Deportation fears play out in Queens. There's an economic cost to that.

The economics of deportation fears are playing out in Queens, where frigid weather and flu bugs aren't the only things eating into business profits.

At De Cache Barber Shop near Corona Plaza, barber Roberto Duran spends long stretches of the day sitting in his styling chair, awaiting customers.

And a few blocks away at an Italian and Ecuadorian restaurant on Junction Boulevard, Luis Sarmiento only seats a handful of tables during what’s normally a bustling lunch rush hour.

Across the street at Mexican restaurant Tulcingo, managers have cut some staffing shifts due to a sharp business decline, worker Esmeralda Hernandez said. She points to rampant fears fueled by President Donald Trump’s re-election and an accompanying uptick in deportation rhetoric.

Owners and staff at 14 businesses in this mostly immigrant neighborhood report sales drops of as much as 50% since Trump’s inauguration, forcing some employers to cut worker hours and shifts. A local business group notes the miserable weather may be a factor, along with a monthslong crackdown on unauthorized street vendors in the area.

But workers and merchants are of a single mind on the main cause of their problem, based on their conversations with customers. They say that increased talk about immigration enforcement – of threatened, actual and rumored action – has customers altering their activities, staying closer to home and work, and steering clear of some familiar haunts.

“Residents here are afraid,” said Duran, 43, who says customers have openly discussed the issue with him. “It’s the cause of panic here.”

It remains unclear if actual enforcement activity has increased in Corona or elsewhere in New York City — where daily immigration arrests averaged about two dozen in 2023 — since Trump officially launched what he has billed as the largest “mass deportation” effort in the nation’s history on Inauguration Day, Jan. 20.

But David Kallick, director of the Immigration Research Initiative, a nonpartisan think tank that studies immigration issues related to economic, social and cultural inclusion, said it should come as no surprise that fear over immigration enforcement would compel vulnerable people to spend less time in local stores or otherwise change their behavior.

“All of the positive impacts that we see of immigrants adding vibrancy to an area start to be reversed if you put fear in the community— that going out and doing what they've been doing could really risk their well-being,” Kallick said.

A January report by Kallick’s group found that if 1 in 10 undocumented New Yorkers were detained or deported, that would lead to a loss of $310 million in state and local tax revenue. But worry can manifest in other ways. A 2018 study reported that fears over immigration enforcement led to a decline in school enrollment, while a 2025 study showed the same with doctor’s office visits.

Fears of deportations have similarly slowed down business in nearby Jackson Heights, another major immigrant hub — and in Brooklyn's Little Haiti, the Haitian Times reported, based on interviews with business owners. Steep sales declines have also plagued a Latino neighborhood in Minneapolis, according to reporting by the Minneapolis Star Tribune, based on interviews with business owners. That report noted that “false rumors abound, exacerbating the effects on businesses that cater to Latinos and other immigrant populations.”

Corona has one of the largest immigrant populations of any neighborhood in New York City, which is one of the United States' largest immigrant hubs. Nearly 2 in 3 people in Corona are immigrants. The neighborhood is home to the largest Mexican and Ecuadorian populations in the city, according to Department of City Planning data.

But the problems aren’t isolated to Latino businesses. Annetta Seecharran, director of Chhaya, a local community development group, said her team had talked to 12 businesses — largely owned and staffed by South Asians — that had seen “precipitous” declines in sales, which the owners and workers also attributed to immigration worries.

Corona residents in interviews described friends and family members seeing ICE officers near their homes, and others pointed to social media videos of uniformed officers moving through Corona and other Queens neighborhoods.

Federal law enforcement officers, including ICE officers, have been seen around Corona multiple times in recent weeks, according to photos and video provided to Gothamist. Nonetheless, the extent to which immigration enforcement has actually increased is unclear, given ICE's lack of transparency on where it has made arrests.

ICE hasn’t released regional figures about its enforcement arrests, and did not respond to requests for comment for this story.

The Drug Enforcement Agency has detained over 100 people in New York City operations with the Department of Homeland Security and ICE between Jan. 28 to Feb. 3, according to Frank Tarentino, DEA special agent in charge of the New York Division. The enforcement actions included alleged drug offenders and immigration violators.

An average of 626 immigration arrests per day have taken place across the country in the first two weeks since Trump's return to office, up from about 300 a day in 2024, according to an ICE post on X.

Seth Bornstein, director of the Queens Economic Development Corporation, says the business decline may be due to seasonal business changes or bad weather in recent weeks. But business owners say the recent drop is worse than the seasonal shifts in prior years.

“January is a tough month,” said Reynaldo Carvajal, 56, manager of La Abundancia bakery in Jackson Heights. “But I haven’t seen it this bad.”

Carvajal said sales at the bakery dropped 30% to 40% since Jan. 20, and sales were a third less than this time last year.

Anita Belles, 27, manager of a nearby salon, added: “This was like a desert.”

Fewer street vendors are also setting up their stalls along thoroughfares like Roosevelt Avenue and Junction Boulevard, according to business owners and vendors.

That’s partly because of heightened police enforcement in recent months under the NYPD’s recent crackdown on quality-of-life issues in the area, including unauthorized street vending. A 90-day police patrol operation on Roosevelt Avenue that ended in January resulted in 985 arrests, including 134 for prostitution-related offenses, and 11,500 summonses. It also resulted in 522 street vendor inspections, resulting in the confiscation of 94 propane tanks.

But since the end of the operation, Corona's vendors have continued to stay away due to fears of immigration enforcement, according to Carina Kaufman-Gutierrez, deputy director of the nonprofit Street Vendor Project, which advocates for street vendors.

A September report from the Immigration Research Initiative found that 96% of the city's estimated 23,000 street vendors are immigrants. Among immigrant food vendors, 27% reported that they didn’t have legal residency status, and another 30% preferred not to answer.

“This is a community that is struggling to survive when you have both the local and the federal governments that are targeting hardworking New Yorkers,” Kaufman-Gutierrez said.

Enforcement fears are also causing staffing problems at some businesses. Belles said workers — even those with work permits and social security numbers — called out two to three days per week due to fears of immigration enforcement, since they’re not citizens.

But many other workers without legal status continue going to their job, risking potential immigration enforcement actions in order to pay their bills.

“We take a risk to come to work,” said Andrea, a salon worker near Corona Plaza without legal status who asked not to share her last name for fear of risking enforcement consequences. No customers were in the shop at the time.

“We need to keep going. We need to pay the rent,” she said.