Long Island's Latino delis struggle amid ICE arrests, reflecting immigrant fears

Before dawn on a recent Thursday, the lights of landscaping, construction and delivery trucks brightened the darkness outside two delis on Union Avenue in the mostly Latino Nassau community of New Cassel. Inside, customers on their way to paint Long Islanders' homes or cut their lawns stood before steaming trays of food and ordered coffee and tamales. Some carried out foam containers of fried plantains and grilled chicken to eat later for lunch.

At Placita Deli, employee Yesenia González was busy — but not nearly as busy as this time last year. Then, there were no empty stools and chairs like there were that morning.

"It was full," González said in Spanish. "Not anymore."

Owner José Ortega said business at Placita has plummeted 40% since President Donald Trump took office in January and immigration agents became much more visible in New Cassel and adjoining Westbury.

"People are afraid," Ortega said in Spanish. "They don’t want to leave home."

Owners and employees at delis across Long Island that cater largely to immigrants told similar stories. Newsday visited 22 such delis and bakeries in New Cassel, Westbury, Hempstead, Brentwood, Central Islip and Riverhead. All the delis reported sales drops — some as high as 50% — since Trump in January vowed to fight what he called an "invasion" of "illegal aliens." Some owners worry their businesses won't survive the downturn.

Traditionally, the delis are community gathering spots, havens where customers can chat in their native language and find food and an atmosphere that remind them of home. The decline in deli customers reflects the aura of fear permeating Long Island’s immigrant communities.

Immigrants, especially those in the country illegally, worry about taking their kids to school and attending church and community events. In interviews, many immigrants said they know people whom Immigration and Customs Enforcement has taken away, or they've seen arrests on television or social media. Some deli owners did not want themselves or their businesses identified because they believed it might make them a target for ICE.

Before January, lines of construction workers and landscapers waited for their eggs and Salvadoran pupusas during breakfast and lunch rushes at Pepe’s Deli & Grill in Hempstead.

"Now there’s no line ever," owner Juan Gutiérrez said in Spanish.

Customers don’t want to risk leaving home, getting nabbed by ICE agents and being sent thousands of miles away from their Long Island families, he said.

It’s not just immigrants without legal authorization who are worried. Store owners and customers said they have seen and read news reports of U.S. citizens and green-card holders getting caught up in ICE raids. They wonder if they’ll be next. A Supreme Court decision last month allowing immigration agents to use factors such as ethnicity and accents in deciding whom to stop and question was major news in the Spanish-language media and heightened the fear, Latino residents said.

Legis. Samuel Gonzalez (D-Brentwood) is a Brooklyn-born Suffolk County legislator. He said that might not protect him if he’s in the wrong place at the wrong time.

"What if that day I don’t have my ID?" he asked. "I’m going to be arrested, and guess what? They’ll sort it out later."

Trump began his second term promising mass deportations after a surge of illegal border crossings under the Biden administration that drew widespread public opposition. Polls showed that Americans strongly supported deporting violent criminals, but did not want to target longtime residents who hadn't committed crimes.

ICE and Trump have repeatedly said the agency's focus is on deporting the "worst of the worst" criminals.

Yet more than 70% of people in ICE detention as of Sept. 7 had no criminal record, according to Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, which analyzes immigration-related data. A June report from the libertarian Cato Institute found that of detainees with criminal convictions, only 1 in 5 were convicted of violent offenses.

Tom Homan, the administration’s border czar, has said even though criminals are ICE’s priority, agents can arrest anyone in the country illegally.

"We are not going to turn our back to somebody that we found is illegally in the United States," he said in a June New York Times podcast interview.

In 2022, there were nearly 112,000 immigrants on Long Island living in the country illegally, according to an analysis of U.S. Census data by the Center for Migration Studies. More than 1 in 5 Long Islanders were born abroad, census data shows.

ICE did not respond to questions about how many people its agents arrested on Long Island this year, how that compares  with last year and how many arrestees had criminal convictions.

