How Bars Are Responding to ICE Raids
Two weeks after the beginning of Donald Trump’s federal takeover of Washington, D.C., a cocktail consultant and director of restaurants, P.—who asked to remain anonymous to protect her staff—is glued to her phone. She has spent the last several days trying to track down two immigrant employees who didn’t show up for work. “We’ve been calling and calling with no answer. We showed up to their homes with no answer. Friday was payday, so I have been monitoring the account to see if the checks have been cashed, and they have not been cashed yet,” she says. “My feeling is that they probably got detained and they’re being processed right now.”
How to Prepare for ICE Agent Visits
Here are some steps recommended by Tiffany Hernandez of Escuelitas and immigration lawyer Juliana Manzanarez.
1. Educate staff on their constitutional rights. The Immigration Legal Resource Center has free pocket-sized cards, signs and flyer templates that can be printed and distributed in various languages, in addition to downloadable and printable sample preparedness plans. The ACLU also has information on legal rights available to print as a PDF.
2. In a bar or restaurant, if customers are allowed in a space, ICE can enter that space, so post clear signage that delineates public versus private areas. Agents need a judicial warrant to search private spaces, so use “employees only” or “authorized personnel only” signs to indicate.
3. Create an SOP (standard operating procedure) for staff to follow in the event of an ICE visit. Everyone needs to know their role. Designate a FOH and BOH lead on every shift—only that person talks to agents. This person needs to be trained in Miranda rights, how to read a warrant and what information is required to disclose or not (including I-9 audits).
4. Have an immigration, civil rights and employment attorney ready to call, in addition to the number for your local rapid response network, who can assist in making sure agents are not suppressing rights. The National Network for Immigrant and Refugee Rights (NNIRR) has a list of resources to start.
5. Designate an employee to record interactions (every state has different laws regarding consent and distance), and to take notes of the date and time, what the agent is wearing, where the incident happened, where the ICE agent searches, what they take, etc. This way, in the event something goes sideways, you have information to hold agents accountable.
This is the first time P. has dealt with the unexpected disappearance of employees, but her situation is not unique in the district, where there’s been a substantial increase in the arrests of immigrants as the Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) and the National Guard work in tandem with Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) operations.
The escalating tension and fear within the hospitality community feels palpable, she says. “This is creating lasting trauma, lasting anxiety and stress for our team.” Many employees are afraid to commute. Agents, she says, have been targeting businesses at times when employees show up for shifts or when they leave for the night. “There are some who want to spend the night in the restaurant instead of going home because they need to work, and they’re scared they won’t make it back.”
Since the beginning of the year, arrests made by ICE have doubled across the country as part of Trump’s mass deportation campaign, with more than 60,000 immigrants of mixed status (the majority of whom have no criminal convictions) currently in detention. Activity is happening across the country in industries that rely heavily on immigrant labor (including other drinks-centric ones like the wine industry) as agents attempt to meet daily quotas. As part of these efforts, ICE is also targeting the hospitality industry, where approximately 21 percent of the workforce is powered by foreign-born workers (including documented and undocumented immigrants), according to Census Bureau data from 2023.
Because of their high volume of immigrant workers, bars and restaurants have become targets. They’re public spaces, which means that agents do not need a warrant to enter front-of-house. The brunt of the administration’s actions have been felt most intensely in Washington, D.C., where checkpoints are set up in high-trafficked nightlife areas, and Los Angeles, where raids and curfews have left many bars suffering in their wake.
At one fine dining restaurant and bar in a D.C. neighborhood known for its lively nightlife, an immigrant bartender and beverage manager (who also asked to remain anonymous to protect his staff) says August is always a slow month, but since the takeover started, reservations have trended down. “If you look brown, or Latino—and even Black folks are getting pulled over for no reason—ICE is a threat,” he says. “They are creating tension. They’re out of control.”
In Boyle Heights, a predominantly Latino neighborhood in Los Angeles, Distrito Catorce owner Guillermo Pinon says there are several DACA recipients in the neighborhood; a majority of the community “ is not coming out to the bar right now,” he says. “These are people I used to see walk by on a daily basis and now they are hiding.”
In some cases, it’s not just federal agents who are sparking terror, but customers as well. In Birmingham, Alabama, another bar owner and green card holder says that some guests have threatened to call ICE on his staff. “Everybody is on edge, and you can especially feel it on the weekends,” he says. Antonio Jimenez, a bartender at Alamanc in Philadelphia, has felt similarly. “Before when people asked me where I am from, it was a starting point for good conversation,” he says, “but a few weeks ago when someone asked me, I froze up, because I don’t feel safe answering that anymore.”
With Trump’s threats to deploy the National Guard to other cities this fall—at the time of this writing, Chicago is bracing for a takeover—plus increased anti-immigrant sentiment happening in more conservative parts of the country, the time for bars and restaurants to implement programs that keep bartenders and other staff out of harm’s way is right now.
To mitigate the fear and prepare for worst case scenarios, P. has implemented a multipronged internal plan to protect her staff in D.C. In addition to distributing Know Your Rights pamphlets and posting clear signage inside establishments to delineate public versus private space (ICE needs a warrant to search private spaces), she has started to compile files for employees that include family and emergency contacts so she’ll know who to coordinate with in the event someone gets detained. She also runs real-time simulations of ICE visits to teach staff how to respond in the heat of the moment, because “when you are physically confronted with a situation like this, you don’t know how you’re going to act,” she says. “Never in my lifetime did I think I’d have to do any of this, but the foundation of our business is being hospitable to people who walk into our buildings, and that extends to our employees.”