Just off the Metra tracks on the East Side of Aurora, Elotes Gus, a food truck, sits in a parking lot. It’s open every day, according to its owner, Gustavo Salmeron, 47. When he’s not working as a Spanish teacher, he’s probably there, serving tacos to the passersby and witnessing the hustle and bustle of the streets around him from his truck.
On a recent Friday evening at just before 6 p.m., Salmeron’s truck has no line. He said on a typical day, even in the winter, there would regularly be three or four customers waiting for their dinner by now. But business has been slow lately, Salmeron said.
“The streets were so lonely, you know what I’m saying?,” Salmeron said about the past few weeks. “There were not people around me. It’s because most of my customers are Mexicans or, you know, Latin people. … It was so different.”
Salmeron says much of his customer base is undocumented, and he suspects fear in Aurora’s immigrant community – like immigrant communities nationwide – over Trump administration policies is the reason business is so quiet.
Since President Donald Trump’s administration promised to crack down on immigration, touting Chicago as ground zero, fear and uncertainty has permeated immigrant communities in and near the city. With high numbers of immigrant and undocumented employees, restaurant and food service establishments in the Chicago area and beyond have grown especially concerned.
Of its nearly 180,000 residents, Aurora is more than 40% Hispanic, according to the most recent available census data, compared to 19% in Illinois and just under 30% in Chicago. Its population was just over 25% foreign-born from 2019-2023, compared to roughly 14% in Illinois and just over 20% in Chicago.
In Aurora, Salmeron described a chilling effect from the Trump administration’s immigration policies. With a customer base made up of mostly Hispanic residents, some of whom are undocumented, he said his business and those around him are struggling to stay afloat.
A few blocks away from Elotes Gus, just off the Fox River, the Dulceria de Aurora said its weekends aren’t what they used to be.
Rosa Rios, 41, told The Beacon-News in Spanish that families would bring their kids to the store on the weekends to buy sweets and pinatas – big families, she said, that would all come in together. These days, just one or two will show up.
“The atmosphere is a little sad,” said Rios’ sister-in-law, Lorena Ramirez, 33. The two women run the store along with their husbands, who are brothers.
Salmeron estimated his sales are down by about half. Ramirez said the same for the past month, adding that more and more customers are asking for ways to purchase their products without having to come to the store in person.
“Every time we do publish stuff on social media, we do get a lot of comments or a lot of emails or messages … asking if we do delivery,” Ramirez said.
Before, she said, they mainly got such requests from out-of-state customers.
The Dulceria de Aurora has been selling products at flea markets for about 18 years, and they’ve had a physical store for about 15. Ramirez has lived in Aurora her whole life, but her husband and her sister-in-law are originally from Mexico. They sell candy and snacks from Mexico, stuffed animals and pinatas, many of which are made-to-order.
Karina García, president and CEO of the nonprofit Aurora Regional Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, said the Trump administration has “put fear in our families, in our kids, in our workers, in our businesses.”
“You go into the stores, they’re not as busy as they were before,” Garcia told The Beacon-News recently.
The Illinois Hispanic Chamber of Commerce has been making plans and resources available for business owners so they’re prepared if U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers come to their doors, Garcia said.
“The businesses are being targeted,” she said, “because usually that’s where the community goes out to either eat or to purchase.”
For Salmeron, he said the past few weeks have marked a change from the three decades he’s lived in Aurora, but he does remember times like these.
Salmeron lived in the Little Village neighborhood in Chicago as a teenager when his family first immigrated to the U.S.
“I remember my mom used to (say), ‘Hey, go hide, immigration is around this street,’” Salmeron said recently. “So we were little kids and we used to, you know, run … because we were afraid that we could get caught from the immigration.
“Then, I see (it) back, what is going on,” he said, calling it “scary.”
Salmeron has been a U.S. citizen for decades, but he has had his own encounters with immigration enforcement. In 2007, his wife presented herself to the United States Consulate in Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua, in order to obtain her permanent Amerlcan residency, he said. Then she was deported, meaning Salmeron was separated from his wife and son. She was able to return to the U.S. about 10 years ago, and has since gotten her green card, he said.
Now, the Salmeron family faces different concerns, about their business this time, namely, how long will they be able to wait things out?
