“No hate! No fear! Immigrants are welcome here!”
Protesters gathered five days after an immigration-related incident unfolded at the Chile & Chili's Taqueria food truck on West Tennessee Street in late September.
According to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), agents and members of the Florida Highway Patrol were targeting a truck they believed was carrying a Guatemalan national suspected of being in the country illegally. The truck pulled onto the Chile & Chili’s property, and the occupants ran. The surveillance video of that incident has been widely viewed on social media. Three Guatemalan workers were taken into custody.
This case is the topic of today’s Speaking Of.
“Our community was attacked, and I think it’s important that whenever our community is attacked, we don’t just stand by and watch it get attacked more. We have to fight back,” said Brandon Beckett, vice president of the Tallahassee Immigrants Rights Alliance. He spoke with WFSU’s Tristan Wood during the protest that followed the arrests and subsequent closure of the Chile and Chile’s food truck.
“I feel like I do a lot of work within the movement, but what I go through in the movement is nothing like what those people have to go through in detention centers or scared to leave their house because they’re scared of being kidnapped by ICE,” Beckett said.
The owner of the food truck told media outlets that the detained workers had been in the process of finalizing their immigration papers, but he did not elaborate on that.
Other employees quit after the incident, and the owner has closed the Tennessee Street location permanently. The incident sparked protests and broader concerns among Tallahassee immigrant-rights groups.
“We go to work everyday just like the people did over here (at the food truck), and it was despicable what ICE did to them,” Jordan Scott with the Florida AFL-CIO shouted through a megaphone at the protest. “They’ve been going around doing this to so many different people.”
The incident has been characterized by the food truck owner and some community members as an ICE raid. ICE has said the enforcement action began with a vehicle stop that ended on the restaurant’s property.
“ICE said…they were trying to stop a truck carrying someone suspected of being in the country illegally from Guatemala. So, what I think is really important and I have not heard mentioned is how did they come up with that suspicion?” asked Tallahassee immigration attorney Elizabeth Ricci. “How did we know or suspect that this person in the vehicle was undocumented?”
Ricci joins us to delve into what we know about this case and to discuss immigrants’ rights. Her firm, Rambana and Ricci, is not representing any of the people arrested at the food truck. (Disclosure: Rambana and Ricci is a long-time supporter of WFSU Public Media.)
“It's not an immigration violation to flee, but it certainly can expose immigration problems, as it did here,” Ricci says. “We are seeing now that people with pending applications are being detained…and what's important to note is that none of these three individuals have a criminal history. And the president had said that increased enforcement under his administration was going to be for the worst of the worst. Well, this is not the worst of the worst.”
Click LISTEN above to hear the full conversation.
