It’s been over a month since President Trump signed executive orders cracking down on immigration, intending on finding and deporting undocumented workers.

Immediately after his inauguration, the president began taking action toward his promise of mass deportations. While reports of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) showing up at a business in New Jersey and outside a school in Chicago spread, restaurants have also become a target.

TODAY.com spoke with several restaurant owners and workers — some U.S. citizens and some undocumented immigrants — on the condition of anonymity. These industry folks requested to remain anonymous for fear of becoming a target and either being investigated or arrested themselves, or of putting their staff and colleagues in danger.

“I typically take the train to work, and I can see that people feel unsafe,” one undocumented New York City-based restaurant employee tells TODAY.com. “Now we have to be careful on the street or on public transport, we have to always be alert.”

“Honestly, I feel safe being at work. Working has helped me to be less stressed,” he continues. “The stress is only when I am on the street.”

A New York City restaurant owner, who is a citizen, tells us about an employee who stopped riding the bus to work and started using a rideshare service to avoid accidental run-ins with ICE agents rumored to be waiting at bus stops.

Two other restaurant owners and one chef across two U.S. cities — all of whom are citizens — tell TODAY.com that they’re a part of different group chats filled with neighboring food business owners. They’ve said chat members will alert the group of any ICE sightings.

“We’re in a group thread in (our neighborhood) and it’s a community thread where all restaurant, bar and cafe owners and management are kind of sharing information, and that came up,” one chef-owner at a multi-city restaurant chain says. “ICE was spotted a week and a half ago in one of the streets, so someone took a photo of the ICE agents and then shot a message, and so we were, so we knew what was going on.”

Carolyn Richmond, chair of the hospitality group at Fox Rothschild (which represents restaurants, hotels and other businesses) and chief labor council of the NYC Hospitality Alliance (a nonprofit that advocates for the city’s restaurant and nightlife industry) says that, as of Feb. 14, she was not aware of any ICE raids in NYC restaurants.

Though reports in and around other cities persist, with The Philadelphia Inquirer recently reporting the arrest of Celal and Emine Emanet, owners of the Jersey Kebab restaurant in Haddon Township, New Jersey, and The Kansas City Star reporting that 12 of another restaurant’s employees were arrested after ICE allegedly came in looking for a child sex offender. According to the Inquirer, the Emanets legally immigrated to the U.S. from Turkey in 2008 and have been awaiting a decision on their application for legal permanent residency since they filed in 2016 after their visas expired.

“Emine Emanet remains in ICE custody and Celal Emanet is on an Alternative to Detention (ATD), each pending removal proceedings,” an ICE spokesperson told NBC News. “ICE’s ATD program, which began in 2004, uses technology and case management to ensure alien compliance with release conditions, court hearings and final orders of removal.”

Speaking about NYC specifically, Richmond tells TODAY.com, “This has been a horrible few weeks of rumors and a game of telephone.”

“We’ve heard all sorts of rumors from ‘ICE is downtown,’ ‘ICE is in the neighborhood, they’ve already gone into restaurants or retail provisions’ to ‘ICE agents were spotted somewhere else,’” she adds. “I think, by and large, everything we heard were rumors and just people getting particularly nervous.”

And while she says restaurateurs shouldn’t fear that ICE will storm into their restaurant during a busy service, she has been working to make sure business owners are well-equipped with the information they need to keep their employees safe.

On Feb. 7, the NYC Hospitality Alliance held a webinar that provided information on the difference between an ICE raid and an ICE audit, and to provide a refresh for members on the I-9 process. Richmond says more than 500 people attended the virtual meeting.

The multi-city restaurateur we spoke with adds that once his teams were able to hear from lawyers and implement some sort of protocols to keep their employees safe — labeling the kitchen and offices as private areas — things calmed down a bit.

“So we got into action and kind of told our staff what they should do if ICE shows up,” he tells TODAY.com. “So our staff, Hispanic staff, were worried, but once we put some protocol in place, they felt a lot more at ease.”

“We have always been dedicated to maintaining a respectful and legally compliant workplace, and we continue to support our employees in every way possible,” Abraham Merchant, CEO of Merchants Hospitality, which owns and operates restaurants, tells TODAY.com. “That means staying informed, offering resources, and reinforcing the strong sense of community that makes the restaurant industry so special.”

‘Know your rights’

Shortly after the raids began this year, “know your rights” campaigns started to circulate throughout the country, including in major cities like Chicago, and advocates say it has helped people avoid unlawful arrests. These campaigns consist of flyers — both physical and digital, usually in multiple languages — clarifying rights people living in the U.S. have when it comes to ICE showing up at businesses, homes or even attempting to make arrests out in public.

While posting these pamphlets everywhere possible might seem like overkill to some, Richmond explains why it’s important to keep them in circulation.

“We are a country that was built on immigrants,” Richmond says. “We have employees from all over the world here, there are workplaces where you could have 10, 15 languages spoken in a business, so there are certainly, at the micro level in the tri-state area, an acute concern about the people — new immigrants — that may not be aware of the rights they are afforded in the United States.”

An executive chef at a casino resort restaurant in New Mexico says he’s been seeing the flyers on his social media feeds. However, he adds, “Nothing super serious is kind of affecting our day to day.”

The chef says prior to the election, there was a lot of joking among staff that they would have to get married in order to stay in the U.S., but after Jan. 20, that kind of chatter has slowed. Instead, the concerns he’s seeing are about employees’ family members or their own ability to easily cross the border.

“Being a border state, there’s a lot of travel back and forth between here in Mexico,” the chef tells TODAY.com. “So there is definitely some fear when some employees go back there, or, you know, like, ‘Hey, I’m taking a two week vacation … I might need three weeks if I have trouble coming back,’ those kinds of things.”

At the time of the interview, he said he hadn’t yet reached “a period where employees are not showing up or are calling out.”

But that hasn’t been the case for everyone. In New York, a two-location restaurant owner, says he had two line cooks who reported being stopped by ICE agents and then halted communication with their employer.

“I have had two staff members who, they’re like, ‘I’m stopped by ICE, I’m currently discussing with my lawyer, they recommend that I do not go outside,’ and I haven’t heard from them, so I have no idea what happened to them,” he says. At the time of the interview, the owner estimated it had been two or three weeks since he had heard from his employees. “Is it possible it was a totally innocuous way to quit? I mean, great, that would be a great scenario — I hope that’s the case, and that he’s fine. But it also could be something else — something that’s very scary.”

Ultimately, he says what’s happening now is going to shake up the food industry at large in a way many folks might not realize.

“The truth here that, you know, that side doesn’t want to acknowledge, is that these people are doing all the jobs you don’t want to do,” he says. “They’re really difficult. … But yet, you know, people want to demonize (undocumented workers), and they don’t ever want to admit, or ever want to acknowledge, that this is the system they have put in place. And they don’t want these jobs.”

“And obviously this is going to be felt in a lot of ways really soon,” he adds. “Prices are going to go up for everyone. … this is all gonna trickle down to consumers.”

He emphasized that undocumented workers are “the backbone of the nation’s economy” and called back to the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic when restaurant workers — including those who were undocumented — were deemed essential workers and still had to show up in person in order to get a paycheck.

“I, as a chef, was getting the first round of vaccinations along with doctors and emergency responders,” he says. “Like, that makes no f---ing sense, but it’s apparently because we’re the most important part of this nation’s economy, right? We’re the foundation of it and people are … unwilling to learn how it really operates, and they expect artificially cheap food because it’s been cooked by people, by immigrants, whose flavor has been grossly undervalued.”

This article was originally published on TODAY.com