Entrepreneurship is in Alejandro Flores-Muñoz's blood.

Back in his birthplace of Guadalajara, Mexico, his mother and other relatives sold whatever they could—hair products, food products—to make ends meet. After Flores-Muñoz's mom brought him to the U.S. as a child, she got a nine-to-five job but kept her entrepreneurial streak alive. "From me just having to watch her figure out how to make a large batch of cheesecakes and flanes" to observing her develop "her selling points" and participate in pop-up events, Flores-Muñoz says, "that entrepreneurship spirit was instilled in me."

He was inspired to become an entrepreneur himself in 2012 after receiving Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), a status established by President Barack Obama's administration that delays deportation for people who were brought to the U.S. without documentation as children. That gave him a way to get a Social Security number and the ability to earn the licenses and certifications he needed to become a full-fledged business owner who employs others. He launched several hustles throughout his 20s before becoming part owner of a food truck in 2018. He now owns a catering company.

"I wanted to pay taxes," he says. "I wanted to get a business license. I wanted to get all of the things that made a business a business."

Flores-Muñoz has contributed to his community and local economy for years and has become an outspoken advocate for immigrant entrepreneurs. But since President Donald Trump began his second term and launched his mass deportation operation, those activities have become much riskier. "I have never really feared for my immigration status," Flores-Muñoz says. "That has changed since January 20, 2025, because now nobody is safe."

"I've had to actually write a letter of what to do if I was to get detained. It's something that I've never had to consider. I've had to write down all my business information, my banking information, just have that available if I do ever get detained," he adds. "I can't believe that I've had to think that way."

People like Flores-Muñoz—and other immigrants, legally present or not—are an important entrepreneurial force in the United States. They start businesses at a higher rate than native-born Americans, creating jobs and enriching communities in the process. Now they're getting swept up in Trump's mass deportation efforts. As entrepreneurial immigrants are detained and deported, it won't just be newcomers and their families who suffer. The American workers, customers, and communities they support will suffer too.

'The Worst of the Worst'?

Trump campaigned for his second presidential term on a promise to carry out large-scale deportations of undocumented immigrants. "These are people that aren't legally in our country. This is an invasion of our country," he said in an April 2024 interview with Time. Trump stressed that agents would "absolutely start with the criminals that are coming in." His administration would deport "the worst of the worst," he pledged.

So far, that doesn't seem to be true. According to an analysis of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) records by the Cato Institute, "convicted criminals account for just 29% of the increase in people detained by ICE" between January and June 2025. "By early June," ICE arrests of immigrants "who had no criminal conviction or pending charge…were approximately 453 per day—a 14-fold increase" compared to early January, the Cato Institute reported. Undocumented individuals, temporary residents, and U.S. citizens alike have been detained.

Several immigrant entrepreneurs have been swept up. Kelly Yu was 19 years old and pregnant when she fled China's one-child policy and crossed the U.S.-Mexico border into Arizona illegally. Since arriving in 2004, Yu has had no criminal offenses and has repeatedly attempted to secure legal status. She developed ties around Phoenix, eventually opening two sushi restaurants and employing 30 people. After ICE detained Yu in May at a routine immigration meeting, neighbors and state politicians began to rally for her release. "She owns two businesses….She has paid her taxes. She's been in the system trying to fight to become a citizen for some time," Lisa Everett, an Arizona Republican district chair, told KTAR. Yu remains in ICE detention.

This summer, ICE detained Paul Dama, the operational manager of the award-winning Boston-area West African restaurant Suya Joint. According to his attorney, Dama had work authorization and a pending asylum case based on his prior kidnapping by Boko Haram. His detention forced his sister to work alone to keep two restaurant locations afloat and support their 20 employees. Dama's latest brush with immigration enforcement has a happier ending than others: After three months in ICE detention, an immigration judge granted him asylum.

