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Farmers, California’s second-largest insurer, limits new home insurance policies

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Farmers, California’s second-largest insurer, limits new home insurance policies

When State Farm, California’s top home insurer, said it would no longer write new policies in the state in late May, homeowners began flocking to Farmers Insurance, the second-largest company in the field.

Now Farmers Insurance is signaling that it has no plans to fill the gap in the market. After seeing a surge in demand last month, Farmers said it has capped the number of new policies it will write in the state each month.

The Los Angeles-based insurer said that it was limiting new policies in California “to a level consistent with the volume we projected to write each month before recent market changes,” effective July 3, and is continuing to renew its existing policies.

In other words, Farmers is pursuing business as usual — but in an insurance market that has gotten more than a little unusual in the last few months.

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State Farm announced at the end of May that it was hitting pause on writing new homeowners policies in the state, while also committing to renewing its existing policies. Allstate, sixth in the rankings, hit pause late last year.

Business as usual for Farmers means adding about 7,000 new homeowners policies a month, said California Department of Insurance spokesperson Michael Soller. “We do not expect their footprint in the state to change significantly one way or another,” he said in a statement.

In 2022, Farmers policies made up a little under 15% of the $12-billion California market for homeowners insurance. State Farm, which had been on a five-year sprint to expand its market share in California before hitting pause, has over 21% of the market.

Farmers said that “record-breaking inflation, severe weather events and reconstruction costs continuing to climb” were behind its decision, in a statement from spokesperson Luis Sahagun.

Rising construction and labor costs mean that repairing or rebuilding homes has become more expensive for insurers, and California’s recent periods of flood and fire have led to some years of major losses for home insurers.

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Farmers’ decision not to pick up the slack left by State Farm and Allstate is also driven by a basic insurance concept: Don’t insure every house on the block. Companies like to spread their risk across as wide an area as possible, so that if disaster strikes in one place, they aren’t left on the hook for too much of the damage on their own.

Although Farmers mentioned only inflation and severe weather, State Farm was more explicit when it announced its move, adding fire risk and the volatile reinsurance market — which has driven up costs for insurers to insure themselves in case of disasters — to its list of reasons to stop growing in the California market.

Insurance industry advocates have said that California’s insurance department, headed by Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara, has been too slow to approve necessary rate increases to keep pace with inflation and growing risk. The industry would also like to pass along reinsurance costs and use forward-looking fire risk models to set premium prices.

The insurance department, in turn, has encouraged companies to ask for all the rate increases they need at once, rather than parceling out requests over time. The department is also hosting a workshop later this week to discuss the forward-looking wildfire models that insurance companies would like to use when setting rates.

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DeepSeek Prompts a Reckoning Across Wall Street and Silicon Valley

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DeepSeek Prompts a Reckoning Across Wall Street and Silicon Valley

Good morning on this action-packed Monday. Mark this week on your “History of Artificial Intelligence Timeline”: The creation of DeepSeek, the Chinese A.I. sensation that we told you about last week, is shaking the technology industry to its core.

The super-efficient, open-source software is raising questions about the valuations of tech giants, including the chip maker Nvidia, with their stocks getting crushed today. Has the entire industry been wildly overspending? It’s also raising profound questions about how China may have undercut America’s most critical economic advantage on A.I. by making its technology free. We have more on all of this below.

Plus: Wall Street should pay attention to comments President Trump made late Friday that have flown under the radar.

Markets are on edge on Monday, as global tech investors face a $1 trillion wipeout. The cause: anxiety that the emergence of powerful — and cheap — Chinese artificial intelligence software could upend the economics of A.I.

Nasdaq futures have plummeted nearly 4 percent. And shares in Nvidia, the chipmaker whose processors help train and run A.I. software, are down 11 percent in premarket trading. Those in Constellation Energy, a utility betting heavily on powering A.I. data centers, are down nearly 13 percent.

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Meanwhile, tech executives and policymakers have been left to wonder how strong America’s lead in A.I. is.

