ICE probes Tucson restaurant La Indita, known for Indigenous focus & activism

When Denise Schafer arrived at her restaurant on Tuesday afternoon, three federal agents with Homeland Security Investigations, a part of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, were waiting in the lobby for her. 

As the Trump administration launches a “shock and awe” program aimed at undocumented migrants and legal immigrants with criminal records, enlisting agents from across federal law enforcement to fill quotas, ICE agents in Tucson have engaged in targeted arrests and launched investigations into a number of small businesses.

Around 1 p.m. on Tuesday, an employee at La Indita — a Tucson stalwart that has served Mexican and Indigenous-style food for more than 40 years — called Schafer to tell her the ICE agents were at the eatery and were asking questions about employees. 

Schafer and Shawn Soulsby, the operations manager, called their attorney and rushed to the business on North Stone Avenue. 

When they arrived, the agents handed Schafer paperwork, but there were errors on the original, which had been haphazardly scratched out and rewritten by hand, she said. 

Schafer said she felt “intimidated” because the agents showed up in the middle of the day, not wearing uniforms and pushed her to sign paperwork and give her ID. However, they were stymied by attorney Stacy Scheff, who “kind of stopped them in their tracks and said that the paperwork that they had was didn’t look legit.” 

Schafer said the lead agent, a special agent with Homeland Security Investigations, said he wasn’t with ICE — HSI’s parent agency. The other agents, both young and “much more intimidating physically” were along for training, she said. 

The agent handed Schafer a “notice of inspection,” a form letter that gives business owners three days to provide employment documents for workers, as well as  provide the government with an account of how the company maintains records to ensure employees can legally work in the U.S. 

Businesses must collect two forms of identification and maintain those records, and they can use E-Verify—a website maintained by the Department of Homeland Security—to check records. While federal vendors and contractors must use E-Verify, small businesses can maintain paper records along with I-9 forms. 

Schafer said she believes agents investigated her business because she doesn’t use E-Verify and it’s a restaurant focused on Indigenous food. She also worried she was targeted because she, along with Soulsby, help support a school in Magdalena, a small town in northern Sonora. 

Further, La Indita has long hosted dinners for activist groups such as the Tucson Samaritans, Coalición de Derechos Humanos, and once catered food for the People’s Defense Initiative — a failed effort to make Tucson a “sanctuary city” in 2019. 

After Scheff, a civil rights attorney, questioned the notice the agents called their own attorney — an official with the Office of the Principal Legal Advisor — and then left, later returning with a corrected document.

“He didn’t seem to know what he was doing, because at first he was intimidated that my lawyer was here,” Schafer said. “He said, ‘You’re the only person that’s ever had a lawyer present.'”  

Scheff said it was clear Schafer had to respond. 

“It’s just like a tax audit, where you know they have the right to do it anytime for anybody, but generally, they save their energies for cases where there’s some evidence of wrongdoing,” she said.

“It seems odd that they’re doing it now,” Scheff told Schafer. “They also started asking you questions about how you verify stuff, which you don’t need to do, if they’re just serving you with the notice, right? They don’t have the right to actually gather information or talk to any of the workers.” 

“So these guys seem to be doing this for no reason other than to intimidate, to harass, to target Hispanic businesses and potentially locate folks that could be deported,” Scheff said.

The Tucson Sentinel sought comment from ICE officials about the review at La Indita, as well as the number of workplace reviews launched in recent weeks, but the agency did not respond. 

Last year, officials with ICE launched 264 Form I-9 inspections, and ordered companies in 169 cases to pay fines totaling $17 million—of which $4.5 million was collected, according to the agency’s annual report. The agency also launched 830 investigations into labor exploitation, and found at least 31 companies engaged in some form of forced labor, human trafficking and document servitude.

Scheff said when she asked to review the paperwork, the lead agent asked for a G-28—a document immigration attorneys file to appear in immigration courts—and said he couldn’t speak with her without that form. 

“I asked him just now if there was an open immigration case,” Scheff said. The agent told her no, and she chalked that up as “another attempt to intimidate.” 

Schafer began running La Indita in April 2024 and started reviewing employee records after Trump’s executive orders were handed down. 

“When the executive order started, we were like, we’ve got to make sure that everybody is up to date, and that’s when we started planning on doing an internal audit. We wanted to be prepared if this ever happened. We didn’t think it would be in a week,” she said.

ICE ‘fishing for arrests’ 

“It’s unprecedented,” said Alba Jaramillo, executive director of the Immigration Law and Justice Network and a community organizer with the Tucson-based group Derechos Humanos.

Hoping to drive up the numbers of people for deportations, ICE agents have begin “fishing for arrests,” she said. 

Following his inauguration, the Trump administration imposed daily quotas on ICE, demanding 1,200-1,500 arrests per day while enlisting personnel from other law enforcement agencies, including the DEA, FBI and Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco Firearms and Explosives to help. 

During the last week in January, ICE said it made 800 arrests per day, but the agency stopped releasing daily arrest figures after it became clear agents were struggling to meet the administration’s goals. On Tuesday, the White House demoted two ICE officials for failing to meet the administration’s goals and releasing some immigrants, the Washington Post reported. 

Jaramillo said ICE agents aren’t just seeking people with criminal histories, but are also investigating businesses to “catch whomever they can.” 

Not only are ICE officials coming to local businesses, in at least one case, they showed up at a home to target someone who overstayed their visa. 

“That’s a big chilling effect,” she said because it meant the U.S. State Department was working with DHS, a significant shift from previous administrations. 

“They’re just targeting businesses that are more likely to employ people who might be deportable,” she said. This includes an incident when ICE agents arrived a South Side bakery and began asking workers if they had legal status. When the workers refused to answer, telling agents they needed to talk to the owners, the ICE officials sought documents for the workers as part of the I-9 audit. 

Jaramillo worried ICE officials were not only reviewing records, but would track workers to their homes to attempt “collateral” arrests. 

Jaramillo said when federal agents arrived at a bakery, one of the workers ran because he was scared. The agents arrested and held him. 

It remains unclear how many businesses have been targeted for I-9 inspections. While the most recent inspections have taken place on Tucson’s South Side, where immigrant communities are, many businesses may keep quiet about the visits because it hurts their public image, or they don’t want to be perceived as hiring workers unlawfully, she said. Some may also worry if they criticize the reviews, they will be targeted by ICE or by right-wing groups. 

So far, ICE officials have sought documents from at least four Tucson-area businesses, including a construction company. 

“They tend to be small business, and they’re scared,” she said. 

Jaramillo added ICE officers will use I-9 audits as a negotiating tactic, asking owners to turn in their employees to avoid fines.

“It’s a really cruel tactic,” she said.