Long Island restaurants are losing workers and customers amid deportation crackdown

Gabino Ramirez started getting worried calls at his Farmingville diner about a year ago.

On days when agents for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement were rumored to be in the area, "the customers call me in the morning, ask if it’s OK to come in," said Ramirez, owner of Gabino’s Diner, which makes Mexican fare for a largely Latino clientele.

Over the months, business fell by 20%, so much that Ramirez had to cut staff hours. Regulars — mostly single working men from Mexico, Honduras, El Salvador and Ecuador, some so reliant on the diner that Ramirez sells a six-meals-a-week package — stopped showing up.

"Some of them went back to their countries," Ramirez said. "Some go to places ... where they are not targeted. They come back once in a while to say hello, but not as often."

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Since January 2025, ICE has arrested at least 2,980 people on Long Island, part of a mass deportation campaign the Trump administration has said is bringing more jobs and higher wages to American workers.

But that has not happened for Long Island's restaurant industry, which relies on immigrants for customers and workers, and which has lost jobs and restaurants since the start of the crackdown.

The sweeping immigration crackdown is threatening an industry already battling rising costs, labor shortages and a slow recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic. On Long Island, where immigrant workers are essential to restaurant kitchens and immigrant customers sustain countless neighborhood businesses, the consequences range from staffing disruptions to empty tables. Even restaurants not touched directly by ICE arrests are feeling impacts. 

Some restaurant workers have left Long Island and the United States. Newsday spoke to a former waitress who lived here as an undocumented immigrant, most recently in Glen Cove, for more than 15 years before self-deporting to her home country of El Salvador in February.

She decided to leave after realizing, "I don’t feel welcome here anymore, I don’t feel safe," she said.

There have been no published accounts of major raids on Long Island restaurants. Nor, said owners and a restaurant industry trade group leader, does there appear to have been a surge in federal audits of the employment eligibility forms known as I-9s, as has happened in recent years at restaurants in cities including Washington, D.C.

But some restaurants serving immigrants have been hit hard nevertheless. When the Trump administration in late July cleared the way to deport hundreds of thousands of Haitians living in the United States by revoking their legal status under a humanitarian program known as Temporary Protected Status, business plummeted at Haitian restaurants in Caribbean enclaves of Elmont and Westbury, owners told Newsday. With customers scared to visit once popular shopping areas, one owner said, sales dropped so steeply she laid off half her staff of 20. 

In Glen Cove, Edward Villatoro, owner of El Tazumal, Long Island's oldest Salvadoran restaurant, said business had dropped by 30% and shifted almost entirely to delivery since the start of the crackdown.

"I’m delivering to immigrants, single guys who are living in a room (with) no access to a kitchen," he said. For most of his immigrant customers, there is "no more going out to dinner, movies; (they're) just sending it back to country or holding it here." Nobody is thinking about  a future here, he said. 

A chilling effect

Enforcement has had a chilling effect on the industry overall, said Melissa Fleischut, president and CEO of the New York State Restaurant Association.

Workers call out on days when ICE is known to be operating in the area or when they have to attend immigration court dates for themselves or family members.

"It does have an impact when (restaurant workers) might be concerned to go to work," Fleischut said. "For consumers, if it’s a restaurant that caters to an immigrant population, they tend not to come out. They don’t want to dine out, they don’t want to be walking down the street. There’s a community impact, full stop, if it’s known that ICE is in the area."

David Dyssegaard Kallick, director of Immigration Research Initiative, a nonpartisan think tank, wrote in an email  ICE surges were tied to job losses. A study the think tank conducted with the Minnesota Budget Project found the ICE surge in Minnesota in late 2025 and early 2026 cost the state thousands of jobs and afflicted U.S.-born workers more than immigrants.

"Arresting large numbers of workers shrinks the economy," Kallick wrote. "When line cooks (more likely to be immigrants) are arrested, waiters (more likely to be U.S.-born) lose out as well."

ICE did not respond to a request for comment. 

Backbone of the industry

According to 2024 U.S. Census estimates, the latest available, roughly one-third of Long Islanders who worked in restaurants were foreign-born, versus about one-fifth of restaurant workers nationwide. 

The figures are significantly higher here for some restaurant roles. About half the Island’s restaurant cooks, a quarter of Nassau’s servers and half of Suffolk’s dishwashers are immigrants, according to the Immigration Research Initiative. 

Statewide, more than 42,000 restaurant workers were undocumented immigrants, the Immigration Research Initiative estimated in 2025; that year, the state's restaurants and bars employed an average of 664,342 workers. 

Michael Bohlsen, a partner at Bohlsen Restaurant Group, which owns high-end restaurants like Tellers: An American Chophouse in Islip, said the crackdown was making it harder to hire staff. It doesn’t matter the company hires people who are legally entitled to live and work in the United States, he said: "It’s a smaller labor pool for the same number of jobs," and as the labor pool shrinks, "we suffer."

Bohlsen employs 450 to 500 people, including about 150 to 200 kitchen workers. "Workers are harder to find" and the company pays a premium to hold on to its hires, Bohlsen said. Minimum wage on Long Island — as well as in New York City and Westchester County — is $17 per hour, higher than it is across the rest of New York State.

 

Anthony Mastrantonio, the former owner of Dang BBQ in Islip, who now runs Dang food trucks and whose family owns the event venue Marconi Manor in Islip, said ICE activity exacerbated existing labor shortages, with some workers "poached" by other restaurants or by landscapers. By late 2025, when Mastrantonio closed Dang’s Islip location, "It was increasingly hard to find" kitchen workers, he said.