DeepSeek is forcing a reckoning in Silicon Valley. The company’s models appear to rival those from OpenAI, Google and Meta, despite the U.S. government’s efforts to limit China’s access to leading-edge A.I. technology. And DeepSeek says it did all this with a fraction of the resources that American competitors use.

Over the weekend, DeepSeek shot to the top of Apple’s App Store charts, rivaling ChatGPT. And DeepSeek is drastically undercutting OpenAI on price.

That raises a number of questions:

  • Do leading A.I. companies like Google, Meta and the privately held OpenAI and Anthropic deserve their astronomical valuations?

  • Do companies need to spend hundreds of billions on vast data centers powered by hugely expensive chips from Nvidia and others? Consider that OpenAI and its partners have promised to spend at least $100 billion on their Stargate project, or that Microsoft said it will spend $80 billion, or Meta $65 billion.

  • Does America need the huge uptick in electricity generation that has fueled a run-up in utility stocks?

American tech companies are scrambling to respond. The Information reports that Meta has tasked several teams of engineers with closely examining DeepSeek to see how they can improve their company’s own Llama A.I. software.

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Already, American A.I. providers are rushing to dissuade customers from switching to cheaper DeepSeek offerings. (One potential stumbling block for some is that DeepSeek, as a Chinese company, won’t answer questions on sensitive topics such as those involving China’s leader, Xi Jinping, though developers say that it’s easy to modify the software.)

Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s C.E.O., has a more positive take: More efficient and accessible A.I. might lead to a “Jevon’s paradox” moment: “As AI gets more efficient and accessible, we will see its use skyrocket, turning it into a commodity we just can’t get enough of,” he wrote on X.

What will policymakers do? President Trump and other Western leaders have been anxious to unveil steps to bolster their homegrown A.I. industries, both by helping them grow and imposing constraints on Chinese rivals. But DeepSeek suggests there are limits to that approach.

Expect tough questions from analysts this week, especially as four of the so-called Magnificent Seven tech giants, including Meta and Microsoft, report earnings this week.

Hearings for Trump cabinet picks and the Fed loom large this week. Senators are expected on Monday to approve Scott Bessent as Treasury secretary. On Wednesday, they will hold confirmation hearings for Howard Lutnick, President Trump’s choice for commerce secretary, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the candidate for health secretary. Also on Wednesday, it’s decision day for the Fed: Many on Wall Street expect the central bank, wary of inflation, will keep interest rates steady.

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Bitcoin falls below $100,000 as the industry deals with a flood of memecoins. The sell-off coincides with the broad slump in tech stocks, and comes despite an executive order by Trump to bolster the sector. (Tokens tied to the president and the first lady, Melania Trump, have slumped sharply again, amid a wave of criticism.) Meanwhile, Brian Armstrong, the C.E.O. of Coinbase, who criticized regulations by the Biden administration, suggested that regulators should create a “block list” for new digital tokens as his company struggles to deal with the million new ones being created each week.

Trump says he’s making progress on a TikTok sale. The president said he was in talks with several potential buyers to take control of the video app as part of an arrangement with ByteDance, the platform’s Chinese owner, with a potential decision in the next 30 days.

President Trump’s jab at Brian Moynihan, Bank of America’s C.E.O., grabbed headlines at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, when he accused the executive of “debanking” his conservative supporters.

What many haven’t noticed that Trump has kept up his attack since then.

When the president visited Los Angeles on Friday for a round table on the California wildfires, he doubled down on his criticism of Bank of America. “They’re not nice. Sounds very nice, ‘The Bank of America.’ They are not nice,” he told someone in attendance. But he didn’t stop there, adding, “We’re doing numbers on banks.”

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Trump’s issues have expanded beyond debanking. The conversation in Los Angeles was about the profit margin that banks often capture by charging a significantly higher interest rate on loans to consumers than the banks pay to borrow from the Fed.

Might he try to force banks to lower interest rates? Or could he make good on a campaign promise of capping credit card interest rates? (It’s not clear if he has the authority to do so via executive order.)

