Stir Fried: Asian American restaurant owners reflect on ICE raids

Wong’s parents fled the Vietnam War to Hong Kong in 1979 with their nine children before being sponsored to New York in 1981. They settled in Minneapolis in 1983, looking for a “nice, quiet, peaceful” place to grow roots after the hectic gang violence of 1980s New York. Wong opened My Huong Kitchen in 2012 to pursue her lifelong love of cooking, and though reviews were glowing, business was touch and go; they didn’t have a liquor license and 43-year-old pho institution Quan’s across the street had more name recognition. After videos of her feeding protesters went viral online, her restaurant is now always packed. People even come from out of state just to meet her and enjoy some pho or bahn mi.

With the new flood of customers, Wong tells me that she’s working around the clock at the restaurant filling in for employees who are afraid to go to work, as well as giving rides to the employees who do come in. “Yes, there’s so many, and I’m so grateful, I’m so happy. The first two weeks, I was crying a lot. But happy tears,” she says.

Julia Momose, Kumiko

Julia Momose's Kumiko won Outstanding Bar at the 2025 James Beard Awards.

Sammy Faze Photography

Born and raised in Japan to a half-Japanese father and American mother, Julia Momose helms award-winning Chicago cocktail bar Kumiko. After announcing on social media that Kumiko would be joining the Jan. 30 “86 ICE” general strike, the bar received several voicemails from angry customers, including one who threatened to boycott their business.

“Someone who doesn't respect or care about immigrants' lives deciding not to come to a Japanese dining bar, for me and the team, that's actually a win. Because it means that my team is that much safer, because that person and their disregard for our lives is not coming to the business,” Momose says. “So I like to think of it kind of as the reverse way, like in the moment, sure, it can feel like an attack or aggressive or whatever, but at the end of the day, there are people whose minds are not going to be changed so easily and so quickly, and it's not necessarily our job to change their minds.”

At Kumiko, Momose’s team has implemented measures to protect staff such as designating white-presenting people as points of contact for receiving ICE in case there is a raid and going over procedures for documenting potential raids and contacting immigrant defense attorneys. “We are acknowledging the fact that ICE isn’t following the law in every case. So with that, we are operating under the assumption that no person of color is truly safe. We are prepared for ‘if and when,’” she says.

While there hasn’t been any in-person anti-immigrant aggressiveness at Kumiko, Momose notes that the bar’s recent sweep of awards has drawn a more privileged crowd who can be combative with staff when they can’t get a table, sometimes attacking the host’s English abilities or ethnicity. Hosts dealing with disrespectful customers now have a process of passing a folded paper crane to the manager so they can aid with deescalation.

“The other side of it, though, is, I think that we are more willing to stand up for ourselves, at least I'm learning to do that. Being raised in Japan, in a culture that demands that you apologize for being different or for standing out, right, like a lot of us are part of the model minority, and breaking out of that has taken some time. In a way, seeing the courage of others to stand up when they are not treated right has encouraged me to do so,” Momose tells me. “Being white-passing, having lived through inherently being seen as that privileged class that can pass, and whatever…it makes me realize that I need to pull away from the side of myself that is docile.”

Cheetie Kumar, Ajja

Cheetie Kumar, co-owner of Ajja, is getting her new restaurant, Big Cat, ready to open in the spring.

Joe Payne

ICE raided North Carolina back in November 2025, and Chandigarh, India-born Raleigh restauranteur Cheetie Kumar tells me her team has been preparing for raids since President Donald Trump was inaugurated for a second term. The co-owner of acclaimed Mediterranean restaurant Ajja is deep in the trenches of getting her new restaurant, Big Cat, ready to open in the spring.

“That was not a time when we were hiring for Big Cat, but Ajja was operational and it was extremely challenging to function because there were people on our team who didn’t feel comfortable leaving their house, going to the grocery store, let alone coming to work,” Kumar says. “It’s just an aura of fear. I mean, people have to pay their bills, and we have to open the restaurant. So we're moving ahead without it becoming a topic of conversation every day, but it's kind of like this black cloud that just hangs over everybody's head. It's like the sword of Damocles, you just know it's going to fall at some point.”

Staff has been instructed to ask for judicial warrants and there are areas marked staff-only throughout the restaurant, but there have been many instances of ICE ignoring legalities. “It makes us feel very powerless. It makes us feel guilty even though we're not doing anything wrong. It makes us feel vulnerable, and I feel like I can't protect my team. I'm an immigrant and I feel scared. I don't know if I should be carrying around my passport, even though I'm a citizen, and I have been for my whole life,” Kumar tells me.

Kumar is the daughter of research scientists who moved to New York with visas and jobs that allowed the family to naturalize, and she expounds on the difficulties of immigrating even from a relatively privileged position, telling me how immigration lost their papers three different times. She feels compelled to speak out against the perception of upper-middle-class Asian immigrants being protected. “I think some of it is kind of on us as Asians who think that because we are more educated and have more wealth, so somehow we're exempt, or maybe we're closer to being accepted,” Kumar says, adding how she is “ashamed Kash Patel and I come from the same place.” 

“I think there’s a false sense of security that people from Asia and South Asia might have,” Kumar says. “They’re after anyone that doesn’t look white. And conservative.”