When the Secret Service appeared at his restaurant, Javier Barajas couldn’t quite believe it. It was a Sunday morning and about 15 men had just walked into his newest restaurant, Il Toro E La Capra — a Mexican-Italian fusion spot in Spring Valley — asking if former President Donald Trump could host an event there the next week.
“I thought ‘Oh my God, I forgot to write down a reservation for sure,’” Barajas, 65, recalled.
That Friday, about 50 guests crammed into Barajas’ restaurant to hear the former president speak on his economic agenda and attempt to woo service workers with his no taxes on tips proposal. There, Barajas endorsed Trump, won over by his economic messaging and what he calls his “nice but strict” personality.
In an interview last week with The Nevada Independent, Barajas said he’s felt increasingly alienated from the Democratic establishment and finds Trump’s candidness and economic messaging refreshing. He says Democrats such as President Joe Biden and former President Barack Obama (who he voted for) delivered empty promises to immigrants such as himself, promising to create more pathways toward legal residency but failing to actually do so.
Barajas is a clear example of shifting dynamics within Nevada’s Latino population — a demographic that makes up nearly 1 in 5 voters in the crucial swing state. Trump’s bombastic rhetoric on immigration and pledges to massively deport undocumented persons appear to not have affected his relative popularity among Latinos — 2020 exit polls showed him doing better with Nevada Latinos than past GOP presidential candidates.
Eating into Democrats’ historic level of support with Nevada Latinos helps explain why Nevada remains squarely in the toss-up category on the presidential level, and why Nevada Democrats have been eager to court Latino voters, opening field offices in areas where the majority of residents are Latinos and expanding outreach efforts.
For Barajas, support for Trump also comes down to personal touch. In July, President Joe Biden visited Barajas’ restaurant, the Original Lindo Michoacan, as part of his final campaign trip (cut short by a positive COVID diagnosis) before dropping out of the race. Barajas said Biden didn’t even speak to him, while Trump talked to him for about 10 minutes after his August event. Before he left, Trump promised to visit his restaurant again, Barajas says.
Despite now mounting calls to boycott his restaurant for hosting Trump, Barajas has stood firm on his political beliefs, including in an interview on “Fox and Friends.”
Since he arrived in Las Vegas more than 40 years ago, Barajas’ restaurants have become Las Vegas staples. Lindo Michoacan has been dubbed as having some of the best Mexican food in the city, and now has four locations: Desert Inn, Summerlin, Henderson and one in Downtown Las Vegas.
But Barajas said he’s speaking out about his support for Trump now because rising inflation and economic conditions will probably force his business to substantially downsize.
“If we keep going like this, I’d probably have to close all restaurants and probably keep one. I would have to fire 450 people. We need change,” Barajas said.
Coming to Las Vegas
Barajas never intended to come to Nevada.
Originally from Michoacán, a verdant state in Central Mexico, Barajas grew up working in his father’s grocery store — an “old-fashioned” place with only one of each item. He enrolled in seminary, but after the economy got tough in the late ’70s, Barajas made plans to work in California with his uncle to send money back home. As the two were crossing the border, they were separated when caught by immigration authorities.
After that, Barajas remembers finding himself outside a gas station in Downtown Las Vegas, crying and nervous.
“I don’t even know how I got here,” he said.
In Vegas, Barajas picked up a variety of odd jobs. First a stint at a “terrible car wash,” then as a dishwasher and gradually working his way up to chef. He describes those early years as difficult, not knowing English and nervous to talk to people.
He was an unauthorized resident until the late 1980s and was granted legal status after Ronald Reagan — whom he calls his hero — signed the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, which granted amnesty and a path to legal status for more than 3 million undocumented people. He became a U.S. citizen in 1992.
For most of his early life, Barajas’ love of cooking was a secret, apprehensive about how it would be received in a “macho culture.” At seminary, he watched the nuns cook and picked up their tricks. Working in Vegas restaurants, he noticed that Mexican food consisted mostly of tacos and burritos (which he had never even heard of). After members of the staff walked out at one restaurant, he stepped in to help in the kitchen. “I was a secret chef,” he said.
More than 13 years later, Barajas opened his own restaurant, a cramped place with six tables and the only bathroom across the kitchen. To source some of his ingredients, he would go to Oaxaca, Mexico.
“It was my dream to open my own restaurant,” Barajas recalled.
Today, Il Toro e La Capra is adorned with gilded columns, lampshades and paintings Barajas had delivered from Italy. He owns five restaurants across Las Vegas and says he employs more than 500 people. Barajas’ brothers have also opened up their own restaurant franchise: El Bonito Michoacan.
‘We want to be able to make a life’
Barajas admits that things have been tough lately. Inflation and the pandemic put new financial strains on his businesses, each of which he estimates pay about $100,000 in payroll every two weeks. A sinkhole forced one of his restaurants to temporarily close in 2020 and, in 2021, one of his children, son Javier Crescencio Barajas, who inherited Barajas’ love of cooking, died.
Still, Barajas says that his businesses were all performing far better under the Trump administration. As someone who has been both an employee and an owner of a restaurant, he believes that the “No Tax on Tips” will be greatly beneficial.
Trump’s proposal to launch mass deportations doesn’t fluster Barajas, who said that Trump told him that he won’t deport “hardworking” immigrants such as himself. If anything, he thinks Trump is more candid than Democrats such as Obama who “promised a lot,” but whose administration ended up deporting more people than any other president in history.
Barajas isn’t alone in his beliefs. About 44 percent of Nevada Latinos believe that Trump will “bring safety to our border and solve the immigration crisis,” according to recent polling from the media firm Entravision. Multiple surveys show that many Latinos (such as Barajas) have increasingly warmed to more stringent immigration measures, finding the current system unfair.
Obama, Barajas says, was particularly disappointing. Two of his brothers were hoping his administration would open a pathway for them to become legal citizens (the Senate passed a bipartisan immigration bill in 2013 that was then blocked by House Republicans), but he still blames Obama, who “didn’t do anything.”
Despite the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, an executive action that protects some eligible immigrants who arrived as children from deportation, some of his friends’ children still don’t have legal residency — a fact that causes Barajas despair.
“I want the people who really work to have the opportunity to legalize their status. The people that have been here for years and years, I want to give them the opportunity,” he said.
Trump, he believes, will accomplish these legal pathways — a belief that runs counter to what Trump has promised in his campaign.
On top of his pledge to launch mass deportations, Trump has proposed ending birthright citizenship and cracked down on visa renewals during his term. Project 2025 — The Heritage Foundation’s playbook for Trump’s second term — has called for a crackdown on temporary work visas and other avenues for employment authorization such as the H-1B program, which allows employers to petition for “highly educated” foreign professionals.
While Harris has not fully fleshed out her immigration policy, she’s also said she’ll crack down on illegal immigration. She said she will take a “pragmatic approach” and will push the U.S. Senate to pass a bill that would stop processing asylum claims if migrant encounters reached a certain threshold.
Barajas ultimately believes the former president recognizes just how essential immigrants are to America and its labor force — that without immigrants the country wouldn’t run. Trump, he says, told him he has Latinos working for him himself and promised only to deport “bad people.”
“We want the economy to be fair. We want to be able to make a life. We want to live good,” Barajas said.