Trump’s relationship with banks is complicated. Few on Wall Street and finance are in Trump’s inner circle, especially compared with tech moguls (some of whom are trying to disrupt banking). Howard Lutnick, Trump’s pick for commerce secretary, comes from the rough-and-tumble brokerage business than the polished worlds of investment banking and commercial lending.

By contrast, Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase has a more nuanced relationship with the president. Though he privately supported Kamala Harris in the 2024 election, the JPMorgan chief has said that Trump wasn’t wrong on issues including taxes and immigration at last year’s Davos, and this year said he’d be on board with tariffs if they’re good for national security.

Also worth noting: One of Bank of America’s largest shareholders is Warren Buffett, who has clashed with Trump in the past. That said, Buffett didn’t weigh in on the election and has been selling down his Bank of America stake since before November.

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Trump is taking shots at banks just as they were expecting a friendlier administration., The industry, whose members had been prevented from merging for years, was expecting a wave of consolidation under Trump.

But there have already been signs that banking won’t get what it wants. Trump’s pick for Treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, said in his confirmation hearing this month that the five largest banks had too much market share.


President Trump’s standoff with Colombia over immigration lasted just a few hours and played out mostly on social media.

But the fallout will likely reverberate among global leaders.

The latest: President Gustavo Petro of Colombia backed down from his refusal to accept American military planes carrying deportees into the South American country. His decision came after Trump threatened sanctions and tariffs — starting at 25 percent, and then climbing — on the country’s exports, including crude oil, coffee and cut flowers.

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Petro’s U-turn gives the White House a victory on multiple fronts. Trump can show he’s living up to his campaign promise to crack down on illegal immigration.

And he can put other foreign capitals on notice that he will use tariffs to extract conditions that go beyond trade. “Today’s events make clear to the world that America is respected again,” the White House declared in a statement.

Allies won’t be spared. Colombia has long had close diplomatic ties to the United States — as do other targets of potential tariffs, Canada and Mexico. Some Trump aides want to proceed with tariffs on the latter on Feb. 1, talks or no talks, The Wall Street Journal reports.

Last week, the S&P 500 rallied in part on hopes that Trump’s recent tariff comments, especially about China, signaled a softer policy approach. Was that all a mirage?

And then there’s Greenland. Trump has coveted the autonomous Danish island for its strategic location in Arctic shipping and defense and for its mineral wealth, and has suggested he’d be willing to use military force or economic coercion to annex it.

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On Air Force One this weekend, Trump told reporters that he could wrest control of Greenland from Denmark. “I think we’re going to have it. I think the people want to be with us,” he said, referring to Greenlanders.

Trump’s comments add to heightened tensions between Washington and NATO allies. “The Danes are saying, ‘Keep it down,’ but they’re scared,” Zaki Laïdi, an adviser to the former E.U. foreign policy chief Josep Borrell Fontelles, told The Times.


The latest guessing game on the Washington-to-New York Acela is where former Vice President Kamala Harris and her husband, Douglas Emhoff, might go next. We know the answer to half of that question.

Emhoff will become a partner at the corporate law firm Willkie Farr & Gallagher, splitting his time between Los Angeles and Manhattan. He starts on Monday, advising companies on crises including litigation and corporate investigations, DealBook’s Lauren Hirsch is first to report.

Emhoff spent decades as a corporate lawyer before moving to Washington. He co-founded a boutique law firm in 2000, which he sold to a rival, Venable, in 2006. He left Venable in 2017 for DLA Piper, and stepped away full-time in 2020, partly to avoid conflicts of interest entanglements once his wife became vice president.

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His clients have included Spotify and Lionsgate. He’s also represented Willie Gault, the former Olympic sprinter and N.F.L. star, whom he represented in an S.E.C. fraud case.

Willkie will tap Emhoff’s experience from his legal career and the White House. The second gentleman has amassed a network of key figures in entertainment, private equity and the corporate world.

