Sadie Skinner had just started her day as a “sandwich artist” at Shorty’s Deli in Camden last Wednesday when a bunch of cops showed up in a “blacked out” van and took away the owner of the neighboring Chinese restaurant.
Skinner watched U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers put Jian Hao Zhang in the van, leaving his wife and two grown children standing in the parking lot with the local police chief.
“It’s wild to me,” she said later. The Zhang family has run China Moon, on Main Street, as long as she can remember.
Chief Sean Redden said he showed up because he got a call from a concerned resident, not the federal government. A week later, he’s just as bewildered as the rest of the Oneida County town of 2,100 residents. ICE agents simply told him Zhang had an immigration violation.
“I have no idea where he’s gone. I have no idea where he’s going,” he said, then added. “I’d like to know.”
Zhang, 56, is in an ICE detention center in Batavia. It’s hard to track him down in the mysterious immigration court system. An online search only works with a case number, not a name.
Even then, the immigration court notice doesn’t say the reason Zhang was grabbed or list any charges. It does not say if he has a lawyer. It says he has no court date.
An ICE spokesperson shared this information in response to a Syracuse.com inquiry: Zhang came to the U.S. on a fraudulent visa in 1990. In 1999, an immigration court judge in New York City ordered him to leave the country by July 2000.
He didn’t go.
“The alien has a final and executable order of removal,” the spokesperson said.
For security reasons, they won’t say what happens next.
For 25 years, ICE has considered Zhang an “immigration fugitive.”
The Zhangs are hardly hiding on Main Street in the mostly white, rural village that handles traffic between the Tug Hill ski region and Oneida Lake.
But now, President Donald Trump’s administration has ordered the federal government to use every possible resource to find and remove people who live in America without permission. The crackdown has gone beyond a roundup of rapists and murders, as Trump advertised.
People in small towns all over America are watching the government detain the undocumented immigrants who make their food, pick their vegetables and landscape their yards.
In rural Upstate NY, a minor car collision with a deer landed an undocumented mother in a Louisiana detention center. Migrant workers are refusing to leave dairy farms, where ICE agents need a warrant to come in their company-provided houses.
The residents of the Camden area chose Trump with 73% of the vote in the 2024 election, records show.
Mayor Jeffrey Oatman voted for Trump. He agrees with most of the work ICE is doing.
But arresting Zhang and shutting down a village restaurant isn’t what he had in mind. Oatman’s kids grew up with the Zhangs’ kids, who could be seen most nights doing their homework in the restaurant while their parents made a life for them, he said.
It’s the perfect American dream scenario, he said.
“All I know is that we lost a pretty good, upstanding citizen in our village,” he said. “That’s sad.”
Barber Mikey Merritt said he voted for Trump. On Monday, he saw the headline “Ice Raids China Moon” across the top of the Queen Central News, the local weekly newspaper published out of a house on Church Street.
“It’s unfortunate to see something like that happen especially in a community like this where they’re not messing with anybody, they’re not bothering anybody. The community likes them,” Merritt said. “These aren’t the immigrants people voted to have sent away.”
Zhang and his wife Jin Ping bought the building at 48 Main St. in 2013 for $50,000. They cook traditional Chinese American food on the first floor from 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. every day but Sunday. They live on the second floor.
The store closed after the arrest last Wednesday and has not reopened. The blinds are drawn and a note on the door directs delivery drivers to the liquor store next door.
Jin Ping Zhang and her daughter Winnie said they had no comment when a reporter visited Wednesday.
In fact, they have asked the entire town not to talk about what happened. They don’t want anyone to advocate for them. They don’t want anyone to raise money. They have a lawyer, they said.
Their neighbors are doing their best to honor those wishes. The administrator of the Camden community Facebook page posted a message that says he will not allow any discussion about what happened to China Moon.
But at the same time, the story needs to be told, residents say.
Without facts about the Zhang family, neighbors are left to talk in general about the larger issues around immigration.
Who belongs here and who does not? When did their families arrive and did they do it “the right way?”
Wouldn’t law enforcement resources be better spent finding the three kids on bikes who held up the Byrne Dairy with a BB gun on the same day?
Who called this tip in to ICE?
And why isn’t anyone helping people like the Zhangs get their paperwork in order?
Chris Padgett owns the new Letter and Leaf bookstore one block away from China Moon.
“You would think that after that many years, if they were deeply alarmed at them not being a U.S. citizen, then why not walk with them through that journey and try to make that easier?” Padgett said. “Where does he even go after 25 years?”
The community calls Camden the “Queen Village” because of its stately Victorian Houses and community pride.
With no information to support their optimism, neighbor after neighbor said they were hopeful Zhang would return and the restaurant would reopen.
Community members are ready to help in one way they hope honors the Zhangs’ wishes.
“We want to sell them out of food,” said Skinner, the sandwich maker at Shorty’s. “If they open back up, everybody go eat Chinese food that night.”
Contact Michelle Breidenbach | mbreidenbach@syracuse.com | 315-470-3186.
