A confrontation in front of a centerpiece of Pittsburgh’s Latino community reflects increased immigration enforcement activity in Beechview, according to the director of Casa San José.
Today in Beechview, immigration enforcement agents stopped but did not detain a father who was taking his daughter to school, lunched at Chicken Latino along the neighborhood’s Broadway Avenue, surrounded a contractor’s van and then had a tense verbal interaction with a manager at the Las Palmas grocery store, according to Monica Ruiz, executive director of Casa San José.
“It’s scary,” said Ruiz. “There’s a lot of immigrant-owned businesses right on this street. It’s generating tax and income and wealth in this community. But if people can’t go to work or can’t go to the grocery store and spend their money at a restaurant, that’s the economic impact of what’s happening. Let alone, how scared was that little girl this morning” when her father was stopped in her presence, she asked.
Casa San José is a 13-year-old advocacy organization serving the Latino population and based in Pittsburgh’s South Hills.
Grainy security video taken by a business across the street from Las Palmas and shared with reporters shows a white van with New Jersey plates parking just up the street from Las Palmas. Three black SUVs surround it and people exit the SUVs.
A man walks from Las Palmas and interacts with the men from the SUVs.
That man was Joey Berumen, who said he is a member of the family which owns Las Palmas.
“All of my employees got scared, so I locked the whole building down, and I walked outside and I told them to get off my property, you’re not permitted in this building,” said Berumen. He said he encountered a long-haired, masked, armed man in a Fugitive Task Force vest. “And he told me, ‘You’re scared of all of your illegal immigrants that you had inside,’” and then used a vulgar term.
“He confronted and got in my face and he’s like, ‘Oh, you obstructing?’ I said, ‘I’m not obstructing, I just want you to get off of my property.’ And after that his hat hit my hat, and he said, ‘You touch me again you’ll see what happens,’ and he grabbed his gun immediately.”
Berumen said the agent told him, “All of you are illegal, I’m going to come back and pick everybody up from this store.” He added that immigration enforcement has not previously been that close to Las Palmas, which has been operating since 2009.
The store was closed this afternoon, and it was unclear when it would reopen.
“Everybody is scared, even if they have a green card, they don’t have a green card, they have papers, they don’t have papers,” said Berumen. “People absolutely do not know what might happen, how it could end, how it could start.”
Ruiz said immigration enforcement has been noticeably more active in Beechview over the past two weeks, and has detained people, though she could not estimate the number.
ICE spokespersons did not immediately reply to requests for comment.
Public Source in 2023 mapped Beechview’s assets and profiled the community, which has the densest Latino population in the region, according to the Census Bureau.
Editor’s note (9/9): Joey Berumen was not named in the initial version of this story, but then withdrew his request for anonymity.
Rich Lord is the managing editor at Pittsburgh’s Public Source and can be reached at rich@publicsource.org.
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