ICE raids impact: Customers' fears sending Hempstead Village businesses into free fall

Christian Saravia started his small business empire in Hempstead a decade ago by selling shoes out of his car.

Within a few years, he opened a shoe store catering to Latino workers, and by last year a furniture store next door.

Today, the Salvadoran immigrant and U.S. citizen is in danger of losing it all.

The Trump administration’s deportation crackdown has decimated business for Saravia and many others in Hempstead, especially over the last six months as the raids escalated, according to business owners, community leaders and officials. 

With Hempstead a focal point of arrests by federal immigration agents on Long Island, many Latino immigrants say they are afraid to go out on its streets and to patronize its restaurants, delis, beauty parlors and other businesses.

Sales in Saravia’s shoe store are down by 90% since the crackdown intensified, he said. He used to sell up to 10 or 12 pairs a day — now it is often one or zero. One recent day, he opened at 11 a.m. and did not have a single customer by 6 p.m. If the raids and arrests don’t stop soon, he said, he will have to close.

"We’re at the point of going bankrupt," Saravia, 46, said in Spanish. "I love this country. My kids were born here. I would go to war for this country."

But "the American dream is not what it used to be."

Empty village streets

President Donald Trump’s deportation campaign has separated families, led to violence, including the fatal shooting of two U.S. citizens in Minneapolis, and triggered widespread fear in many communities. It is inflicting economic devastation on immigrant-heavy places such as Hempstead, whose once-bustling streets have gone quiet, according to community leaders.

"All of those small businesses depend on the immigrant community walking around," Nadia Marin-Molina, an immigrant advocate who has worked in Hempstead for decades, told Newsday. "When you have ICE going to supermarkets, going to the bus terminals, grabbing people on the street. ... It's terrorizing the community and those businesses are losing customers."

At Pollos Mario, a popular Latino restaurant in the heart of Hempstead, lunch hours used to see a full house, with all 30 tables taken by customers, assistant manager Laura Alvarez said in Spanish. On a recent day, just five tables were taken. Daily serving staff has been reduced from five to two. The restaurant is opening an hour later than usual, at 11 a.m. instead of 10 a.m., because of a lack of customers.

Business "is way down," Alvarez said. "The community is very afraid" to leave home. "The situation is very difficult. It’s very difficult to survive."

It's terrorizing the community and those businesses are losing customers.

—Nadia Marin-Molina, immigrant advocate

Latino community leader Nelson Hernandez told Newsday he recently visited 60 businesses in Hempstead, and they all had similar messages of despair. If immigration agents "continue doing what they're doing," Hernandez said, "this is going to be a ghost town."

The downturn is particularly alarming to Latino advocates and civic leaders because immigrants helped pull Hempstead out of the economic ashes over the last few decades. In the late 1960s and '70s Hempstead, once a major shopping and transportation hub in Nassau County, became economically depressed as the emergence of malls supplanted many local mom-and-pop shops, said Hempstead Village Mayor Waylyn Hobbs Jr.

Many storefronts were boarded up, said Patrick Young, an immigration attorney and advocate whose experience in Hempstead dates back decades.

Then in the 1980s, thousands of Salvadorans arrived as they fled a brutal civil war in their homeland. They were followed starting in the 1990s by other immigrants from Honduras, Guatemala, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Colombia, Mexico and other Latin American countries.

Hempstead, once heavily African American, is now about 45% Hispanic, according to U.S. Census Bureau data.

The village became a robust center of ethnic restaurants, clothing stores, delis, beauty parlors and other businesses. "It definitely went through a real turnaround," Young said.

Businesses 'are really hurting'

Now the progress is in jeopardy. Business owners are "holding on, but I don't know how long they will be able to do this," said LaShawn Lukes, president of the New Greater Hempstead Chamber of Commerce. "I have not seen anything like this before. ... I've never seen just the fear that individuals have."

Businesses, Hobbs told Newsday, "are really hurting."

In response, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement said in a statement: "Every day, ICE is conducting law enforcement activities across the country to keep Americans safe. Removing dangerous criminals from our streets makes it safer for everyone — including business owners and their customers."

Nassau County Executive Bruce Blakeman has strongly backed Trump’s deportation campaign, including by "deputizing" 10 Nassau police detectives to assist ICE and renting out 50 cells in the county jail to ICE. In a statement to Newsday, he said the ICE raids are not having a negative impact on the economy.

"There is absolutely no data to support the fake proposition that removing criminals from Nassau County is hurting the economy," Blakeman said. "In fact, it’s quite the opposite."

Trump contends the deportation campaign is targeting dangerous illegal immigrants, though as of early February nearly 75% of ICE detainees had no criminal record, according to Syracuse University's Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse.

David Dyssegaard Kallick, director of the Manhattan-based Immigration Research Initiative, said the ICE raids are causing economic devastation in immigrant communities across Long Island and nationwide.

"Around the country, we're seeing a downturn in business activity as immigrants take steps to minimize the risk to themselves and their families," he said. "The economic impact is most severe in the places where there's been really intensive and sustained raids."

