The Immigrant Workforce

On September 4th, Volkan Guzey, a longtime front-of-house employee of Major Food Group, was detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents. According to his wife Eliana Cabrera, they were at Miami International Airport to fly to her home state of Utah for their honeymoon. (The two were married over the summer.) “I was so excited to show him the places I grew up, introduce him to more of my family, and simply spend time together as newlyweds,” she writes on the GoFundMe page. 

As they were about to board the plane, Cabrera told me over the phone, two ICE agents approached Guzey and asked to see his passport, and then his entry visa. Before he was escorted away, she says, he told her to get on the flight so that she could still see her cousin’s newborn. “He called me 10 minutes later to say he was being detained,” she says. “They just took him away, it felt like they kidnapped him.” She didn’t hear from him for two days. “They do not give the spouse or immediate family any information at all.”