Restaurants near Army base that called ICE on pizza guy are refusing to send workers there
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}Pablo Villavicencio, an illegal immigrant from Ecuador, was arrested by immigration agents while delivering a pizza in New York. (GoFundMe)
If an army marches on its stomach, the forces at Fort Hamilton had better learn to cook.
Eateries near the Brooklyn Army base, which handed over an undocumented pizza deliveryman to immigration agents last week, are now refusing to send their own workers into the garrison.
“I won’t send my guys there anymore,” said Josefina Cardoso, owner of the El Puente restaurant in Bay Ridge.
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}“I would feel guilty if something happened.”
The owner of the El Puente restaurant in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, says he won't be sending his workers to the Army base. "I would feel guilty if something happened." (Google Street View)
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Cardoso, 45, a U.S. citizen born in Mexico, said she’d make the delivery herself if she had to — but other workers at the taco joint want to boycott the base over its treatment of Ecuadorian immigrant Pablo Villavicencio.
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}“Some people tell their bosses ‘I’m not going,’ ” said cook and delivery guy Emanuel Kabrinny, 34. “I’m not going either. If they want food, let them come here [to pick it up].”
Villavicencio, 35, wound up in immigration detention Friday after dropping off Italian food at the base — where officials refused to accept his IDNYC card as identification and then ran a background check, revealing he has an outstanding deportation order from 2010.
Base officials told the press the father of two signed “a waiver” for the background check — but he says that is “a lie.”
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}“I am 100 percent sure that I did not sign any document there,” Villavicencio told The New York Post in a phone interview from immigration detention.
The manager of the Queens pizzeria where Villavicencio works said one guard just “had it out for him.”
“That’s what this is all about,” the manager of Nonna Delia’s in College Point, who wouldn’t give his name, said.
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}The manager of Nonna Delia's, where Villavicencio was employed, thinks the guards at the base "had it out for him." (Google Street View)
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Other local delivery guys said the guards rarely check for any ID. “They don’t ask us for ID,” said Juan Salvador, 38, an immigrant from Guatemala who delivers for Fourth Avenue deli Goustaro. But his manager said she, too, is now afraid to send undocumented food couriers into the federal facility.
“We’re kind of afraid to send someone to the Army base this morning, and what’s the first call? From the Army base,” said Chris Moustakas, 35, a manager of the family-owned bagel joint.
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}Meanwhile, Villavicencio’s possible deportation has turned into a political football ahead of the upcoming state primary, with Gov. Andrew Cuomo on Thursday offering him free legal representation.
“Detaining a hardworking man, separating a father from his children and tearing apart communities doesn’t make America safe, and a wrong-minded immigration policy grounded in bias and cruelty doesn’t make America great,” Cuomo said of the married father of two young girls.
Additional reporting by Kevin Sheehan and Nolan Hicks. This article originally appeared in The New York Post.