Marcos Carbajal’s family restaurant, Carnitas Uruapan, was serving food at a professional soccer match in suburban Bridgeview on the first Sunday of last September. Families were out, and fans were celebrating.
A few miles away that day, federal immigration agents were arresting a flower vendor in Chicago’s Archer Heights neighborhood. He was deported within days.
That’s when things changed, Carbajal said, as the Trump administration’s Operation Midway Blitz kicked off. Customers started calling to ask if workers could bring food to their cars. Families who came by every Sunday stopped coming. Staff and neighbors checked social media for immigration enforcement activity before their commutes.
At the peak of the deportation campaign, revenue fell dramatically at the restaurant’s Little Village, Gage Park and Pilsen locations, Carbajal said.
“The numbers told the same story: When people are afraid, they stay home,” he said.
Carbajal was among several Chicago-area residents, lawyers and advocates who told a federal commission at a hearing Wednesday about the fear and trauma caused by the Trump administration’s aggressive immigration enforcement, which at times put neighborhoods “under siege,” one speaker said.
This story originally appeared in WBEZ Chicago.
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