by Jim Barton, compiled from several sources
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| Upper right: Sheyla Gomez, restaurant owner's daughter |
El Control Mexican Restaurant in Harlingen, Texas, was forced to close its doors in June after Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents raided the business, detaining the owner, several family members, and employees. “ICE arrived and went straight to the kitchen to ask for Social Security numbers, work permits, and to ask all the workers to come to the kitchen,” recalled Sheyla Gรณmez, daughter of the owner, in Spanish. “They took my mother, my stepfather, my older sister, and they took two workers.”
With her family in custody, Gรณmez was left to manage the restaurant and care for her younger sisters. She struggled to find people, legally authorized to work, who could keep the business running. “It’s something I see as difficult for my family to be together again. It’s something that might not happen. I’m getting used to the idea that maybe we’ll have to close down here,” she said. “They’re taking the wrong people, people who are doing something for this country.”
Her stepfather and restaurant co-owner, Blas Garcia, still remembers the moment the agents came. “I was standing here,” he said. “When I looked up, there was (the agent).” Garcia spent 20 days in a detention facility in Port Isabel. “The minutes become an eternity,” he said. “The hours, the days, the weeks, although I was only in there for 20 days.” His wife, a key figure in the kitchen and known for warmly greeting customers, was deported to Matamoros, Mexico. “I try to cope with it, because it hurts that she is not here,” Garcia said. “I tell myself she is waiting back at the house. I just lie to myself.”
Garcia’s daughter Zory, who was also detained that day, has returned to work. “I feel blessed, and thank God I’m back and I’m working,” she said through tears. “Only my mom is not here. I just need my mom.”
The restaurant, which has served the Valley for 13 years, initially planned to reopen only its drive-thru after the raid. But within two days, loyal customers were lining up to dine in. “We thought about maybe going somewhere else, which we did, but it wasn’t the same,” said longtime customer Juan Lopez. “The experience wasn’t the same, the food wasn’t the same. You kind of get used to wherever you go. We’ve been coming for several years. We are used to the food, to the people, and the staff.”
While business appears normal again, Garcia says life has not returned to what it was before. “It may have been destiny or perhaps a tip,” he said of the raid. “Because we were aware they were in the area.” Moving forward, she said the restaurant will only hire workers with Social Security numbers.
The raid and detentions have stirred debate in the community, with some questioning why undocumented workers do not simply adjust their status. “If they had the money to open a restaurant, they could afford to become legal residents,” one local resident wrote online. “Paperwork, a few thousand dollars and a little bit of time, they could be legal if they have no criminal history. I am just at a loss as to why they can’t do this. I know many that have.”
For the Gomez-Garcia family, however, the focus remains on keeping El Control open and coping with the absence of loved ones. As Garcia put it, “I take the loss day by day.”
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They didn’t burst in for justice — they came for obedience. Black boots on greasy tile, plastic gloves snapping like punctuation marks, herding cooks and waitresses into the kitchen like livestock. The smell of sizzling meat and onion still hung in the air, colliding with the chemical stench of fear. It wasn’t random. This was a message. A flex. A little street theater for the man in the gold tower — Trump — whose eyes glint whenever his personal Gestapo, ICE, drags another family through the mud for the cameras.
ReplyDeleteThis is the psychology of power: you don’t just punish the guilty, you humiliate the harmless. You project your own rot onto them, frame it as “law and order,” and convince the crowd that ripping a mother from her kitchen is the same as protecting the nation. It’s a sickness that feeds on applause and headlines, a carnival game where cruelty is the prize and compassion is the punchline.
But here’s the twist Trump and his hired thugs can’t process — the doors are open again. The plates still come out steaming, the customers still fill the booths, and the air is once again thick with the smell of food and the hum of people refusing to disappear. Every taco is a raised fist, every enchilada a reminder that a community will feed itself no matter how many raids you stage or how many families you fracture. You can send in the boots, Donald, but you’ll choke on the salsa before you break this place.