It’s a small, but mighty sign: “Everyone is welcome here, except I.CE.” Katherine Duncan, owner of Katherine Anne Confections, fastened it proudly on her shop’s front door.
“It was a no-brainer for me,” Duncan said on a recent Wednesday afternoon, hours after she put the sign up at the storefront on 3653 W. Irving Park Road. “I feel so helpless. With my business and my kids, I can’t escort students to and from school or other things like that. So it was like, well — what can we do?”
In recent weeks, Chicago has seen an increase in Immigration and Customs Enforcement actions, which have been met with significant criticism from activists, local government and community groups, spurring protests, legal challenges and a new executive order from Mayor Brandon Johnson creating citywide “ICE-free zones” to push back against the federal crackdown. For restaurant and cafe workers, many of whom are immigrants, the looming threat of unannounced visits by ICE, which have already led to arrests in restaurants, outside grocery stores and in the parking lots of businesses in Chicago, has created anxiety and uncertainty about their future.
Business owners like Duncan are left searching for ways to support and protect their staff. Solidarity signs have been a quieter approach to denouncing ICE.
“Two blocks from our store in Logan Square, people were taken — by having the signs, we’re very much hoping that anyone who is concerned or who needs a safe haven for even a moment knows that they can come in,” she said.
Duncan taped the signs up at both of her locations to dissent to what ICE is doing, something she describes as “practically kidnapping people off the streets.”
The sign is from the Immigrant Legal Resource Center, one of the organizations behind the increasingly popular “Know Your Rights” signs and red cards that provide examples of how people can exercise certain rights and protections under the U.S. Constitution.
The “Everyone is welcome here, except I.C.E.” signs were created by Manny Guisa, communications manager at Immigrant Legal Resource Center, in May. He said increased ICE activity in places such as Chicago, Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., has recently fueled more restaurants, cafes and businesses to take a visible stand.
Guisa said that when creating the specific sign, he tapped into “design psychology” to make it a little punchier and curt, yet effective and vibrant.
On the right corner is an alligator with a red strike-through. Resting on the reptile is a yellow butterfly. Guisa said his design predated “that whole thing.” In June, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security posted an AI-generated image of alligators wearing ICE hats outside a new migrant detention center, making way for memes and internet discourse.
“That imagery was originally used because the butterfly is often known to fearlessly land on an alligator’s snout — I liked the symbolism, a butterfly is a universal icon of migration worldwide facing a much more intimidating predator,” Guisa said, laughing that it was an accidental parallel.
The signs are available in different color options: “You just go to this website, download them, cut them out and post them up — it’s really been organic and really came out of more and more people saying, ‘We don’t know what to do, but we want to do something — we want to speak up somehow,’” Guisa said.
Duncan said that the same morning she put up the sign at Katherine Anne Confections, a person came by to tell the staff she was “disappointed they didn’t support law enforcement.”
“And this is not a regular customer of ours — she came just to tell us this,” Duncan explained of the limited pushback. “I think we need to think real hard about who needs our support right now — those federal agents are going home to their families without being scared that a simple trip to work or the store will cause them to lose everything in a single moment.”
Through Oct. 13, Katherine Anne Confections was donating 20% of proceeds from sales to nonprofits assisting immigrants and refugees, and $1 from each latte sold was donated to the Altuve family’s GoFundMe. According to the fundraiser posted by Isamar Altuve, a woman’s husband was taken by ICE on Sept. 23 while she and her children were visiting family in a different state. Duncan noted that she chose to highlight that specific GoFundMe because it hadn’t raised enough of its $4,500 goal. As of Monday afternoon, it had reached nearly $4,000.
Though a “drop in the bucket,” Duncan said she believes if “1,000 people in the city did this, then we might be in a different place.”
Businesses from all across the city have been putting up signs, from neighborhoods like Bridgeport, Pilsen and further south, to ones in the northwest such as Logan Square and Avondale.
Cafe Tola on Milwaukee Avenue, known for its inventive coffee drinks and freshly made empanadas, has the ILRC sign printed out in bright pink and blue.
Victoria Salamanca, owner of Cafe Tola, said the decision for her was a bit more nuanced, taking into consideration the heavily Latino area the restaurant serves.
