NEW ORLEANS — Kim Krivjanick is not afraid of hard work.
In the 32 years she’s owned and operated her North Broad Street business “Ricard’s Inc.,” it’s taken plenty of sweat and toil to keep the lights on.
“I’ve survived hurricanes, the pandemic, the buyout of a partner, all of these things, and I’ve never been in a situation like this,” Krivjanick said.
But Krivjanick said she has recently started having trouble finding electricians, housekeepers, delivery drivers all essential to her work managing short-term rentals and selling restaurant, catering and janitorial products. People are not showing up or just outright quitting, she said, and she attributes this to workers being afraid that federal immigration agents will target people who have brown skin — even creole women, like her.
She’s not alone.
Broad Street traverses several of the city’s neighborhoods from Broadmoor to the 7th Ward. Long an epicenter of Black-owned businesses, Broad Street is now also a commercial hub for the city’s Latino community. The street and adjacent ones are peppered with a wide variety of businesses — hair salons, grocery stores, restaurants, cafes, auto repair shops, veterinarians and fast food stores. On the strip of Broad between Canal and Tulane, businesses such as Morenita Plus, Ideal Market and Botanica San Simon are frequented by Latino customers. On a normal weekday, music pulses from popular store fronts and people line up at Taqueria El Poblano for lunch.
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But now, as the Department of Homeland Security launches Operation Catahoula Crunch, many in the Broad Street business community who spoke with Verite News, say they feel increasingly placed in a quandary: wanting to keep their businesses operating as usual but worried that customers and workers could feel at-risk of being swept up in the operation, which has a reported goal of arresting 5,000 people. They’re saying that the fear that’s gripped residents of New Orleans is negatively impacting business. Some business owners are taking small steps to help where they can.
Others expressed fear of speaking out and drawing the unwanted gaze of immigration agents. Many say that federal law enforcement using aggressive tactics to round up people they see as part of their community is not normal, desired or helpful for business.
“This is not America. This is not who we are,” Krivjanick said. “We don’t have masked men running up to us, grabbing us, throwing us into unidentified cars, you know or to beat us up on the street.”
DHS says the masks worn by many immigration agents protect them from people learning details about them and their families.
Krivjanick said the tactic makes people afraid of the government.
On top of the worker shortage, short-term renters are calling, Krivjanick said, and asking if the U.S. Immigration Customs Enforcement is still going to be roaming the streets around the New Year’s holiday or Mardi Gras. Those are times when Krivjanick typically expects her rentals to fill up. She doesn’t know what to say, because she doesn’t know herself.
In her experience, people come to New Orleans to enjoy themselves. Potential renters Krivjanick said, who’ve seen scenes from other Border Patrol operations across the country play out don’t think a confrontation with masked agents compliments the partying, drinking, dining and dancing people anticipate when planning a trip to New Orleans. Three potential tenants canceled on her earlier this week, citing ICE as a reason for cancelling, she said.
In response to Verite News questions about fears of people being targeted for their skin color, DHS denied that it engages in racial and ethnic profiling, calling allegations that it does so disgusting, reckless and false.
Allowing workers to stay home is one step some businesses said they’re taking to help alleviate the anxiety they’re hearing in light of stories of Border Patrol agents profiling and detaining people.
“I can’t ask anybody to come to work right now,” said Krivjanick, choking on some of her words, “I simply can’t, because I feel if I made pressure and said, ‘Hey, you know, if you come in, I’ll pay you a little extra,’ if I do that and something happens to the family, yeah, I wouldn’t be able to live with myself.”
Tommy LeBlanc, co-owner of HEY Coffee Co., based off of North Broad Street, also said he didn’t want to encourage people to come out to an upcoming fundraiser if they didn’t feel safe. On Wednesday, he and his friend, José Chris Blanco, co-owner of Waska, a pop-up store that specializes in cooking arepas, were hosting an event at LeBlanc’s Broadmoor location.
