaurants, bars and hotels remain unfilled.
In an open letter to Congress in August, more than 1,000 chefs, restaurant and hotel owners called on Congress to support the creation of a work permit system that would allow long-term, law-abiding, tax-paying immigrants working in food or hospitality to stay in the country.
The “Seat the Table” campaign organized by the American Business Immigration Coalition is supported by the Independent Restaurant Coalition, the James Beard Foundation, and state restaurant associations from Texas, Illinois, New York City, Nebraska and others.
McBride, of the Beard Foundation, said one message for lawmakers will be attempting to “humanize who immigrants are,” she said. “There’s a lot of messaging villainizing immigrants as a whole group.”
Erika Polmar, executive director of the Independent Restaurant Coalition, said restaurant operators want to see a stable path for long-tenured workers with clean records and deep community ties.
A first step would be recognizing that food-and-beverage workers are skilled labor. Those workers who make pastry, work the hot kitchen line, pour creative cocktails and tend to the needs of guests all have skills that are essential for a restaurant’s success, she argues.
But restaurant workers are boxed out by visa categories that don’t fit, or have costs that small businesses can’t absorb, she said. H-1B visas, for example, require a college degree, and the Trump Administration recently added a $100,000 fee. H2B is a seasonal visa, and numbers are capped. EB-3 visas classify restaurant work as “unskilled.”
But one of those programs could be expanded, ideally with carve-outs to make them more accessible to small businesses and in-country renewal, so workers would not have to leave the U.S. to reapply, Polmar said.
“The system definitely feels broken. And when something is broken enough, sometimes it’s an opportunity to rebuild in a way that makes more sense.” —Cheetie Kumar
The National Restaurant Association, meanwhile, has lobbied in support of the Essential Workers for Economic Advancement Act (EWEA), reintroduced in September by Rep. Lloyd Smucker, a Republican from Pennsylvania, who first sponsored the bill in 2022.
EWEA would create temporary guest visas for a limited number of foreign workers to come into the U.S. to help restaurants fill vacancies. But employers must prove that the position has been unfilled for three months and that no qualified U.S. worker is able to do the job.
As is, the bill, however, does not offer a path for workers already in the U.S.
Broken enough
Given that the restaurant industry has been calling for immigration reform for decades, without much result, some wonder whether the time is right for real change.
Kumar of Ajja, however, said she was an immigrant who came to the U.S. as a child and knows first-hand how hard it is to go through the process of legalization.
“The system definitely feels broken,” she said. “And when something is broken enough, sometimes it’s an opportunity to rebuild in a way that makes more sense.”
Adam Orman, co-owner of the Austin, Texas, restaurants L’Oca d’Oro and Bambino, is among the restaurant operators grappling with the broken system.
Adam Orman, co-owner of L’Oca d’Oro and Bambino. | Photo courtesy of Adam Orman
Orman said two of his cooks have been detained this year.
One had worked legally for years and had diligently been working through the asylum process. But he was arrested by ICE when showing up for a monthly check-in as part of that process.
The worker was held for two months before his family was able to get him released after paying $15,000 in bail. He has a court date in March, but was told he cannot work in the meantime.
A second worker was arrested during a traffic stop. That worker was deported, leaving a wife and family in Texas.
Orman is in touch, through his lawyer, trying to sponsor him to come back, but there is no applicable visa. People want to do the right thing, but there is no clear path.
“It’s really confusing,” Orman said. “The goalposts keep changing.
“We want a simpler system,” he said. “We want a way to be able to hire the most qualified people that we can, and the people who want to do the jobs.”
Orman said the incidents have left the rest of his staff anxious. And such absences raise a host of operational challenges.
“First it was about trying to find out why they didn’t show up for work, and then it goes to ‘what are we going to do about replacing them,’” he said. “How long do we hold the spots? What do we do about hiring and training to cover the spots? How does it impact the guest experience?”
Orman’s restaurants are small enough that the absence of one person can make a significant difference.
“It’s an extra added pressure in a year when being an independent restaurant has already been difficult,” he said.
A show of support
This month, the spotlight has been on both Chicago and Portland, Oregon, where Trump has moved in national guard troops to protect ICE agents there, though, at press time, that deployment was blocked by federal courts.
The fear of stepped-up ICE action in Chicago, for example, frightened workers at the small bagel shop Bagel Miller on a recent festival weekend. They didn’t want to come to work, and owner Dave Miller didn’t want to make them. He paid them anyway.
But because of the labor shortage, he decided to close the shop to in-store business, posting on Instagram that bagels would be available for online order and pickup at a walk-up window.
In a second post, he explained that the decision to pause operations was out of “care for our people. Some of our team members were afraid to travel from their homes and we took that seriously. Fear and confusion are being weaponized right now and we are not the victims—they are. We chose compassion over business as usual because it is the right thing to do.”
In an interview, Miller emphasized that all of his staff is authorized to work. Some are high schoolers, and their parents didn’t want them to leave the house because of the chaos.
The perception is that ICE is “taking people, whether they’re legal or not, and holding them,” said Miller, who described himself as a Mexican-American. “And the fear is that there would be no legal recourse.”
The decision to do pick-up only, like during the pandemic, seemed to be a practical solution to keep sales coming in. It wasn’t meant to be a statement.
But the post went viral and suddenly supporters were buying bagels from all over the world—from Italy, Ireland, Cyprus. They paid for bagels that they had no intention of actually picking up.
In notes, those supporters would say, “We just want to make sure your staff gets paid,” he said. “It got to be so much that I had to redirect it for meals for people on the street.”
Protecting people
Meanwhile, restaurant operators said they have been working to help staff members know their rights.
They have hung signs on their doors to welcome guests, but not ICE.
They have clearly marked private areas within their restaurants, where ICE agents can’t freely enter.
Some have paid for workers to take Ubers to and from work, so they could avoid public transportation.
Others have given workers with limited English phonetic scripts for responding when questioned about their immigration status.
One operator who asked not to be named said that just-in-case preparation had a downside.
After the deportation-response training at her restaurant, a couple of workers just stopped coming to work—which, in the end, wasn’t that surprising, she said.
“Acknowledging that this could happen was scary for people,” she said. “When you’re preparing for something terrifying, you insert some fear into the whole culture of the restaurant.”
