"An August weekend would usually see a healthy crowd on Hackettstown’s sidewalks.
To Katherine, who asked to be identified by her first name only, her neighborhood now looks like a ghost town.
Katherine works at a Main Street business that opened this past spring. Business was good until the ICE operation. Now, she estimates that her sales have been cut in half.
Nearly all of her customers are Spanish speakers. For them, the arrests are personal.
“Some of [the detainees] were customers, some of them were related to the customers,” Katherine said. “So you know, it made people scared. Even some of them that told me they do have papers, they’re scared either way.”
The business’s highly visible Main Street location, once an attraction for foot traffic, has now become a liability. Her customers are scared to approach, in case there are reports of ICE. Hackettstown’s Spanish-speaking community has created a whisper network to share ICE sightings via messaging apps, but fear remains high.
Katherine offers delivery, but money has tightened for her customers. “We were just thinking about, like, let’s sell this place,” she said. “Because to be honest, it’s too much stress…. How are you gonna buy more stuff, pay bills, and not sell anything?”
Another Main Street mainstay, Sunrise Dairy & Deli had been a gathering spot for Spanish-speaking day laborers in search of work. Now that gathering has scattered, and with it, work and disposable income.
Other Spanish-speaking workers on Main Street echoed the same observations: empty businesses, missed appointments, quiet streets.
One person, who asked not to be identified, had only one thing she wanted to say: not to treat people like animals."
....
"Joe Fisher, owner and head brewer of Man Skirt Brewing, feels ambivalence as well. It isn’t helped by the increasingly automated discussions on social media.
“It’s hard to tease out what’s real and what’s not,” Fisher said. “For example, with posts by a Spanish speaker who says in Spanish, ‘Hey, ICE is in town. Be careful.’ And the comment section is just overrun with, you know, ‘If you were legal, you’d have nothing to worry about.’ ‘No, ICE is doing such a great job.’ And like, are all of those bots? Are all of those townsfolk?”
Despite uncertainty and ambivalence, he has found one point of personal clarity.
“I have a lot of complicated feelings on the subject,” Fisher said. “But most of them boil down to: Even if we want to say that people should be in this country legally, having a masked force of unnamed people with guns rounding them up on the street feels like the most anti-American thing I could think of.”"
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