As ICE rumors spread, Lower East Side business owners got added to a group chat to address them. “Nothing was confirmed from any of the establishments,” one chef says.

A few weeks ago, on a Thursday evening, a rumor ripped through New York’s restaurant industry: ICE was hitting the Lower East Side. Shortly before 6:00 p.m., I met up with a source, who told me a 1,000-person industry group chat was going off. There was chatter of a mass sweep downtown. Within 30 minutes, two others reached out. On social media and over text, more people were sharing the names of restaurants that were supposedly raided: a cocktail bar and a wine bar, a seafood spot, a Southeast Asian restaurant, a Mediterranean place. Word was spreading that ICE had snatched a barback from the cocktail bar: “Everyone get inside and lock your doors,” one person wrote.

That night, a cook says his phone was blowing up with texts from people fearfully asking about the barback. He immediately reached out to former coworkers, who told him it wasn’t true. “I wish I knew how it started. I really don’t,” Brian says. (Like everyone else, he asked to speak anonymously, and has been given a pseudonym.) A restaurateur asked people to take their posts down, saying it made them a target.

Stories kept circulating on that text chain and others. One server said she heard about ICE hitting a club in Brooklyn. During her Friday shift—when some businesses closed as a part of a strike protesting ICE—the raids were the only thing the staff talked about. The owner of a nearby restaurant came in for lunch, and he told them he knew a guy who was, supposedly, taken by ICE. (It wasn’t true.) The same day, the admins of a Signal chat about ICE in New York wrote, “We have been receiving an enormous amount of false sightings the last few days.” Asking members to “help dispel rumors,” they included photos of the National Guard misidentified as ICE. Closer to midnight, I got a text from a bar owner. “This is a total game of telephone right now,” he wrote. An employee had told him that a friend was at a small bar downtown when ICE agents “blew directly” into the kitchen and took the cooks. “Any or none of this could be true,” he added. 

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