In January, just days after Donald Trump was sworn in as president, immigration agents came to Dana Beauty Salon in Mount Rainer, Maryland, located just two minutes from the Washington D.C. border.
They were looking for one of the employees, an undocumented migrant, who was taken into custody and is being held at a detention center in New Hampshire pending a court hearing. That day changed the life of the salon’s owner, Daysi García.
“They showed up one day, I think it was a Thursday. By the time the weekend came around, no one was coming in, our workers weren’t coming in for their shifts, not even the clients were coming in,” she recalls sadly.
The majority affected are at the helm of small Latino-run businesses. Located in majority-Latino neighborhoods, they often offer services and products that are typical of their countries of origin, and Spanish is often the most common language used on the job. Many own restaurants and beauty salons, which have been the most impacted by fall in clientele, alongside grocery stores, service providers like party planners and craftspeople.
“What is happening now is worse than what we experienced during Covid.
Back then, people could put on a mask and come in. Now, they don’t even want to leave their homes,” says García.
Percy Pelaez-Contti, president of the Central American Chamber of Commerce in Houston, explains that the damage to Latino businesses has been immense and is due, above all, to what he calls “the domino effect.”
“Some people have their papers in order, but they are still afraid. They think, what happens if it also affects legal residents, or even citizens, etcetera, etcetera? They start with the people who haven’t sorted out their documents, but it also impacts those close to them,” he says.
The U.S. government claims that its deportation campaign is only directed at undocumented immigrants who have committed crimes, a stance that helped Trump gain the trust of many Latinos during last year’s elections, as they believed that, since they had no criminal record, they had nothing to fear. But the reality has turned out to be much different.
Many of the detained migrants haven’t committed any crime, apart from entering the country without proper documentation. This, coupled with the termination of programs that until now, protected certain migrants from being deported, such as the Temporary Protection Status and humanitarian parole, is spreading fear through immigrant communities.