A portion of the proceeds were set to go to a local nonprofit that serves some of the area’s Hispanic community, Puentes New Orleans. Blanco cooked food and said 70% of the profits from Waska would go to Puentes. LeBlanc said 20% of the day’s sales at his other coffee shop in Broadmoor would go to Puentes. LeBlanc’s shop also sells a coffee blend, café con sueños, that launched this summer and whose proceeds go to Puentes NOLA’s mission.
“We’re just trying to take the time to show our neighbors, our Latino neighbors, that they are cherished and welcome, as far as we’re concerned,” LeBlanc said.
Puentes New Orleans normally works to promote better outcomes in education, career development and cultural integration. But they’ve recently had to pivot into crisis mode, to address the fear and panic setting in among families as uncertainty around the immigration enforcement operation looms, according to the non-profit’s executive director, Angela Ramirez.
For Blanco, whose business is mobile and who has sometimes worked on Broad Street, spending a day cooking arepas so that 70% of the proceeds could go to Puentes New Orleans was a “no-brainer.”
“I love what they do, what they stand for,” Blanco said.
Blanco was born in Colombia, grew up in Miami, worked as a chef in Vermont, and started his pop-up around the end of 2022, he said. For the first time since coming to the country, Blanco is carrying around his green card with him, which he called “pretty wild.”
“I’ve never had to walk around with my residence card, and even that … doesn’t give me 100% protection against what ICE is doing,” he said.
As the Trump administration has deployed surges of immigration agents to cities around the country, they have been accused of detaining people based on the way they look, the language they speak or their place of work. American citizens have been detained in the operations, as well.
He also said he knows people who are not leaving their homes.
“Is this, like, Nazi Germany? Like, what’s going on?” Blanco asked. “People are hiding because they don’t want to go out because they’re afraid of being abducted.”
Blanco’s business partner, Marcella Garcia, said she sees the residents of New Orleans as a fearless people, and that she hopes that those who can will help protect the people who are the most vulnerable to immigration enforcement actions by raising awareness of what agents are doing.
Several Broad Street business owners would only speak anonymously for fear of being targeted by federal immigration agents.
One said he’s losing money in sales daily because some of his customers are afraid to come out to shop, and some of his employees are afraid to come to work. He said they’re scared to be targeted even driving around. In places right outside of the city, a routine traffic stop could lead to immigration detention and deportation.
Malaysia Walker, who’s a longtime seamstress and works as a general manager at Broadway Bound Costume Supplies, was sewing the base for a Mardi Gras Indian suit when she spoke with Verite News.
Walker said that as far as she can tell, her business has not been impacted by the operation, but she was personally not fond of the idea of expanded law enforcement in the streets.
“I do feel it’s an extreme way to handle the situation, and I think it’s going to bring more harm than good to the city,” Walker said.
On Tuesday afternoon at Coffee Science on South Broad Street, plastic whistles sat in a container near the sales register, as business was winding down for the day.
Co-owner Leah Vautrot said that the whistles are there for community members to use as a tool to draw attention to immigration agents to alert others of their presence and help prevent people from being isolated or quietly detained. She said that, as a community hub committed to social justice, the business felt a responsibility to stand up for its neighbors.
“Disappearing our neighbors off the street should never be normalized. That’s why we’re doing what we can, however small, to create resources that help our customers recognize when ICE is present, alert others, and draw a crowd,” said Vautrot.
Vautrot said that what she’s witnessing feels like something out of 1933 Germany, when Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany, and his Nazi party completed its takeover of the country’s government.
She also highlighted the important role that immigrants, foreign farms and global exchange play in the main product they sell — coffee — and she said she’s opposed to the idea of disrupting the livelihood of the families that enable their business “from origin to cup.”
“If we don’t stand up for dignity and due process, we’re complicit in a system that erases people,” Vautrot said. “And people are not disposable.”
This article first appeared on Verite News New Orleans and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
