A Hispanic American cleaning company owner says her business has been “ruined” after she threatened to “call ICE” on what she believed were illegal street food vendors downgrading her neighborhood and impacting local businesses.
In a video that was also posted by Fox 11 in Los Angeles, Francesca Ortega is seen confronting the vendors in Spanish in the Los Angeles suburb of Santa Clarita, saying she was going to alert Immigration and Custom Enforcement (ICE).
Such a threat apparently is the kiss of death for even a Hispanic business owner in Southern California.
The footage and the story went viral on social media and critics went about virtually destroying Ortega’s cleaning business with one-star reviews.
Opponents flooded her well-reviewed cleaning business with bad reviews and nasty comments. Later, residents showed up in droves to buy tacos at the apparently unregulated food stand; apparently unconcerned street vendors no longer have to meet food safety standards in the Los Angeles County.
With the third-world-like appearance from the tent canopies and open cooking of the street vendors dotting the area, Ortega told Fox 11 that she “doesn’t want Santa Clarita to turn into Mexico.”
Ortega told a Los Angeles Times columnist she was born in the U.S. but raised in Mexico until she was 18.
“Look how L.A. looks,” she continued. “Look how Santa Monica looks, ‘cause nobody does anything.”
But she paid a price.
“Now all of my livelihood is ruined,” she said in a video she posted. “The business that I worked so hard to build for 10 years — we had excellent, perfect reviews — it got flooded, flooded by these insane horrible Latino people.”
In other words, in Southern California in the minds of many, a legal business owner who follows all the rules and pays all the necessary fees is excoriated, while a purportedly illegal food stand operator is seen as a victim.
As one X account wrote in support of the woman, “America is so damn backwards right now it’s insane.”
As Breitbart News has noted in a series of articles on the thousands of illegal and unregulated street food vendors in Southern California, many operated by undocumented migrants, a community can open itself up to vigilantism when it suspends the rules of law and order.
Both the Los Angeles County Department of Health and Karen Bass’s Los Angeles have suspended all enforcement of street food permits, health standards, and labor laws while legally operated restaurants and food outlets are still held to strict standards, given fines and even shuttered, Breitbart News also exclusively reported.
This, despite a staggering 662-page dossier of nearly 10,000 public health complaints obtained by the California Post that included everything from rats invading vendors’ operations to widespread unsanitary conditions and untrained food servers.
One of the reasons given by authorities for suspending the rules was to help protect vendors from illegal immigration crackdowns by the Trump administration.
The suspension of food safety standards by authorities, however, went unreported by local outlets in their coverage of the taco stand controversy.
The viral firestorm was also amplified when Ortega, owner of Excellent Cleaning Pros, decided to fight back.
After getting dozens of harassing phone calls, she changed the phone number on the Google listing for her business to the phone number of one of the critics who had contacted her, a Southern Californian named Ricardo Morales.
Morales then received all the damning calls from throughout the United States, and as they were coming in in the background, he told Fox 11 he was critical of Ortega for “harassing people on the street” and being “vindictive.”
But later, with her business being “ruined,” Ortega told the outlet she “never meant to threaten anyone” and got upset when a vendor took a picture of her license plate during the confrontation.
Los Angeles Times columnist Gustavo Arellano even joined the fray this week in a column headlined the “Taco Stand Karen Fiasco,” claiming Ortega, under an online pseudonym, has been “insulting Latinos on social media with rhetoric that sounded straight from Stephen Miller.”
The columnist also claimed she is an example of Latino MAGA supporters who “work off the Trump playbook” of blaming everyone else and who are ridiculed as “self-hating freaks.”
He also reported she voted for Trump twice and cited her as an example of MAGA Latinos who will “regret” voting for the 47th president.
All the attention may have taken its toll on Ortega. This week she was in tears on an Instagram video she posted, saying she was “emotional” during the confrontation due to being pregnant. She begged people to stop harassing her family and said that her employees were suffering as well because her business was failing.
She also apologized several times.
“I am not the person I’m being portrayed as in that video,” she said. “I should not have confronted them. I’m sorry.”
“Please leave my children and family in peace,” she also said. “They have done nothing wrong.”
Breitbart contributor Lowell Cauffiel is the best-selling author of the Los Angeles crime novel Below the Line and nine other crime novels and nonfiction titles. See lowellcauffiel.com for more.