In Minneapolis, for instance, the city government estimated businesses were losing $20 million a week during the ICE surge that started Dec. 1 and is winding down after widespread protests and violence.

Precise figures of ICE arrests on Long Island aren't available, but last year alone Nassau officials held more than 2,600 immigrants in the county jail in East Meadow on behalf of ICE, county data obtained by Newsday shows. 

Focal point of raids

A couple doors down from Saravia’s stores on Fulton Avenue is the popular Colombian bakery La Sevillana. The owner, Guillermo Garcia, said his parents opened the bakery 24 years ago. Its rear door opens onto a parking lot that has been a focal point of ICE activity, with dozens of people arrested in the last several months, including some of his customers, he said.

Since we were the epicenter…it affected us a lot.

— Guillermo Garcia, Hempstead bakery owner

It was especially damaging since residents would pass the word that ICE was arresting people near La Sevillana, he said. "Since we were the epicenter ... it affected us a lot," Garcia said.

Business is down by about half. He, too, has contemplated shutting down and has laid off staff, dropping from as high as 25 workers to a dozen. Those who remain had their hours cut.

"It's been kind of hard because we didn't want to do that to our employees, but we had no choice," Garcia said. "If it keeps going like this, we're going to have to keep on cutting staff or cutting hours and see how it works."

A few stores away, the owner of Key Food supermarket said the impact of the crackdown has been the worst he has seen in 30 years of running the store, including during the COVID-19 pandemic

"The business is bad. Very bad," Francisco Batista said in Spanish.

Sales have dropped by about half, and he has laid off eight to 10 employees out of a staff of 40, he said. He’s cut the hours of remaining employees from about 40 hours a week to 20 to 30.

To try to boost business, he recently started offering free grocery delivery, something the store had never done. But it’s made little difference, with just a few orders a week, possibly because many customers are also losing their jobs or seeing pay reductions, he said.

Rosa Jiménez, who runs a beauty salon in Hempstead, said she used to get about 10 clients a week. Now some weeks, it’s down to one or two.

They are taking everyone. No one wants to be out on the street.

—Rosa Jimenez, Hempstead salon owner

"They are taking everyone," she said in Spanish, referring to ICE. "No one wants to be out on the street."

Lukes of the Chamber of Commerce said she believes even U.S. citizens or immigrants with legal status are reluctant to go to restaurants in Hempstead with their children because they don’t want them witnessing an ICE raid.

There have "been episodes where ICE have patronized the business and then also have arrested individuals and detained them after their meal," Lukes told Newsday.  

ICE said in a statement: "These are nothing more than false claims intended to stoke fear and outrage in a community that ICE personnel are risking their lives to protect and serve."

A search for solutions

Some business owners and community leaders are banding together to seek solutions to the crackdown.

Hernandez, the community leader, who is also a real estate broker and property manager, handed out posters to the owners of the businesses he visited to place in their windows telling ICE and U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents to stay out.

The flyer states that ICE and CBP agents "do not have consent to enter this business unless they have a valid judicial warrant." In the middle of the page is a red stop sign.

Hobbs said he recently prohibited ICE and other immigration enforcement agencies from using village parking lots and other properties to stage their operations. 

"They’re not allowed to muster up or meet up on any village property," Hobbs told Newsday. It has not stopped them from operating in Hempstead since they are a federal agency, though he said village police are prohibited from assisting them other than when ICE has a judicial warrant to arrest someone.

Hernandez said his tour of the businesses gave him a good sense of how they are doing.

"I realized by talking to every single one of them how devastated the business community has been for the last month and a half," he said. "They've been feeling that they cannot do anything about it. They feel helpless."

He and other business owners have met with village officials and would like to meet with Rep. Laura Gillen (D-Rockville Centre), whose congressional district includes Hempstead, to ask for help.

Gillen told Newsday that Trump needs to rein in ICE. Democrats in the U.S. Senate say they are withholding funding to the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE, until the agency is reformed.

"It’s time for the administration to negotiate in good faith with Congress on reforms for ICE," Gillen said in a statement. "We must reach a bipartisan compromise that puts meaningful guardrails and accountability in place."

Lukes said she is trying to get residents from outside of Hempstead to patronize the village’s restaurants and stores.

"We have some phenomenal restaurants here," she said. "You can have a taste of the whole world right here in the Village of Hempstead. It's so much diversity."

Hobbs believes Hempstead’s economy can recover.

"I do believe that we're going to be able to bounce back, businesses are going to bounce back after this ICE activity has ceased," the mayor said. "It might have slowed us down, but we will survive this, and we will see that people are going to come to Hempstead. It'll be the hub again."

But Saravia, the owner of the shoe and furniture stores, said he probably can hold on for only a few more months. Every time ICE does a raid near his store and a video of it spreads on social media, it kills his business for about a week, with no sales, because people are afraid to go there, he said.

"This campaign of fear," he said, "has been unfair."

Newsday's Belisa Morillo and Bahar Ostadan contributed to this story.