Kid Rock's Restaurant Shields Illegal Employees From ICE Agents: Report
Newsweek AI is in beta. Translations may contain inaccuracies—please refer to the original content.
Kid Rock's restaurant was among three in downtown Nashville to have recently shielded workers lacking legal status from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents, according to local reports.
Why It Matters
Kid Rock, the musician whose real name is Bob Ritchie, has been one of President Donald Trump's staunchest advocates. Aside from endorsing Trump during his presidential elections, which included a performance at the Republican National Convention in 2024, he has also been vocal about cultural issues, including the release of a video showing him shooting cases of Bud Light in response to Anheuser Busch putting transgender activist Dylan Mulvaney on a beer can.
What To Know
Managers allegedly told restaurant employees lacking U.S. citizenship to leave on May 10 after ICE activity surged in the area, according to the Nashville Scene.
They included workers at Kid Rock's Big Ass Honky Tonk Rock N' Roll Steakhouse, The Diner and Honky Tonk Central. A co-owner of the Kid Rock restaurant, conservative restaurateur Steve Smith owns the latter two establishments on the popular Broadway thoroughfare in downtown Nashville, Tennessee.
Newsweek reached out to all three restaurants for comment, as well as Kid Rock's manager.
Kid Rock attends the 2023 Veterans Day Parade on November 11, 2023, in Nashville, Tennessee.
Kid Rock attends the 2023 Veterans Day Parade on November 11, 2023, in Nashville, Tennessee.Nashville Scene reported that the workers were sent away during a primetime rush, even as establishments have had issues with staffing as a result of more stringent immigration protocols enforced by the Trump administration.
The loss of workers reportedly continued into Sunday, as some of the workers told to leave the restaurants' premises feared potential arrests upon return.
"We were already understaffed because of the ICE raids throughout the weekend," an employee who requested anonymity told the Scene. "Then, around 9:30 p.m. on Saturday, our manager came back and told anyone without legal status to go home.
"Events at the Ryman, Ascend, the Savannah Bananas' baseball game all let out, and it was crazy busy. But there was no one in the kitchen to cook the food."
The worker shortage has reportedly been an ongoing problem in the area.
On Wednesday, ICE announced that a weeklong targeted enforcement operation resulted in the arrest of 196 criminal illegal aliens, "some with significant criminal histories and outstanding final orders of removal."
The targeted enforcement was carried out across the greater Nashville area, in coordination with Department of Homeland Security components, the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco Firearms and Explosives, and the Tennessee Highway Patrol.
Arrests included a 37-year-old Venezuelan national Tren de Aragua affiliate gang member; a 39-year-old Mexican national with six prior removals from the U.S. and convictions for felony domestic assault and sex with a minor; and a 60-year-old Iraqi national convicted of rape.
What People Are Saying
Republican Tennessee Representative Andy Ogles told WZTV Nashville: "Why are illegal aliens acting surprised when federal law enforcement finds them and sends them home? If you break American laws, you will be treated like a lawbreaker."
What Happens Next
In their newly proposed budget, House Republicans included a new 5 percent tax on remittances. It would exempt U.S. citizens but affect green-card holders and nonimmigrant visa holders such as those on H-1B, H-2A and H-2B visas—meaning more than 40 million people would be impacted.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
4 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Oil Gains as Focus Shifts to Zelenskiy Meet After Alaska Summit
(Bloomberg) -- Oil rose as investors turned their attention to Donald Trump's meeting with Volodymyr Zelenskiy on Monday, with the Ukrainian leader facing US pressure to reach a peace deal with Russia that involves ceding territory. The US-Canadian Road Safety Gap Is Getting Wider A Photographer's Pipe Dream: Capturing New York's Vast Water System Festivals and Parades Are Canceled Amid US Immigration Anxiety A London Apartment Tower With Echoes of Victorian Rail and Ancient Rome Princeton Plans New Budget Cuts as Pressure From Trump Builds Brent traded near $66 a barrel after closing 1.5% lower in the previous session, while West Texas Intermediate was above $63. In a show of support, European leaders including European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, French President Emmanuel Macron, and NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte, will join the high-stakes meeting in Washington with Trump and Zelenskiy. The US president said after his talks with Vladimir Putin in Alaska on Friday that he'll urge Zelenskiy to make a quick deal, and sounded receptive to the Russian leader's demand that Ukraine give up large swathes of land. 'We're still a long ways off,' Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who took part in the summit, told Fox News on Sunday. 