A white guy in Manhattan wanted some ICE with his coffee.
Angry that staffers at a Fresh Kitchen in Midtown Manhattan were speaking Spanish rather than English, a man threatened to call Immigration and Customs Enforcement after going on a rant saying restaurant staff should be speaking English.
Videos by VICE
“Honey, I’m calling ICE,” he says, in a videotaped interaction that was posted online.
A fellow customer posted the video to Facebook on Tuesday, and it very quickly went viral. As of press time Wednesday noon, the video had been shared 35,000 times.
“Your staff is speaking Spanish to your customers when they should be speaking English,” the man said. “I will be following up, and my guess is they’re not documented, so my next call is to ICE to have each one of them kicked out of my country.”
For the record, this is happening in New York City, home to some 2.4 million Spanish-speakers, according to the city government.
“If they have the balls to come here and live off of my money — I pay for their welfare, I pay for their ability to be here,” he went on, breathlessly. “The least they could do — the least they could do! — is speak English.”
A woman behind the camera laughed in his face. “Such an ignorant asshole,” another customer can be heard saying.
In recent weeks, national media have picked up on a flurry of racist interactions in businesses. Last month, two Philadelphia Starbucks patrons, who were waiting in the shop to meet their white friend, were arrested for trespassing. On Tuesday, video of a white man berating a Muslim woman in a Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf in Riverside, California, went viral.