Elmer Rubio, owner of the upscale New American Chachama Grill in East Patchogue, said the immigration crackdown had caused him to cancel plans to expand his restaurant into an adjacent, long-vacant space.

"I could not get employees," he said. "I asked myself, why am I doing this?"

Rubio, who emigrated from El Salvador 40 years ago and is now an American citizen, said the push to clamp down on immigration mystified him.

"Immigrants are good and bad people. I think more people are good than bad — (they’re) people like me, working hard," he said.

A contracting sector

Restaurant employment can be seasonal, dipping in the winter and rising in the summer, but New York State labor statistics show Long Island’s restaurant industry has contracted. In the third quarter of 2024, a post-pandemic high point, Long Island had 7,612 food service and drinking establishments with 107,211 workers. A year later, there were 7,481 establishments and 106,726 workers. 

In the first quarter of 2026, the island’s 7,295 establishments were the fewest since 2022 and its 95,420 employees were the lowest first quarter figures since 2023.

The National Restaurant Association, a trade group, reported in July one-third of restaurant operators nationwide said they were not profitable in the first half of 2026, with profit margins squeezed by food and labor costs that have risen steadily since the pandemic. The group has also warned of "persistent workforce shortages" — 900,000 unfilled jobs — making it hard for some restaurants to operate.

Restaurant owners Newsday interviewed said they collected all required documentation when hiring workers and, occasionally, they were notified a Social Security number was not valid. None said they had ever been penalized or fined by any state or federal agency.

Owners said even employees with legal documentation sometimes missed work because of the crackdown. Staff called out of work because of ICE activity near the restaurant, because enforcement had snared family members or because workers had been summoned to court hearings on their own immigration cases that they did not have to attend in the past. 

Even owners of multiple restaurant groups have been impacted, though they tend to weather challenges better than the independents because they have more resources, Cornell University S.C. Johnson School of Business Professor of Hospitality Human Resources David Sherwyn said.

Few want to take a public stance on an issue as polarizing as immigration, he said. "I’ve run roundtables with large hospitality employers, and the union says to them, ‘Do something about this, go to the politicians and tell them, this is unacceptable, we need a path to citizenship, we need these people (to work).' The employers say, ‘I can’t be on the front lines of this.' ”

Pathways for workers

The Restaurant Association has been less reticent. Its leaders have described the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement program as problematic and advocated for immigration reform to safeguard the industry’s immigrant workers.

The group calls for "permanent legal pathways" for residency for longtime immigrant workers and creation of a new visa program for year-round nonresident workers. It also calls for an "immigration system for the future" that would take into account demographic trends including a declining birthrate, aging population and fewer teens entering the workforce.

The national group did not make any of its leaders available for an interview, but last spring, Sean Kennedy, its chief advocacy officer, was quoted in a post on the association’s website: "We’re looking at a level of enforcement activity that’s gone beyond what was pledged," he said. "We have migrants who are here lawfully but are afraid to come into work. We have policies that absolutely constrict overall migration into the United States, that in the long run, ultimately obliterate America's privilege as THE country where the world's smartest people want to work, study and live."

Fleischut, the group’s New York State CEO, said immigration was key to restaurant culture. "There used to be a way to come to the U.S. and build your dream, build your restaurant, a family business where everyone was working in the restaurant to make it thrive. It brought such a diverse flavor profile, especially to New York, where we have this ability to taste amazing cuisines from all over the world," she said. "Shutting down immigration pathways makes that much harder."

In May, the Restaurant Association announced its support for the Dignity Act of 2025, proposed federal legislation which would, among other things, defer removal of some immigrants without legal immigration status who have lived in the United States since 2020, provided they work or attend school, pay restitution and satisfy other conditions. It would not provide a path to citizenship.

Three of Long Island’s congressional representatives — Rep. Laura Gillen (D-Rockville Centre), Rep. Nick LaLota (R-Amityville) and Rep. Tom Suozzi (D-Glen Cove) — are co-sponsors of the bill. Rep. Andrew Garbarino (R-Bayport) is not. Garbarino chairs the House Homeland Security Committee, which oversees ICE as part of its jurisdiction over the Department of Homeland Security.

Suozzi, a onetime partner in Stango’s, the now-closed Italian stalwart in Glen Cove who also worked as a busboy in his student days, said in an interview the immigration crackdown had been "devastating for the restaurant industry, as well as many other industries. ... We should deport violent criminals, but we should also treat people like human beings."

Suozzi said the bill, largely stalled now, could gain traction after the midterms if the Democrats win a majority in the U.S. House and Senate.

Fleeing anxiety

Some restaurant employees have returned to their countries, driven out by their own fear of being arrested.

The former waitress, who spoke on condition of anonymity because she did not want to jeopardize her former co-workers, returned to El Salvador even though it had been easy to find work in U.S. restaurants.

"There are so many, and different options. ... There are opportunities everywhere, but it’s one of the harder jobs. Most people don’t like to be on their feet all day, work long hours. You barely have time to eat sometimes. It was an opportunity for me. I learned it very well, I was able to help other people open restaurants, train other people and it was a pretty decent income as well."

But she grew anxious leaving her house and started to feel self-conscious speaking Spanish in public. Acquaintances disappeared. A co-worker stopped coming to work; weeks later, the former waitress heard she had been arrested by ICE.

She left her mother and two sisters, who still live in the United States, and now has an apartment in the Salvadoran city of San Miguel. She got a job in a call center that pays less than half of what she used to earn here. 

"I make much less here, but I don’t have regrets," she said. "I would love to return, but under different terms. I don’t ever want to feel the same way I felt. It was home for me, but that changed."