'We are not at the precipice of a peace agreement. We are not at the edge of one. But I do think progress was made.' Trump told European leaders after the meeting that the US could contribute to any security guarantees, and that Putin was prepared to accept that. However, it remains unclear what kind of guarantees are being discussed with the Russian leader, and what the Kremlin is willing to accept. In a Truth Social post late Sunday, Trump said Zelenskiy 'can end the war with Russia almost immediately, if he wants to, or he can continue to fight.' He also made a reference to Crimea, without providing further details. Prior to the summit in Alaska, Trump told allies that reaching a ceasefire would be his key demand, and threatened to walk out of the talks and impose tough new measures on Moscow and countries buying its oil if it wasn't met. On Friday, the US president signaled he was in no hurry to implement penalties. So far, Trump has singled out India for buying Russian crude, slapping the South Asian nation with hefty tariffs for doing so. However, the US president said in a Fox News interview on Friday that he will hold off increasing levies on Chinese goods due to the country's purchases of Moscow's crude. 'The fact that further meetings are taking place here is a positive,' said Robert Rennie, the head of commodity and carbon research at Westpac Banking Corp. Talks around seeking a resolution to the Ukraine war have injected uncertainty into the market, and led to oil trading in a narrow range recently. Still, futures are down more than 10% this year on concerns around the fallout from Trump's trade policies and as OPEC+ rapidly returns idled barrels to the market. What Declining Cardboard Box Sales Tell Us About the US Economy Americans Are Getting Priced Out of Homeownership at Record Rates Living With 12 Strangers to Ease a Housing Crunch Bessent on Tariffs, Deficits and Embracing Trump's Economic Plan How Syrian Immigrants Are Boosting Germany's Economy ©2025 Bloomberg L.P. 登入存取你的投資組合
Boston Globe
5 minutes ago
- Boston Globe
The toxic brew that awaits professors this fall
In August, I usually begin to count down the days until the semester starts and the students return, bringing energy and vitality back to campus. But not this year. It's not that I won't be happy to see my students; it's just that I'm feeling a bit at sea, facing a tsunami of challenges in the classroom and in responding to student work, and I feel like I could use some help figuring out how to respond. First, there is the situation Serwer writes of 'the sweeping attack on human knowledge and progress that the Trump administration is now undertaking — a deliberate destruction of education, science, and history, conducted with a fanaticism that recalls the Dark Ages.' Advertisement When the United States is led by someone who doesn't seem to value learning at all, it is hard to get students to value learning themselves. Even basic information feels like a fragile concept. Most of my students have been raised in an era Advertisement And then there is the Because I teach in the humanities and social sciences, the climate of anxiety is never far from my classroom. It promises to make the task of getting students to think beyond accepted beliefs and politically correct solutions even more difficult. What can I say to assure them that what they say in the classroom will not find its way onto the internet with potentially ruinous consequences? To start, I will ask my students to sign a classroom pledge that they will not post anything about our class on social media. But I'm not sure how efficacious such an approach will be, or whether it will simply make them even more anxious. Then there is the challenge posed by artificial intelligence. I invest a lot in teaching my students to write clearly and concisely, to say what they mean and mean what they say. But how do I convince them that it is worth learning to write well when they can go online, boot up ChatGPT, and in an instant have it produce a reasonable facsimile of human writing? Advertisement New York Times columnist Frank Bruni 'What happened,' Bruni asked, 'to college as a theater of intellectual betterment, character development, self-discovery?' Frankly, I don't have a good answer. But I am eager to find answers together with my colleagues. I feel a real craving for these questions to be taken up directly before we get to the standard pieties about critical reasoning, a lifetime of learning, and transformative educational experiences in our 'welcome to campus' events. That craving was fed last summer when I taught a summer program for high school teachers. They came from around the country and worked in many different school settings. When asked to characterize the mood among the students they teach, they collectively agreed on 'cynicism.' Cynical about education and its value, cynical about adults and the world they have fashioned, cynical about the future and their place in it. They Add that to the political climate, AI, and grade inflation; it is a toxic brew. Ignoring these challenges will not make them go away. Advertisement Let me be clear, I do not long for some lost golden age. I have no ready solution, but it does no good for institutions of higher education not to address these problems as a package. Instead of the usual start-of-the-semester, high-minded speeches about the virtues of education, let's start the year by talking frankly about the difficulties that will shape the education that we provide. That way, all of us will feel a little less alone as we seek to navigate the troubled waters of American higher education.
CNBC
6 minutes ago
- CNBC
Putin's calls for Ukrainian territorial concessions are unacceptable, says lawmaker
Oleksiy Goncharenko, Ukrainian lawmaker, discusses the outcome of the Trump-Putin summit in Alaska, and shares his hopes for Zelenskyy's meeting with European leaders and U.S. President Donald Trump in Washington.