Emhoff was a visible presence during the presidential campaign, helping his wife raise more than $1 billion. He also represented the U.S. in a diplomatic capacity at events like the 2024 Olympics in Paris, and led the Biden administration’s efforts to combat antisemitism.

“That got him in touch with very important leaders across the globe,” Thomas Cerabino, a co-chairman at Willkie, told DealBook.

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'Erewhon 2.0' is coming with three new locations opening in 2025

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'Erewhon 2.0' is coming with three new locations opening in 2025

Erewhon, the luxury supermarket chain that turned grocery shopping into a hyper-trendy Los Angeles lifestyle, is ramping up its pace of expansion.

The company will move into three cities in 2025: Manhattan Beach, West Hollywood and Glendale.

It’s the most store openings in a single year since owners Tony and Josephine Antoci bought Erewhon in 2011, a sign of the organic grocer’s soaring popularity. And after relocating its central kitchen to a much larger industrial space last month, the company says it has the capacity to grow even more around Southern California.

“We see 2025 as the beginning of Erewhon 2.0 — a wave of expansion for us,” said Tony Antoci, who is chief executive.

In Glendale, Erewhon will be taking over the property previously occupied by Virgil’s Hardware Home Center.

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(Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times)

The Manhattan Beach store will be Erewhon’s first in the South Bay and is scheduled to open in March in a former Mother’s Market & Kitchen at 1700 Rosecrans Ave. After that, the West Hollywood store is set to open over the summer at 8550 Santa Monica Blvd. in a space that was previously a Sprouts. The Glendale store is expected to open toward the end of the year at the site of the old Virgil’s Hardware Home Center at 520 N. Glendale Ave.

Erewhon currently operates 10 markets, all of them in affluent areas of Los Angeles County. Its Pacific Palisades store, which survived the Palisades fire, is temporarily closed.

To support the addition of three new locations — and particularly the in-store cafes that have become core to Erewhon’s business — the company recently completed a three-year buildout of a new central kitchen in Vernon, which at 65,000 square feet is five times larger than its previous one in Boyle Heights.

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Known as the commissary, the kitchen is where all of Erewhon’s TikTok-famous hot bar and tonic bar menu items — buffalo cauliflower, coconut chicken tenders, kale salads and gluten-free coconut chaga brownies — are prepped before being delivered to its grocery stores around 5 a.m. daily.

Unlike at traditional supermarket chains, Erewhon has cultivated a following of shoppers who visit daily to grab a prepared meal or one of its celebrity-backed $20 smoothies. The privately held company declined to share financial figures, but said its all-day cafes take up roughly 30% of floor space and serve 100,000 customers every week.

In a 2021 interview with The Times, Tony Antoci said about 40% of the company’s revenue came from its prepared foods and private-label products. Erewhon reportedly pulls in $1,800 to $2,500 in sales per square foot; the industry average is $500 per square foot.

A customer orders from the cafe at Erewhon in Culver City in July.

A customer orders from the cafe at Erewhon in Culver City in July.

(Dania Maxwell / Los Angeles Times)

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As Erewhon has increased its footprint around L.A. County, it has expanded and relocated its commissary every few years to keep up.

Roughly 350 of Erewhon’s 2,500 employees work out of the new 110,000-square-foot Vernon building. The commissary takes up more than half of the leased space and includes a bakery, juice room, pasta room, dry storage and production areas, a research and development kitchen and a training kitchen for the stores’ culinary managers. The rest of the building is being used as office space.

“It’s raising the ceiling of what we can accomplish,” said Tony, who called the commissary the “engine” of the business. “That means more variety, more consistency and more innovation.”

Erewhon's new commissary, where all the food for its cafes is prepped.

Erewhon’s new commissary, where all the food for its cafes is prepped, takes up 65,000 square feet in Vernon and includes a bakery, juice room, pasta room and dry storage warehouse.