Salmeron said business was so slow he closed the truck for a few days after the inauguration. Things have picked up slightly a few weeks out from the initial announcement of an immigration crackdown, as people returned to their normal lives and work.
But he said if things continue this way, he might need to close some days of the week – or altogether.
“It’s probably one of my worst first two months of the year,” Salmeron, who’s been selling on the streets for 25 years, said. “Even during the COVID time, it was not that bad. … People outside could eat outside, so we never closed.”
Anticipating slower business in the winter, Salmeron normally stores away some money to pay rent for the portion of the parking lot he parks his truck at, but he said he’s struggling to pull the necessary funds together. He says he’s going to give it a few more weeks.
Ramirez said the Dulceria de Aurora is thinking about offering deliveries, so people who don’t want to leave their homes can still order their products.
“(Before), we didn’t need to,” Ramirez said. “People would just come to us.”
Customers typically came in weeks, if not months, in advance to order custom pinatas for birthdays, holidays, religious celebrations and bachelorette parties, the store’s owners said. The family makes about 20 to 30 pinatas per week, so orders filled up quickly. But not anymore, they said.
Overall, for businesses in the United States, sales dropped 0.9% in January, according to reporting from the Associated Press, a sharper drop than experts anticipated and the biggest decline in a year. The cause is likely a combination of factors, from historically cold temperatures to fading consumer confidence. The Trump administration’s tariff plans may also affect how retailers conduct their business and how customers respond going forward, according to reports.
Amid the economic uncertainty, however, many business owners locally and nationwide have shown support for the immigrant community. Nationwide – including in Aurora and Chicago – scores of businesses closed their doors on Feb. 3 in protest as part of the “Day Without Immigrants.” Both Elotes Gus and the Dulceria de Aurora closed their businesses that day.
Still, though they’re making efforts to show support for fellow immigrant customers, these local businesses say there’s only so much they can do.
“Every time they come and they talk and they’re so worried about it,” Salmeron said about his undocumented customers. “A lot of them say that, ‘Oh, I have to save money because, if something happened to me, I need to save because I’m going to go.’”
The Aurora Regional Hispanic Chamber of Commerce hosts regular workshops for Hispanic business owners in the area, Garcia said, and her organization is hoping to use those to address some of the concerns immigrant business owners have been expressing in recent weeks.
Right now, they’re advising some business owners about setting up online and social media tools for purchasing their products, in response to lower in-person sales.
On Feb. 24, for example, Garcia said a workshop was scheduled at AmoreMio at 33 W. New York St. in Aurora. She said it was meant to help business owners compare revenue from this year with previous years and make plans for reducing costs and spending without cutting staff.
The regular workshops are free and offered in Spanish, in collaboration with state Sen. Karina Villa, D-West Chicago; state Rep. Barbara Hernandez, D-Aurora; Illinois’ Small Business Development Center; social services nonprofit The Neighbor Project; Chicago-based community organization Casa Michoacan; and International Women of Influence.
In the future, Garcia said, they hope to bring in an immigration attorney to advise local business owners.
But the extent of fear within the Aurora immigrant community extends outside of just business.
Rios said she talks with her children about what’s happening. They have undocumented friends who tell them they’re afraid of encountering ICE. One asked Rios’ daughter if she could take care of her cat if she had to leave the U.S.
And, as the community waits in uncertainty about what immigration enforcement will look like in the coming years, the owners of the Dulceria de Aurora worry about what the community will miss out on. Lorena and Martin Ramirez said they see the store as a microcosm of Mexico – a lot of their products are imported from there.
“Since a lot of people can’t go back to Mexico, and, you know, come back and forth, they would come here,” Lorena Ramirez explained. “They’d be like, ‘Oh, I remember this when I was a kid, I remember this candy, I remember this drink. Can you guys bring this in?’”
She said when families came in together, parents would point out the things they liked as kids in Mexico. But the store owners have seen a lot less of that these past few weeks.
“They’d try to show them (their families) everything that they used to have over there, when they were kids – you know, the memories,” Ramirez said. “Now it’s like, they don’t even want to come, they don’t want to bring them here to experience that.”
mmorrow@chicagotribune.com
