By Omar Mohammed;Photo Credit: Pat Greenhouse/Globe Staff
NEW BEDFORD — In recent days, Acushnet Avenue, typically a busy commercial area populated by restaurants, retail stores and mini-markets in the city’s North End, has been quiet. Locals have stayed away since the recent immigration raids, in which at least 24 people were arrested — many in front of small businesses.
For Iris de la Rosa, owner of Mexican restaurant Taqueria La Raza, her business has barely seen customers after someone was picked up outside her restaurant on Sept. 22 during the latest US Immigration and Customs Enforcement surge on the South Coast.
“If the business continues like that, I think I have to close the door because it’s too much,” de la Rosa said. “I can’t pay the bill, the mortgage, because I own that building.”
The latest arrests by federal agents have had a chilling effect on local immigrant businesses as people in the community are hunkering down in their homes — even as Mayor Jon Mitchell urged residents this week to visit the area’s establishments — too nervous to go to work, eat at restaurants, or step into their local grocery store in fear that they could be next.
The chilling effect, advocates say, hurts immigrant small businesses — and the immigrant community as a whole — in a city of 100,000 people, a fifth of whom are foreign born, advocates say.
Even those who are documented, de la Rosa has noticed, believe their status alone might not prevent them from being arrested by ICE — and that too has contributed to the slow foot traffic, she believes.
“Many of the businesses that we work with, whether they run a restaurant or a convenience store or a retail shop, depend on their customer base that comes from the immigrant community,” said Corinn Williams, director of the Community Economic Development Center of Southeastern Massachusetts. “When ICE sweeps through a neighborhood and kind of terrorizes a customer base, a lot of people stay away.”
New Bedford has a deeply rooted immigrant community. Portuguese and Cape Verdeans settled in the area and worked in the lucrative whaling industry in the 19th century. Central Americans, who arrived in the 1980s and 1990s, staffed the fishing houses and assembly lines of textile mills.
”When we see the sort of harsh presence at supermarkets and other places, these are places we go to every day,“ said Derek Santos, the executive director of the New Bedford Economic Development Council. ”We’re not outside of this community … It’s incredibly upsetting.”
Santos’s organization does not have data to fully quantify the impact of the raids on the local economy. But anecdotally, whispers that federal agents are snatching people on the streets have kept people away from patronizing local businesses, he said.
“It’s incredibly disruptive to the larger economy,” he said. “We know for a fact New Bedford’s not alone. We may have different populations here, but the impacts, I think, are universal across the country.”
Martín Ordoñez, owner of Restaurante y Tortilleria Guatemalteco also on Acushnet Avenue, is facing similar challenges after a customer was detained by agents last week outside his establishment. Ever since then, business has plunged an estimated 50 percent, he said. His concern, though, goes beyond the impact the latest ICE activity will have on his Guatemalan restaurant. He is worried about his community.
“It’s about our neighbor, our people,” he said.
Hector Grave, who owns a business selling fishing nets, said reports that even green card holders have found themselves detained has him feeling like no one is safe.
Grave is Guatemalan and is documented through the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA. He has been running his business since 2012. He said he cannot afford to stay home, advice that some local advocates have sent out to keep people from getting embroiled in ICE sweeps.
“I have to work. I have to comply with my responsibility as a business owner to my clients,” he said. “I am just hoping that things could change. It’s a mess now with inflation and now this. It seems like it’s going from bad to worse.”
He said that people just want to get on with their lives and care for their families.
“It’s sad. People are just trying to bring food on the table, make a living,” he said.
Ondine Sniffin, an immigration lawyer in New Bedford, said the people getting detained were mostly workers in the area, most of whom are from Central America, with some from Mexico and — in at least one occasion — an individual from Haiti. Several worked at the seafood processing plants down at the ports in New Bedford, she said.
“This has a ripple effect, as do so many of the ICE enforcement actions that they’ve been carrying out nationwide. Already, people are staying home. People are not going into work,” she said.
The harsh immigration policies that have hit the community have some local immigrant business owners make contingency plans should they get deported, according to Guelmie Santiago who runs Santiago Professional Services in New Bedford that offers tax advice and helps register small businesses. Her clients are stressed and anxious about their futures, she said.
“People, don’t know what will happen, because if they get deported, how the mortgage will [be paid] … and they would like to have a plan B in case something happens,” Santiago said.
In recent months, families are asking to create care taker affidavits, so if they are ensnared by ICE, there will be someone there to care for their children.
“It is pretty sad that a parent, a family, have to source that because they don’t know when this could happen,” she said.
Santiago has been advising immigrant businesses for more than a decade and said she has never seen the level of anxiety that has now gripped the immigrant community in New Bedford. The fear is even worse now than in the aftermath of the raid at a leather factory nearly 20 years ago when more than 360 undocumented immigrants were detained by immigration authorities, she said.
She sees it in her own family, even though she is Puerto Rican. Her 14-year old granddaughter has told her to be careful, worried that she could be caught up in ICE raids.
“This is not about being legal or illegal,” Santiago said. “This is about kids that, even though they’re legal, they’re seeing all this happening and they don’t know who’s secure.”
Published in Boston Globe