Moises Sotelo-Casas was on his way to work at his vineyard management company when ICE detained him in June. The Oregon resident had lived in the U.S. without authorization since the 1990s and had recently begun the legal immigration process. KGW, the NBC affiliate in Portland, Oregon, noted that it "was not able to find any criminal records related to Sotelo-Casas." Throughout his immigration detention, Sotelo-Casas "continued to provide remote guidance to his vineyard staff" over the phone, KGW reported. He was deported to Mexico at the end of the summer.

Entrepreneurs with different kinds of immigration statuses have been targeted: Paramjit Singh, a green card holder who owns a chain of gas stations in Indiana and faces deportation; Sergio Cerdio Gomez, a Washington food truck owner who was deported despite a pending immigration application; Roger Huang, a New York restaurant owner who fled political persecution in China and now faces deportation; Emine Emanet, who was arrested at her New Jersey kebab restaurant despite a pending permanent residency application; and many more.

None of these immigrant entrepreneurs has a history of violent criminal conduct, and several of them were pursuing legal immigration pathways before their arrests. They're embedded in their communities, and their detentions have caused an uproar among their neighbors. It makes little sense to claim that they're "the worst of the worst"—and it makes little sense for immigration agents to be focusing on them.

"We're clearly seeing that the people who are being detained are not the criminals that are being talked about. In fact, they are the people who are helping everybody run their businesses, put together lives," argues Flores-Muñoz. "Hardworking people are being taken away."

America's 'Economic Success Story'

Immigration is an inherently entrepreneurial act. It requires someone to envision a better future and decide to pursue it in spite of the risks. It makes sense that many of the people who choose that path end up starting businesses when they reach their new homes.

Part of that comes down to the need to make a living, but it also reflects their ability to innovate where others haven't and tap into the American dream. Hamdi Ulukaya, the billionaire founder of yogurt company Chobani, told The Washington Post in 2023 that it was "the magic of the land" that changed his perspective from one of "I would never do business" to seeing a factory in a flyer and saying, "I can buy this and make something."

Many enterprising immigrants have the same experience. Immigrants are 80 percent more likely to found companies than U.S.-born individuals, says a 2022 paper in American Economic Review: Insights. Immigrants "create more small firms, they create more medium-size firms, [and] they create more large firms," said Pierre Azoulay, an MIT economist and the study's co-author. The U.S. is home to more than 3.8 million immigrant entrepreneurs, 1.1 million of whom are undocumented, according to the American Immigration Council (AIC).

"The United States' economic success story would not exist without immigrant entrepreneurs with a range of backgrounds and skill levels who were willing to launch their business ideas here," argues the Bipartisan Policy Center (BPC). Drawing on the U.S. Census Bureau's 2007 and 2012 Survey of Business Owners, the center observes that "immigrants had formed about 25% of new businesses in the United States, with rates surpassing 40% in some states." They were "also 10% more likely to own their own business than U.S. natives."

Those businesses provide the products and services that Americans enjoy every day, and they also contribute to the national economy in big ways. "Most immigrant entrepreneurs own the types of businesses that populate Main Street," noted Laura Collins, director of the George W. Bush Institute–Southern Methodist University Economic Growth Initiative, in 2019. They "start more than a quarter of all 'main street' businesses—retail, neighborhood services, and accommodation and food service." Immigrants have also founded some of the country's biggest companies: Over a fifth of all Fortune 500 companies were started by immigrants, and about a quarter were founded by the children of immigrants. Those companies employ 15.5 million people globally, according to the AIC.

Immigrant-owned companies—big and small, founded by documented and undocumented individuals—create jobs. "Immigrants own nearly a fifth of all employer companies," which is "higher than their percentages of the US population or the workforce generally," noted a May USAFacts analysis of Census data. The MIT study found that, on average, companies founded by immigrants have 1 percent more employees than companies founded by native-born Americans.

