Several local restaurants near Brooklyn’s Fort Hamilton are boycotting the army base after a pizza deliveryman was arrested when it was discovered he is an illegal alien.
Pablo Villavicencio, a 35-year-old Ecuadorean national, was taken into custody by ICE agents after he could not produce legal identification when he attempted to deliver a pizza to a soldier at the base on June 1.
But now, some local restaurants are speaking up by launching a boycott and refusing to serve soldiers.
“I won’t send my guys there anymore,” Josefina Cardoso, owner of the El Puente restaurant in Bay Ridge, told the New York Post. “I would feel guilty if something happened.”
Cardoso added that her employees want to boycott the soldiers.
“Some people tell their bosses ‘I’m not going,'” cook and deliveryman Emanuel Kabrinny told the media. “I’m not going either. If they want food, let them come here [to pick it up].”
Chris Moustakas, a manager of a local bagel joint, also said that he no longer wants to send deliverymen to the base.
“We’re kind of afraid to send someone to the Army base this morning, and what’s the first call? From the Army base,” Moustakas said.
The manager of the Queens pizzeria where the illegal alien worked insisted that the guard at Fort Hamilton “had a hard-on” for the deliveryman.
The illegal alien’s case instantly became a cause célèbre among liberals both in the city and outside. New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, for instance, spoke up claiming that Villavicencio would get all the assistance that the state could offer.
“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 on Thursday.
Follow Warner Todd Huston on Twitter @warnerthuston.
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