On Friday morning, around 60 people gathered in the auditorium of an East Village church to listen intently to a Powerpoint presentation that could literally save lives: a Know Your Rights workshop, facilitated by New York Immigration Coalition trainer Janice Northia, aimed specifically at the restaurant industry.
The atmosphere was focused, the audience members attentive. Delivery workers stored brochures on top of bright orange refrigerator bags. Other attendees, some decked out in the merch of their respective restaurants, took out their phones to snap photos of the slides as Northia explained them. One man Facetimed in a friend, camera pointed at the screen set up in front of the pulpit as Northia explained how to identify an ICE agent: by their typical undercover cop outfit (jeans, khakis, boots, sneakers) topped with a bulletproof vest, emblazoned with something vague like "POLICE" or "HSI." The facilitator also passed around a sample "administrative warrant," an effectively powerless document signed by an ICE administrator and designed to look like the judicial warrant actually needed to enter a business or private space and extract the individual it names. "I'm showing it in English, because they will not have a translated copy," she said.
The workshop, delivered in English, Spanish, and French, was timed with the surge of terror across the city's restaurant industry, sparked by President Donald Trump's highly publicized immigration enforcement push. As of early February, more than 100 New York City residents have been detained by federal immigration authorities, and the possibility of those raids hitting the city's restaurants—undeniably powered by immigrant labor—has become a major point of concern for the people who work in them.