(Andrew Kenney)

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Erewhon didn’t start out as a premium grocer. It was founded in 1966 by Japanese immigrants Michio and Aveline Kushi, pioneers of the natural-foods macrobiotic movement who began selling imported organic goods such as brown rice, miso, soy sauce and umeboshi out of their Boston home. After the health department shut it down, the couple rented a small storefront nearby and named it Erewhon, an anagram of “nowhere.”

Erewhon grew to three stores and a distribution facility on the East Coast, and in 1969, the company opened a location in L.A. on Beverly Boulevard. The stores changed owners several times, and eventually the East Coast side of the business was folded into another grocery chain after a period of financial and management struggles.

When the Antocis bought the company for an undisclosed price 14 years ago, only one store remained and its cafe offerings were cooked on site, which limited the couple’s ability to open new locations.

The Antocis have embraced L.A.’s culture and used it to build a cultlike devotion among A-list stars and social media influencers, who have propelled many of its products into viral sensations.

Erewhon now has 10 organic grocers around Los Angeles County and a devoted fan base of well-off, wellness-minded customers.

Erewhon now has 10 organic grocers around Los Angeles County and a devoted fan base of well-off, wellness-minded customers.

(Dania Maxwell / Los Angeles Times)

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To build upon the buzz, Erewhon has branched out beyond selling groceries.

Its fast-growing private-label line now includes Erewhon-branded apparel, bags, candles, nutritional supplements as well as bath and body products.

And its membership program has grown to roughly 50,000 people who pay $100 to $200 annually for special pricing, perks such as free drinks and access to its “lifestyle collective,” an array of discounts from resorts, workout studios, spas and athleisure brands.

Erewhon owners Tony and Josephine Antoci at the Studio City store in 2021.

Erewhon owners Tony and Josephine Antoci at the Studio City store in 2021.

(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)

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The company recently expanded its shipping range for nonperishable items, such as a jar of sea moss gel for $88 or a logo hoodie for $185, to a total of 19 countries.

But fans from around the U.S. continue to push for physical stores in other regions, which Tony Antoci said is “a major focal point for us.”

A store in New York, he added, is “absolutely on our radar.” In order to do so, the company would first need to build an East Coast commissary similar to the one in Vernon, he said.

“For the immediate future, we’re focusing on Southern California.”

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As Trump’s Immigration Crackdown Looms, Restaurants’ Undocumented Workers Fear the Worst

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As Trump’s Immigration Crackdown Looms, Restaurants’ Undocumented Workers Fear the Worst

As the Trump administration rolls out its changes to the immigration system, fear is surging in the food-service industry as it braces itself for a promised crackdown on unauthorized workers.

Immigrant labor, both authorized and unauthorized, is integral to the staffing and running of restaurants in the United States. In a 2024 data brief, the National Restaurant Association reported that 21 percent of restaurant workers in the United States were immigrants. That figure does not include unauthorized workers, however; the Center for Migration Studies has estimated they number an additional one million employees.

Under the new administration, proprietors and workers are preparing for the worst.

An Immigration and Customs Enforcement sweep at the Ocean Seafood Depot in Newark on Thursday deepened the anxiety (though it is unclear whether the action, which resulted in three arrests, was part of the Trump administration’s plan). And many restaurant owners around the country were reluctant to be interviewed, saying they worried that their businesses and workers would be targeted. Several declined to comment at all.

Chicago and its restaurant industry have been anticipating actions by ICE since plans for post-inauguration immigration actions were leaked to the news media last week, with Chicago slated to be the first location.

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Even well-known Chicago chefs and restaurateurs who have been vocal about political issues in the past, including immigration, were hesitant to speak publicly about the threat of immigration arrests, so as not to put “a target” on their businesses and employees as numerous owners told The New York Times.

A photo provided to The Times shows a handwritten sign in the kitchen of a prominent Chicago restaurant that reads: “Don’t let ICE in the building! And no snitching!” (The person who provided the photo asked that the restaurant not be named for fear of it being targeted.) And scripts have been passed around to employees at the restaurant, with recommended phrases to use in the event that they’re confronted by ICE agents.