“I’ve been going back and forth in my mind — do I put up a sign and ask for that attention? Or do I put up this sign and think that it really, truly is going to protect us?” Salamanca said on Friday. “I tried to go with the most positive outcome, if something were to happen that we have in our right to lock our doors and say you’re not welcome here.”
Salamanca has a couple dozen employees across all four locations, many of whom are feeling a mix of fear, anxiety and confusion. On Friday afternoon, she requested that her staff take a yoga class in her office to help them relax.
“They’re not all undocumented, but it’s just a matter of coming together and feeling a little bit free of our body and our mind for an hour,” she said.
In the current political storm, restaurant owners with a public-facing business are bearing the responsibility of protecting both their employees and their customers, Salamanca added. She printed out the ILRC sign last week for the front windows of each Cafe Tola location.
“I feel like I have a good sense of who my people are and I’ll always give them their place,” she said. “And if a customer is being ugly, I have the right to say we don’t need your business; thank you so much. That’s where we’re at.”
A few days ago, Salamanca heard a woman running down Milwaukee Avenue, blowing a whistle to alert the neighborhood that ICE was nearby.
“To see someone be that vigilant is really inspiring and really scary,” Salamanca said. “And it turned out that right across from my office at the Sweet Greens, sure enough, there was a truck.”
Salamanca said she’s glad to see the signs pop up on more and more windows as ICE continues to upend the lives of immigrants. With more solidarity, the world might feel safer and smaller, she said.
A few miles from Cafe Tola, the often-vocal Botanical Cafe in the Lakeview neighborhood was printing out its own “Everyone is welcome here, except I.C.E.” sign to go along with its “Know Your Rights” sign printed in both English and Spanish.
“It not only lets these federal agents know that they’re unwelcome and they can’t mess with the city of Chicago, but it reminds the people right now who are scared and terrified to just leave their house, that there are places where they can feel safe and welcome,” said Delaney Ballard, co-owner of Botanical Cafe, a coffee shop that also sells plants.
Ballard said Botanical Cafe, which is half Filipino-owned, regularly supports social causes and has gained a steady social media following for its outspokenness online.
“We’re an established business and I am a white woman, and I need to use that privilege to speak up and be as loud as possible … use it for something good,” she said.
Ballard said she plans to fill the storefront with as many signs as she can, including one that says “Hands Off Chicago,” directed at the recent deployment of the National Guard from Texas to aid in immigration enforcement.
“They are not wanted here,” Ballard said, noting that her team has been educated on the law and trained on what federal agents can and can’t do without a signed warrant.
Priscilla Olivarez, policy attorney and strategist at the ILRC, emphasized that the signs’ primary function is to inform people about their rights, such as the right to refuse to speak to ICE if questioned, since immigration officials don’t need a warrant to enter the public areas of a restaurant.
They can go wherever the general public can go: dining rooms, lobbies, outside patios. But they cannot access spaces that are off-limits to guests, such as the kitchen, storage rooms or offices, without a judicial warrant signed by a judge, Olivarez said.
“I always emphasize the difference between an ICE warrant and a judicial warrant, because ICE will often borrow language from the criminal legal system in an attempt to make it appear that these documents have legal weight behind them,” she said. “We encourage people to ask for a copy of that warrant.”
For Duncan, it’s been trickier to distinguish what is off-limits to the public and therefore to potential immigration agents. The Irving Park location has a sliding door separating the front-of-house from the private back-of-house, but the Logan Square shop is more open concept.
“So we put one of the no-entry signs on the door to the basement,” Duncan said. “We were like, ‘Are we going to hide somebody in a basement here?’ But that’s what we have available, so that’s what we did.”
Olivarez said that’s the right approach, noting that signage making it clear to ICE that an establishment knows its constitutional rights is a form of protection in itself.
Guisa compared the impact of solidarity signs to things like LGBTQ+ decals at restaurants or other posters and stickers supporting a social cause, whether it’s for immigrants or marginalized groups.
“Those are seen as proclamations from business owners saying, ‘No, I don’t agree with what’s going on, and people are welcome here because we will stand for them,’” he explained. “And even if this is not some sort of magic field that’s going to keep ICE from entering your establishment, it still has that effect of making people feel like they are not going to have a target on their back or they don’t have to constantly look over their shoulder. That’s why it’s worthwhile.”