Entrepreneurship is often a necessary route for immigrants. Many arrive in the U.S. without the English skills required for certain jobs. Others face "difficulties in finding work that aligns with the skill and knowledge base that [they] developed over years in their home countries," points out the BPC. It can be burdensome for a newcomer to get his professional and educational credentials recognized in the United States. And if he's undocumented, there's another reason to be self-employed: It's illegal for U.S. employers to knowingly hire undocumented workers who don't have work authorization.

Immigrants start their own businesses despite facing more barriers to entrepreneurship than native-born Americans. There is no visa category that specifically allows foreigners to immigrate to the U.S. to start a business, "leaving these individuals to try to retrofit other channels in the U.S. immigration system to pursue these aspirations," notes the BPC.

This is true of everyone from a decent cook who wants to open a restaurant to a well-resourced programmer who wants to launch a tech startup. A 2022 report by the National Foundation for American Policy found that while 55 percent of America's privately held startups valued at $1 billion or more were started by immigrants, a large share of those founders came to the country as refugees, on family-sponsored visas, or through employment-based visas for other companies. Employment-based pathways largely require that an immigrant secure a job offer from an American employer before coming to the country. But a hopeful immigrant who wants to start a job-creating business in the U.S. has no straightforward way to do so, even if he has a proven track record of successful businesses elsewhere.

On top of all these barriers, immigrant entrepreneurs now have to worry about what might happen if they become entangled in the Trump administration's mass deportation effort.

The Cost of Crackdowns

Mass deportations—and immigration crackdowns more generally—come at a cost. Beyond their price tag and the civil rights violations they bring, they also create a hostile environment for immigrants who own businesses or might start them in the future. They can drive immigrants into under-the-table work or otherwise persuade them to avoid the visibility that comes with being a business owner. And they can decrease the number of available jobs.

Arizona's Senate Bill 1070 passed in 2010 and is widely regarded as the harshest anti–illegal immigration measure of its time. From 2008 to 2015, Arizona saw a 2.5 percent decrease in "the total number of jobs available…due to the passage of SB 1070," New American Economy, an immigration research and advocacy organization, reported at the time. Alabama passed its own strict immigration law, House Bill 56, in 2011. Within a year, the state lost an estimated 70,000 jobs, New American Economy finds.

Since undocumented immigrants often create jobs, the AIC explains, "deporting the estimated 8.1 million undocumented immigrants in the workforce would not automatically create 8.1 million jobs for unemployed Americans." If anything, it would put some Americans out of work. It would certainly shutter many businesses and disrupt many services they enjoy.

Some localities have considered or adopted policies to encourage immigrant entrepreneurship, including among undocumented immigrants. California has allowed undocumented immigrants to secure business licenses since 2014. In 2022, Colorado lifted its ban on undocumented immigrants obtaining business licenses. Senate Bill S5964, introduced in New York in March 2023, would have allowed undocumented immigrants to access business licenses. The following year, New York weighed a proposal to allow international graduate students to get university-sponsored visas to become entrepreneurs.

At the national level, members of Congress have repeatedly introduced legislation to create a visa category for immigrant entrepreneurs, often targeted at those who are highly educated or experienced or have a history of raising capital. Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D–Calif.) introduced the Let Immigrants Kickstart Employment Act in 2021, "which would create a new category of temporary visas for founders of startups, offering the opportunity for permanent residence if the startup reached certain benchmarks," per the BPC.

Such measures would do far more to support Americans and the U.S. economy than mass deportations. And many Americans understand this. Flores-Muñoz observes a "community that has come out of this situation," with U.S. citizens "going to courtrooms, escorting immigrants who are going through their hearings," and acting as "support groups out there."

Meanwhile, he's aiming to "highlight the importance of our contributions to America, whether that be through our entrepreneurship journey, us vending [and] selling things, or the services that we provide in the restaurant industry, in the hospitality industry, and construction industry." Immigrants, Flores-Muñoz says, are "more than what we're portrayed to be."