One veteran Chicago chef and restaurateur, who asked not to be named for fear that his restaurant would be targeted by ICE, said that since Monday he had been keeping a binder at the host’s stand that advises employees what to do in case of an ICE visit.

The chef said employees who speak openly about the fear of ICE are those he knows stand no risk of actually being deported. “If you are one of the people who is legitimately worried about your immigration status,” he said, “you are going to be pretty quiet about it where you work.”

Andres Reyes said the threat of an immigration crackdown has been a topic of conversation among employees and customers at both locations of his Chicago restaurant, Birrierias Ocotlan. His father, Ramon, opened the original restaurant in 1973 in South Chicago, one of the city’s oldest Mexican immigrant neighborhoods.

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“We have people who have been here for 40 years who are still working on getting their papers — and they are not criminals,” he said, referring to community members, not his employees. “They are working and they are contributing members of society. It’s unfortunate that they could be caught in the middle.”

According to the Migration Policy Institute, 53 percent of the unauthorized immigrants in Illinois have lived in the United States for more than 15 years, and 37 percent have at least one child who is a U.S. citizen.

Mr. Reyes attributed reduced business and slower-than-normal street traffic in the neighborhood in part to fear of the sweeps. “A lot of the unauthorized immigrants are now not spending money, because they are afraid of deportation or a setback,” he said.

Another of Chicago’s well-known Mexican American chefs, who requested anonymity, said misinformation was making an already stressful situation worse. The chef’s restaurant went on high alert on three occasions recently, after employees got word that nearby restaurants were being raided by immigration agents — only to learn that the rumors were false.

In Los Angeles, where longstanding fears of immigration enforcement had subsided in recent years, anxieties were running high among food-service professionals.

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California is the state with the largest number of unauthorized immigrants — 1.8 million, according to the Pew Research Center. The Migration Policy Institute estimates that 950,000 of those people live in Los Angeles County. (More than half of those have lived in the United States for more than 15 years, and 17 percent are homeowners.)

One Los Angeles chef and restaurant owner, a U.S. citizen who grew up in Mexico, was preparing Friday for a meeting to address the fear of ICE visits with his entire staff and go over their plan, which included instructions on where to safely shelter in the building. ICE agents can legally visit public-facing areas of a business, like a dining room, but need either a warrant or permission from the staff to enter private spaces.

“Tensions are high, and this is something we should prepare for, like any emergency,” said the chef, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “We should have a plan in place.”

A chef in San Francisco, who requested anonymity, said he hoped preparation would temper the angst among restaurant workers.

The chef, an unauthorized immigrant himself, was fielding questions from a jumpy staff. “When you’re scared, you’re scared of anyone in a uniform,” he said. “You see cops and wonder if they’re going to come inside — you don’t know what kind of power they have.”

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He handed all of his employees fliers and cards made by an immigration lawyer with basic information about their rights. The chef plans to attend a seminar next week with local restaurateurs and lawyers to gather more information and legal advice.

He also had a conversation with his family about what to do if he were detained — whom to call first and where to go. “All we can do right now is get prepared, instead of feeling scared, which is easier said than done.”

In Washington, D.C., Erik Bruner-Yang, the chef and owner of Maketto, is awaiting guidance from the Restaurant Association Metropolitan Washington.

“I think right now everyone’s waiting to see what’s really going to happen with immigration,” he said. “R.A.M.W. has been really good about providing resources, and they were during the first Trump administration. To be fair, the Obama and the Biden administration weren’t that great, either, when it came to deportations.”

Téa Ivanovic, a founder and the chief operating officer of Immigrant Food, which has a location a block from the White House, said the unintended consequences of mass deportations could extend far beyond the fate of individual workers.

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“I think as any business owner, especially in the food industry, where we’re completely dependent on immigrant labor and it’s a trillion-dollar industry,” she said. “I think it’s very concerning when they’re talking about workplace raids.”

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