ICE told Newsday in early August that, since Jan. 20, its agents had arrested more than 1,600 people on Long Island with previous convictions, although the agency did not delineate which were major and which were minor offenses, or how many people without any criminal conviction were arrested.

Deli owners said they want ICE to arrest violent criminals. But as they see their own customers arrested and separated from their families, despite what the deli owners believe is a lack of criminal records, they said it seems as if ICE is targeting far more than just the "worst of the worst."

"We were confident that if Trump won, things would be better than they were, with fewer criminals around," Ortega said. "But we’re now worse off. They’re taking away people who don’t do anything wrong, hard-working people."

A few days earlier, three customers had breakfast at Placita and then went to a corner nearby where laborers gather to seek work. Ortega said he was driving by when they and two others were arrested.

"He was here in the morning eating," Ortega said as he showed a Facebook post with a photo of a man standing against a wooden fence, a masked man with a "Police" vest grasping his arms.

Immigrants widely share photos and videos of ICE arrests — and of spottings of apparent ICE agents — on social media.

At Placita, as Andrés Navarro, 25, of Uniondale, was eating his breakfast of avocado and tortillas, a man at the table next to him was looking at a TikTok video that showed ICE agents in Hempstead the day before.

Navarro, a Honduran immigrant who wore a blue T-shirt splattered with white paint from his job, said he has a work permit and has "done nothing wrong," so he didn’t worry about sitting down to eat. But he knows other men who are afraid to stop at the deli.

"They go directly to work," he said.

González, the morning supervisor at Placita, said other customers still come in to get food to go, but don’t linger as they did in the past.

"They don’t stay here," she said, standing at the cash register next to Salvadoran cheese bread and construction boots for sale.

A block away from Placita, at Antojitos Salvadoreños Deli, María Escobar said business tumbled after ICE arrested four men in a small black-asphalt lot behind the store on June 2. The number of customers goes up and down depending on ICE’s presence in the area, said Escobar, who oversees the business in the early morning when the owner is not there.

Word spreads quickly among immigrants, through social media and word-of-mouth, of where ICE has been. A TikTok post that received thousands of views reported that ICE was a few blocks away from the store that morning.

"Now that immigration has been around here again, and there have been raids, people are going to start to be afraid again, and days will pass by before they come in again," Escobar said in Spanish.

As Omar Hernández, 41, stood in the same Antojitos Salvadoreños lot where the June arrests took place, he said, although he does not have legal permission to work in the United States, he does not want to live in fear.

"If I come here to eat, I eat in peace," he said after a leisurely meal inside.

"I trust in God that everything is OK, and he takes care of me," the Westbury man said.

Hernández, who left Honduras for the United States 22 years ago, said some fellow construction workers are so scared of being stopped by ICE that they don’t go to work.

The fear some Long Islanders have of going to their jobs "is having a very clear and significant impact on Long Island’s economy," said Matt Cohen, president and CEO of the Long Island Association, which represents regional business interests.

Some industries on Long Island, such as landscaping, home health care, domestic work, restaurants, bars and construction, depend heavily on immigrant labor, and some have a hard time attracting U.S.-born workers, he said. Although Cohen hasn’t heard of labor shortages yet, he believes if the fear continues, it "could really trickle down to your mother can't find someone to be her home health care aide, because it's so hard to find a good person for that."

At a deli and restaurant in downtown Hempstead, the owner, who did not want to be identified, said she bought the business 11 years earlier and completely remodeled it, putting "a lot of love and affection" into the store.

But with business down more than 50%, she and her life partner are struggling. She’s laid off six of the eight employees, and now it’s just the two others, her partner and her. She’s behind on rent and gas bills, and is not sure how long they can make it.

Her partner said in Spanish the couple has talked about selling the deli.

"But we can’t sell the store," he said. "Who would buy this place the way things are?"

Newsday's Belisa Morillo contributed to this story.