Just a couple weeks ago, we wrote that ICE had detained Khao Niew Lao food cart owner “Nong” Thavatsay Phimmoungkhoun, known by many as a fixture of the PSU community. And this week, another ICE detention has hit another Portland family and the local food community hard.
Torta restaurant Güero posted on Instagram on May 10 about the detention of their cook, Jose “Poni” Gongora Poot, and linked to a GoFundMe raising money to support his family in the legal fight to bring him home. According to the GoFundMe, ICE agents forcibly took Poni from his car while he was traveling to work on Friday, May 8, and he has been detained in Tacoma since then. The GoFundMe has raised over $30,000 at the time of writing.
“If you don’t know Poni by name, you would recognize him as the cook singing in the kitchen loudly to all his favorite songs and saying goodbye to customers as they leave through the back door for the last decade. To his community, Poni is known above all as a loving father and husband, as well as a cherished friend and coworker – Truly an enormous and unexpendable presence in both his personal and professional environments,” the Instagram post reads. “As has happened to so many others, there is absolutely no reason or legal justification for Poni to be taken and held in chains. His warrantless abduction is unconscionable and we his community are committed to seeing him safely reunited with his wife and children.”…