Just outside Mueller Lake Park, northeast of downtown Austin, stands a bright green building outfitted with a neon goose, welcoming customers to L’Oca d’Oro. Earlier this year, Adam Orman strolled into his restaurant like he would on most days and got to work.
But as time went on, he noticed one key member of his staff hadn’t shown up to work.
"This had never happened before,” Orman said. “We just were waiting. We knew something was wrong.”
Days passed. Finally, Orman reached out to the man’s family. That’s when Orman heard the news: his employee had been arrested and was in the custody of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
The entire staff was shaken by the ordeal, despite the employee being detained outside of work, and his detention contributed to a climate of fear at L’Oca d’Oro. Orman says that fear could potentially cause repercussion for the entire restaurant industry amid harsher, Trump administration immigration policies.
“A lot of our team members know that it doesn't matter if they're here legally or not, but they still have targets on their backs,” he said. “So, they are not moving around as freely as they used to.”
Those concerns for the industry — and his colleagues — come at the same time he and other restaurants are dealing with another significant economic pressure: The rising cost of goods ahead of President Trump’s looming tariffs. Orman buys most of his restaurant products locally, but he's still had to get creative to save money on the imported goods they need, like wine, chocolate and cheese.
“The idea that this is going to spur some sort of domestic production is false in our case," he said. "There are equivalents for Parmesan, but there's not Parmesan."
That combination of tariffs and tighter immigration enforcement has compounded the growing uncertainty in the restaurant industry — and others like construction, agriculture and health care.
“Employers have to look at raising prices for their goods and their services while they, at the same time, cannot find workers to do many of the jobs that we need,” said Chris Wallace, president and CEO of the North Texas Commission, a public policy organization.
Like his immigration crackdown, Trump has tied his executive order imposing tariffs to illegal immigration and drug smuggling. The president and his supporters have also publicly said tariffs will persuade countries to establish better trade deals with the United States.
But experts say businesses in the United States rely too heavily on imported goods for this to be effective and predict tariffs could cost Texas businesses $47 billion, cut the state’s gross domestic product growth, and lead to the loss of about 100,000 jobs.
Fears that tariffs would harm nationwide economic growth sent the stock market plummeting in April, and Trump put a 90-day pause on reciprocal tariffs in response. That freeze is expected to end in July.
Meanwhile, ICE raids and deportations in recent months have also contributed to fears of a labor shortage in Texas, according to Chelsea Kramer, Texas state organizer for the American Immigration Council.
“From health care to energy to construction, it doesn't matter what it is,” Kramer said. “Immigrants are at every part of our economy.”
Immigrants make up 25% of workers in the restaurant and food and service industry, according to research from FWD.us, an immigration and criminal justice advocacy organization. Texas alone employs about 3.7 million immigrants — or nearly a quarter of the state’s workforce.
When those people don’t show up to work for fear of being deported, Kramer says the result is higher prices for consumers.
“Prices are going to eventually go up and we're going to be seeing that directly in our pocketbooks and in how we're accessing food, whether that's at a restaurant or at a grocery store,” she said.
Adam Orman says with restaurants facing so much uncertainty, business owners have to adapt quickly in a constantly changing landscape.
“We're tired of small business owners having to come up with creative solutions for all of these big national and international economic crises,” he said. “We're the bottom of the supply chain and for us, we are the least well-equipped to be able to make changes.”
