Busted: Business Owners Caught Housing and Employing Illegals

Chinese buffet owners now face prison and hundreds of thousands in fines.

We’ve all seen them: viral images of illegals crying as they are led into Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) vehicles to await deportation. As the Trump administration works to reverse the Biden administration’s open border disaster, Democrats use those emotional scenes as evidence for their claim that enforcing immigration law is “cruel.” A quote attributed to economist Adam Smith comes to mind: “Mercy to the guilty is cruelty to the innocent.” That reality is quietly playing out in one small East Tennessee town where federal authorities say local business owners were harboring illegal immigrant workers while thousands of American locals struggled to find work.

Business as Criminal

Xue Rong Wu and Xiong Wei Yang, a married couple who own the Red Ginger Buffet in Elizabethton, TN, recently pled guilty to conspiracy to harbor illegal immigrants “for the purpose of commercial advantage and private financial gain” and “aiding and abetting the practice and pattern of hiring for employment aliens not authorized to be employed in the United States.”

According to the US Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Tennessee, Wu and Yang used “a single-family residence” to discreetly house multiple illegal immigrant employees. During a traffic stop earlier this year, federal agents found Wu with seven people in her vehicle. They had just left the residence and were heading to Red Ginger Buffet, authorities said.

Of the seven passengers, there were five who spoke Spanish and just three could provide identification. Two claimed their IDs were at home. Four of the men said they were from Mexico, and the fifth said he was from Guatemala.

The remaining two passengers were Chinese women who “spoke very little English” but were able to produce Tennessee IDs.

Things only got worse for Wu and Yang from there. The five men confirmed their employment with Red Ginger Buffet and had not been required to provide proof of their citizenship or identity. The Spanish-speaking passengers also explained that they were allowed to live at the home provided by Wu and Yang for free.

The final nail in the coffin: All five men were found to have entered the United States illegally.

Wu and Yang both pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to harbor aliens for the purpose of commercial advantage and private financial gain and one count of aiding and abetting the practice and pattern of hiring illegals not authorized to be employed in the United States. They could face up to ten years in prison and $250,000 in fines for the first charge, with an additional six months and $3,000 for each unauthorized alien, and up to a $5,000 fine for the second charge.

Sentencing for the pair will take place on April 8, 2026, before the Honorable Clifton L. Corker in the United States District Court at Greeneville.

Illegals – the American Nightmare

The population of Elizabethton is just under 15,000 people, and the poverty rate is reportedly just shy of 20%. Thousands are unemployed in the surrounding four-county area, according to city data.

As Americans in a small East Tennessee town struggle to get by, local business owners  knowingly employ illegals and even provide them rent-free housing. How many taxpaying, hard-working Americans are pushed aside by similar arrangements across the country?

In a recent viral video, comedian and podcaster Tim Dillon criticized the Trump administration’s “clumsy, somewhat insane, over the top deportations.” He said it is “barbaric” to deport illegal immigrants who have lived in the US “their whole life.” Dillon even previously described ICE raids as “heartless.” His comments reflect a viewpoint that is increasingly common on the political left.

While illegals who commit violent crimes or traffic drugs pose the most obvious threat, the fact remains that even nonviolent illegal immigration comes at a cost to law-abiding Americans. How many struggling small-town Americans must be displaced by aliens – who are given free housing and under-the-table pay – before people like Dillon decide to stand up for their countrymen first?

Americans are in the midst of an “affordability crisis,” but illegal immigrants can enjoy housing for free. The US unemployment rate recently rose to 4.4%, but illegals are handed tax-avoidant jobs.

The Trump administration’s crackdown on one business harboring illegal immigrants in Tennessee hasn’t gone unnoticed, but is it enough? There are undoubtedly thousands more across the United States. At the moment, the American Dream appears to be turning into the Mexican Dream, the Guatemalan Dream, and the Chinese Dream – or the American Nightmare.