Oscar Garcia Santaella’s Mexican restaurant is hurting badly as US immigration agents stage raids in Texas: his customers are afraid to leave home and some of his staff are wary of coming to work.
Garcia, who is 54 and originally from Mexico, runs a variety of eateries and one is a normally bustling Houston-area taco joint called Los Primos.
Its troubles are a microcosm of what is happening in restaurants elsewhere in Texas and around the country as President Donald Trump’s administration presses on with his dogged campaign to arrest and expel people without residency papers.
Most of Garcia’s clientele is Latino, the ethnic group often targeted when Immigration and Customs agents pounce at restaurants, construction sites, parks and other places where Spanish-speakers tend to gather or work.
Texas — a conservative state where Trump enjoys broad support and 40 percent of the population is Latino — has had its share of these ICE operations, many of them captured on video and shared on social media.
Among other sites, ICE staged raids at an apartment complex near Garcia’s restaurant a month ago.
“They were there a week. And both that week and the next, we sold nothing. It was bad, because people were afraid to go out,” Garcia said.
One of his employees who lives in that complex called to say she could not report to work because agents had arrested her cousin.
“So yes, it is affecting us directly,” Garcia said, adding that this is happening not just in Texas but nationwide.
“It has affected restaurants in general in the United States, as I have friends in many cities who have restaurants and I speak with them. In our case our sales are down 40 percent.”
According to the Texas Restaurant Association, in the second quarter of this year 23 percent of its members lost employees, 21 percent received fewer job applications and 16 percent lost customers.
As of 2022, approximately 11 million people lived in the United States illegally, according to government figures. And this figure may have risen since then to as many as 14 million, according to the Washington-based Migration Policy Institute.
Undocumented workers paid $97 billion in taxes in 2022 alone, according to Americans for Tax Fairness.
Figures from 2024 from the US Labor Department said nearly half of the foreign-born workforce in America is Latino.
– A solution-
Texas, a vast state larger than many countries, is undergoing constant development in real estate and industry as it lures people from other states.
“Part of that is we’re a victim of our own success in Texas,” said Kelsey Erickson Streufert, a spokeswoman for the Texas Restaurant Association.
“We’re actually the state’s largest private sector employer already, and yet most restaurants don’t have enough employees,” she said. Nor do farms, ranches, meatpacking plants or other parts of the food chain.
“And as a result, all Americans are paying a lot more for the food that they consume from grocery stores and from restaurants,” said Erickson Streufert.
She said her association has joined with restaurant industry leaders around the country to urge Trump to create temporary work permits for longtime trusted immigrants throughout the food pipeline in America.
“We’re not talking about amnesty. We’re not talking about citizenship necessarily, just the ability to fill an open job, to pay taxes, to follow the law,” said Erickson Streufert.
While Trump often demonizes undocumented immigrants as criminals, rapists and even “animals,” Garcia defends immigrants as good, responsible workers.
“I can guarantee you that 95 percent of the people I have met in the restaurant industry are honest, hard-working people,” he said.
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